Scrap Grader

A quick post because I've been slacking (blog-wise anyway) ... Here's the ATV sized "road grader" I made. It's not a real heavy duty but it works pretty good for the sand and gravel I'm using it on. I was originally going to put actuators front and back, but I realized it was more simple to have the front lift high enough that the fixed rear wheels engage. Plus, now I have an extra actuator so I can add retractable york rake or something. I have video of it action... if I can find it. The lawn mower was just to test it.

Base Complete

First a little side note: I found another great free tool to use with Sketchup. It is a free renderer called Kerkythea (kirk-ih-thea). That way I can make really pretty pictures of the projects a may finish someday :)


Anyway I finished the drawers and such for the base.





The faceframe is made from some of my own cherry (almost 2 years of air drying). This stuff is quarter-sawn and you can see some nice ray fleck in the close-up.





Again I was able to use my own maple for the drawer fronts edge banding:









Then I added a couple coats of Danish Oil and some hardware to match the miter bench.





The torsion style top is next...

Slight Diversion

I couldn't resist making the router plate for this router table. Now that this is done, almost, I can build the top around it.

Carcass

The carcass is pretty much done, now the hard part, lots of drawers and stuff.

Router Table Plan

I figure I'll try a torsion box style top on this. The style is a cross between Norm Abrams and a couple others I found on Flicker and LumberJocks. I can't really add the router plate insert until I know what size it is. Here is the sketchup File: router-table.skp

Cabinet complete :)

The main bench is complete now. Next is the router table...

Planer Refurb

Another 3 week project that took a year to complete :) 60 bucks at auction and quite a bit of labor. The whole gallery can be viewed here: Web Album (click the little bubble for a brief caption)



Test Run: 3HP... Pine... HAHAHA!

New Top

Well, I put the hardboard top and trim on, set up a box jig, and put together a few practice joints. Now I can start putting the drawers together.
Made a few mistakes on the first box jig. The key is to make sure the dado, the pin, and the space between them is EXACTLY the same. During the first attempt I gave a light sanding to the pin to get it to fit. That made it so the joint was to tight to fit together, and the front and side of the corner ended up at different heights. So, unlike the picture below, the 2 pieces wouldn't have gone together (without a ton of force), and the piece on the right would be shifted down by a 16th of an inch or so.
Masonite top and flush mounted oak trim.

Ripped a couple of 3" strips of oak, bevel cut them to fit, and rounded the edges with the router.


Flush trimmed the masonite to the existing top instead of trying to cut it to fit.
The Box of screws on the left was $4.19 at HomeDepot. The 7 pounds of screws on the right were $18.43 at Hiawatha Fasteners.

From Google Sketchup to the real world

Masonite and trim next, then it's time to make some drawers...
DOH!

Bench and Cabinets

On to the next project now that the planer is complete , I'll post lots of those pics later. I plan making the bench (a hutch really, thanks Norm) below as well some cabinets . Should be some good practice for the house(s). As usual I have 10 preliminary step to do first.Step number one... turn a POS craftsman into a cabinet saw, ya right ;) First I built an outfeed table to support cutting large sheets. Boy I'm glad I went to those auctions and picked up some cheap steel :) The angle iron provides a ledge to attach the outfeed table. I actually cut the legs from some of the maple I had drying on the property, which I had to trek through the snow to get :o. It's probably not nearly dry enough, but it'll be interesting to see how it survives. Oh, and I had to create a taper jig to cut them. Well, I didn't have to, but...
The next use for my auction steel is to extend the width of the table saw. It just so happens that the cheapo fence is simple 1x1 angle iron which I just happen to have !-)Once the fences were extended, I created another melamine surface to fit between them.
This tenoning jig wasn't really a prerequisite to the bench, but I had to "dial in" the table anyway, and it will come in handy eventually. I grabbed the plans from an old Shop Notes magazine (slightly improved). It's nice because you can cut both sides of the tenon without having to rotate the workpiece.
Now the BIG DOG, a Milwaukee 5625-20: 3 1/2 HP swinging a 3 1/2" raised panel bit ... oh oh oh . This will go in the router table that will make up the right side of the work hutch.raised panel bit and a cope and stick combo bit.Just a little bigger than the 1/2 HP next to it ;)

More Chilibowl Pictures

Indoor 1/4 mile track at the Chilibowl:

MANY multi car teams...
alot of nice ass... cars
So it ONLY costs $8000 to race? ;)

One of Jason Leffler's cars ran(FAST) what was basically a motorcycle wheel. One of his other cars Won the Chilibowl, Not bad.



