Gallery, Projects and General > Project Logs

Another doodad for my lathe...

<< < (2/2)

arnoldb:
That's fine Stew - I hope there's something in this thread that will help.

Some more progress today ( :offtopic: After a run-around in town and to my office to collect a car full of written off printers and flat screens; might be able to use those  :lol:)

The 2 blocks of metal that will make up the column was given a dress-down on the bench grinder to make some nice fillets to weld in.  These welds must go to just below the center line of the column; I want to keep the tops split, as one top part will become the main bearing with a screw for adjustment, while the other will get a screw with handle for doing locking.  First photo shows the two column halves clamped together in the big vice prior to welding with a nice V-Groove to do the weld in:


I could have gone the route of bolting everything together, but I feel I'll get more rigidity with the welds. (Also, I'm lazy, so I'll skip trying to find bolts and drilling and tapping holes  :lol:)

Next up, I had to clean off excess from the welds - just chucked the lot in the 4-jaw and had at it.  The first side was more difficult than the second, as there was a raised weld against the chuck body that had to be compensated for... :


Next up, another piece of HRS flat bar was relieved of it's outer layer - this will make a back-column, on which to mount the quick-index pin, and the worm drive screw.  Here a pretty major flaw becomes apparent in my design so far... If you make a similar device, make the spindle long enough.  I'm going to have a right bugger of a time adding an extension piece to my spindle that is 100 % concentric through the back column.  It can (and will) be done, but it's going to take a good amount of effort to set up accurately...  Only reason my spindle is too short, is because I'm re-using things from the other project - when it didn't matter.

Here's where I stopped today; the old brass electrical fitting will become the front thrust washer, and I'm considering using a slice of the cast iron as an index plate/worm wheel combination.  Ignore the bolt; that will be replaced by a turned steel shaft (from an old dot matrix printer <grin>).


The base has already been drilled for taking the bolts for T-nuts to clamp to the cross-slide.  Those are the ones between the 2 columns - spaced for the Myford cross-slide.  I also drilled additional holes at the nose side - those are spaced at Myford spacing from the main bolt holes; If I remove the "square-ing" bar, the whole lot can then be clamped at 90 degrees on the cross-slide or vertical slide.  Not really needed for now, but easier to do now rather than later if it may be needed.

Once the columns are welded into place, I'll have to make a boring bar to bore the spindle holes to size... Make a tool to Make a tool to Make a tool to Make a tool to....

Cheers, Arnold

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page