Gallery, Projects and General > How to's
Making a flywheel
bogstandard:
Due to massive demand (two people actually), I will be showing how I make flywheels, from the raw material to the finished item, with all the gory details being shown. This will be the first time I have actually done this, showing everything in one post.
I have a little cast iron flywheel stash, but very very rarely use them on the small engines I make. I prefer to make my own. It takes a just as long to clean up a cast flywheel to a show state as it does to make your own. But cast does score in that they usually have a lot of mass, and the spoke design on some of them is difficult to reproduce when cutting your own.
So another member and myself will be making some very nice beam engines from plans, and because I will require two flywheels for the ones I will be building, it is just as easy to make another one for him while I am at it.
This is the drawing for the ones we require.
If you notice, the main flywheel width is 12mm whilst the hub is 15mm wide. I have lots of 12.5mm plate but very little 15mm and above, so I have decided to make the main bit out of 12.5mm plate and fit a brass hub to take it out to 15mm. This will also make the flywheel a lot more interesting, with the contrast between brass and ali.
So here we see the materials gathered together. The over sized marked circles will be cut on my bandsaw, and the brass hex with be turned and shaped to make the hubs.
That's it for now.
Don't worry if you have seen all this before, I am sure you will pick up a few new tips as I get into murdering the metal.
Bogs.
rleete:
Looking forward to another episode on the Bogstandard Education Network.
Just try not to bleed all over things this time, eh?
Divided he ad:
Well I'm up for the flywheel workshop :thumbup: :dremel:
I'm going to have to get this spoke thing into my head one day!!! :)
Looking forward to it John :ddb:
Ralph.
bogstandard:
Rleete,
Those were my bloodthirsty days, I have given up cannibalism now (well almost, just a door to door saleman occasionally).
Ralph,
I know you have been putting this off for ages. :poke:
This is about the easiest flywheel shape to do, with straight spokes. So if you can understand this post when it is finished, everything else will be a natural progression from it, and the only limitation will be your imagination.
Bogs
bogstandard:
So here we are, part two of this scintillating exercise (yawn). I have done this so many times in the past, it is now difficult to remember all the stages, as I normally do it without thinking. This one does have a couple of differences as I will be making multiple units.
Someone asked a short while back whether they could leave the corners on the bits as they turned them into a dsic, and I said they could, and to prove a point, I have left the blanks as they came off the bandsaw instead of hacking them nearly round.
On the pop marks I had made to draw the circles, I drilled thru with a 6mm drill (I will be using metric for this post as the part is metric). If you will be needing a smaller hole than this thru the flywheel when finished, then of course you will drill the hole smaller than the finished size. I will be opening these holes out to fit a brass centre boss.
I stuck a bit of double sided tape to the backs of two of them and found a piece of 6mm rod, just a bit longer than the width of the 3 parts put together.
The block was assembled over the bit of rod with the tape on the two inside joints.
The block was then clamped up in a vice in a few different places, to get a good strong joint made.
I grabbed a bit of bar end (32mm) from the recycle box and mounted it up in the three jaw.
It was faced up and a 6mm hole drilled thru it.
The slug was turned around and a centre was wacked into it. No need to face it up.
The slug was removed and I forgot to take a shot of the next operation.
All I did was to put a large diameter of bar end into the jaws, towards the back, so none was protruding out the front. When the jaws were tightened up, the front part of the jaws were just smaller than the required diameter of the job (100mm).
The just machined slug was slipped onto the centre bar with the faced off side against the metal to be turned. The bar was pushed in a bit so that it wouldn't touch the point of the centre. You could pop a bit of superglue onto the bar to hold it in position (DEFINITELY DO NOT USE LOCTITE), but I have always found it won't move anyway.
On the back end of the plates, I would have normally used masking tape, to give the friction drive, but because I had run out, I used wide double sided tape without removing the backing.
The plates were offered up to the chuck jaws and the live centre wound forwards to sit in the centre drilling, and the plates were trapped between the live centre and the chuck jaws. Do NOT be tempted to use a solid centre, it will not work.
For doing a single plate, you can just use a centre drilling on the plate and do away with the rod and slug.
Here is a shot from another angle showing how the chuck jaws are on the back plate.
Swing the chuck by hand to make sure you won't get any fouling on any part of the machine, with the tool in both the fwds and backwards position.
Tentative steps were taken in the beginning to see how much the friction drive could take. I ended up at a 1mm depth of cut. With a smaller lathe that could be as low as a quarter of that. If the plates stop turning, just take the cut off, tighten up a bit on the centre and come in again with a shallower cut. Normally, as I said, I would have trimmed the discs up a lot closer using my bandsaw.
You can just see the bit of barstock I stuck in the jaws to get them to the right diameter.
If you are doing an interrupted cut as I am doing, then use your chip guard if you have one. The bits flying off here are red hot and razor sharp, not the usual curly stuff you get with ali, that comes later when the plates are almost to size.
I started to get curly swarf coming off in small pieces, so I stopped the machine to see how close I was getting. A few more 1mm cuts and I would be onto full circle discs.
Skimming the discs up to the size I required for this time.
This is what you get if you don't trim off most of the excess beforehand. Thousands upon thousands of mini razor blades.
Here are the discs, just been split apart.
The reason for the gloves. Unlike the edges you can get to and take the sharp edges off, the two inside joints have edges like cut throat razors. Until those edges have been smoothed off, the gloves stay on.
After cleaning off they were measured. Perfect size for what I want to do. If you notice on the drawing, there is a hole drilled in the outer rim to allow the grub screw positioning and thread cutting. After that exercise is carried out, I want to fill the outer hole in with a bit of ali bar, then reskim the surface to clean it up. That little bit extra will allow for that to be done without going undersized.
So we now have three fairly accurate discs. The next steps will be to get them back onto the lathe to profile them a bit, then onto the RT to start cutting the spokes.
Bogs
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