This was probably the smallest trailer...

J.J. Yeley (47) choked on Saturday, well most of the weekend actually. He spun out, hit the cone on the restart (black flag), then spun out a second time. 2 strikes and you're out, so he never finished. This videos are smaller than I thought... JJ's the black car/white 47 near the back.




Tony Stewart was beat by a 16 year old in one of his mains :)

Open face helmet and a tee shirt?!

No work this weekend, I'm in Tulsa for the Chilibowl :)

Just a quick flic showing how a co axial indicator is used to find the exact center of circular object like a hockey puck ;)

Just over 1 year later. I'm Done with ONE project!

Well, here is the almost finished welding cart that I started in Sept. of 2006 . It still needs bit of bling (diamond plate). Used a couple of keyboard slides to create a drawer. The front of this drawer, and the other side of the cart will be covered with diamond plate.







Once it was primed, I could really envision the final product :)
rounded off the ends to make it purdy.




A few "fish eyes" in the welds, but good enough for me.

shortened and capped

keyboard slides in position


two folds and one side shortened...
Who needs a metal brake(i do), a couple hammers and a piece of angle iron is all you need.

Another Big Tool

(edit: maybe not so big, lol -> look here)
Went to a local auction the other day and and a big hunk of iron followed me home...

After the forklift loaded the lathe, they tipped the deck down and loaded the forklift so it could be unloaded at my house :)


A 4000lb shop crane was able to lift the 3000lb lathe fairly easily. Now getting it to roll was a different story. Nothing a 2x4 as a pry bar wouldn't fix. ( BTW, the crane was also picked up at the aution for cheap :)


In position with only a small dent in the wall ( and my shin )




Pretty gunked up, but usable, so I'll just give it a good cleaning, flushing, and fill it with new fluids.

Removed the tailstock, and started in on the carriage and cross-slide.

I need a parts washer and more GOJO ...


The Mill was brought in last fall ( Click on the thumbnail for more pictures):

Final Pics

Complete, and about 200 pounds heavier that craftsman next to it.






A couple "taps" with a dead blow hammer and this 5 thousands of runout was gone :)

Why do I have an extra screw

Painted and ready for reassembly.

Baldor 500 Grinder

Another trip we made during my week in Springfield, VT was a trip to Springfield Tools. They pick stuff up from machine auctions and resell on ebay and out of their warehouses. I picked an old (1953 I think?) Baldor grinder. It has a Diamond and a Silicon/Carbide wheel and everything is cast iron, including a nice solid cast iron pedestal. It ran, but the bearings were shot, so I decided to refurbish it when I pulled it apart to replace the bearings. Here is the tear down. It should be reassembled this weekend, good as new... no better than that cheap new stuff :)








The graduations on this piece are pretty much gone.
I'm guessing the Serial number means this is a 1953?

Brass?




The one small piece of original wiring is just a bit brittle!








Pulling off the old bearings and pulling off the old paint
ready for primer



Amazing what a swipe of acetone will do.

The was a bit of warp in the tables, but not for long :-)
All but the pedestal is painted no, so I'll probably throw it back together this weekend...

American Precision Museum

We finished up one of the nights by taking a tour of the American Precision Museum. It was closed for the season, but we were sooo important they let us see ;-) Actually they went out of their way to accommodate us, and it was an impressive collection. http://www.americanprecision.org

I have no idea what most of these machines are, but I took as many pictures as could anyway. Basically these are some of the first precision machines used... EVER!





















This display was a scale, working replica of a machine shop. They even scraped the machine tool ways. Everything works, although it was not running in the off season.

Scraping Class

First Some basic tools:

A hand scraper, which is essentially a flat bar with a beveled radius on one end and a handle on the other. You can see some scrapers below, and the end would look similar to the end you see on the power scraper below. The other tools we used were a couple of surface plates, an angle block, a diamond grinder, and a diamond charged lapping wheel. I wasn't familiar, well with much of anything, but the lapping wheel is simply a steel wheel that you add an extremely fine diamond charged paste ( we're talking microns here). This produces a mirror fnish on even a hard surface like carbide.


The surface plates are the "masters". These are covered with ink, the the workpiece you are scraping is laid on this "blued" master. When the workpiece is removed any blue on the workpiece represents a high spot. You scrape of the high spots and do it again, and again, and again,... We use dial indicator to get 2 side parallel and the angle block to check for perpindicularity.Lapping wheel and grinder
The first pass. Now blue yet, this just roughs up the surface and preps it to receive the first bluing.

flashh to show the scrapes. BTW this was my first attempt, so anybody who knows this is bad.... keep it to yourself ;)
first cycle: notice that only 3 or 4 spots touched because it is so far from flat.
In this one I scraped the tops of the high spots ( only 4) and did it again. You can see how the high spots moved and changed in size. This does start to change much more rapidly once you remove the "big" high spots.
Here it is after 4 or 5 cycles of bluing and scraping.
It starts to look like galvanized steel for awhile.
This process continues until you are happy. The result is measured in "spots per inch". The number of spots per inch desired depends on the use of the workspace. Since I want to restore the ways on my mill I chose practice creating 20 spi. That leaves just enough peaks to slide on and enough valleys to hold lubricant. If you were making another master, you would keep cycling. to say 150 spi or more. By the way this block is "flat" NOT "smooth", but is also more smooth than it looks because of the camera flash.



Here is a surface plate that one of the guys(Richard) brought with him to scrape.
It was a 2 man job to place this thing on the master. Forrest Addy ( on the right) was teaching the class as well as helping Richard scrape this baby.
Forrest give a "Biax" power scraper demo.
This tip, on the power scraper, is pretty close to what you would do for a hand scraper. I'll post some more when I finish some of my own scraping.
We finished off one of the days with a trip to the American Precision Museum. Pictures to come...

Trip to Springfield, VT for a metal scraping seminar

I went to a 4 day seminar on metal scraping last week. This was all organized through the practical machinist message board. This process is exactly what it sounds like, you scrape metal. The amazing thing is that HAND scraping can create a truly flat surface that is not possible with MOST machines. In fact it the first machines had to be hand scraped to be accurate enough to produce more machines. I plan using this scraping techniques to recondition my Bridgeport mill. The estimate to do this by machine was 6k to 8 k!!! That's about 6 to 8 times what the machine cost.
Driving up route 7 / 11 from Albany looking at the top of Bromley. As I was driving through "the middle of nowhere" I was wondering how Springfield Vermont became a precision machine center, then I saw the river :)





They certainley had no fear of the bedrock washing away!

Scraping pictures to come...

Autobody practice.

A little practice on some 20 gauge. The top weld was done in a continuous(sortof) bead with 3/32 tungsten, 3/32 filler.UGLY. I also realized I had the starting amperage too high. It wasn't even starting the arc until 50 amps which would blow a hole( pin head) through the steel. This was mainly because I ground off the paint which took too much metal off, so it was way to thin. The barrel was really distorted too.

The lower one was stiched in smaller sections with 1/16th tungsten and filler, I used a wire brush to remove the paint, and set starting amperage to 5 amps. I kept alternating side to side to keep the metal as cool as possible. Still not great, but complete penetration.
(The circles are dime sized)

Up in Smoke, but progress was made...

It was a tough weekend for my Dewalt tools. The drill was my fault, a consumer level drill just isn't made for drilling 3" holes 1/4" steel. THe grinder, however, just gave up. I finished using it, and the next time I went to use it... NOTHIN? So, I bought a Milwaukee and got back to work.

Added the shelf for the Welder... While the Vikings were losing. !!!%^$#!^%$!#$
And starting fabbing up the clamp that will hold the Argon tank. ( If you look closely, I actually welded this 90 degrees out of position, doh!

And a test fit...

Getting lighter

Well, it is getting lighter...

Oops

OK, I knew this thing would way over-built, but it was material I already had. However after welding the two halves together, it went from over-built to retarded! Time to lighten the load. This could actually end up looking really good because of this. I'll cut some material out and drill some holes to lighten the heavy parts.

Putting the cart before the horse

Between the body work on the truck , redesign on the backhoe forks, and the new box scraper I plan on making for the ATV, I must have dragged my welding sh!t in and out of the garage 20 times. Time to build a welding cart that carries the welder, the tha Argon tank, the TIG torch, grounding clamps, filler metals, helmet, glasses, clamps, ... and anything else I can fit. Using a mix of old and new, this baby will be an All Terrain cart that is so over built it's not funny.



The bars in the back will be the handle for the cart , the bars up front will hold the welder at an angle that nake it easier to read the display, and there will be 1 or more drawers underneath withe side access.Oops, ran out of Argon...

Time to do a little bodywork. Hell it can't look any worse than it is...

Just throw on new rocker panels... Oops, the underbody they mount to is gone too! No prob, I'll just fab some new stuff, although it is so rusted I can't even tell what shape it is suppose to be.
After finding a large enough solid area was able to use the cross-section below to get the measurements I need.
Basically everything black, below the blue line has to be replaced in order to have something solid to mount the new rocker panels(red) .

Bucket Forks

Old truck... New forks
Once I figure out the exact mounting mechanism, I'll paint them.
Rounding off the tips left a bit of a fishmouth on the end of the forks, so I filled them with weld.

Ground smooth and almost ready for paint.

Fully welded
I kept waiting for the welds to POP!
Nothing a couple C-clamps and a few tack welds won't fix :-)

Fork wedges ready for caps.

Think there is a little stress in hot rolled steel!!!


Well, it was a rainy weekend, so I figured it was time to make the bucket forks for my backhoe. I bought some 3/16" 2x4 rectangular tube stock and went from there.

Levelers

OK, did a little more work on the table. The garage floor is anything but level, and I realized I needed some of those twisty furniture legs ( otherwise known as threaded tube ends.) After spending an hour looking for the tube ends I suddenly remebered something... I HAVE A WELDER! So, I cut some end plates...
Welded on a couple of nuts...
Which completeley gunked up the threads...
So, I tapped them back out...
Screwed in a thingy bolt that I found wandering around ACE. (use the local guys whenever possible)
And voila!.. It won't hold up too much weight, but it should be OK for what I need.

First Project, a welding table

OK, finally a real project. My first thought was to create forks for my backhoe, but I thought I better create a welding cart first, but I quickly realized I needed to create a table to build that on, but... The garage was a mess! So, garage cleaned, I was finally able to start project #1...


Parts is Parts..
Laying out the first joint, which did burn the workmate, hence the need for a steel table :-)
Basic table
A simple seem without using any filler material.
My first corner of the top, boy did this one suck. Good project to learn on though.
The last corner. Much better but much more practice needed.

Leg supports added...
Once again the first weld sucked.
The last one was much better.

Shelf added...Lets see ya do this with a MIG :-)


TODO's : Wheels, a pull handle, and some holders for cables and TIG torch.

New Welder

Well, I broke down and bought a new TIG Welder. I needed to fix a few things on the backhoe, and had a couple of things I'd like to do, so I jumped ahead of my plans a little and bought it. I searched around the welding forums and a bunch of people recommended the Thermal-Arc ProWave 185 TSW. It's not a MIller or Lincoln, but ThermaDyne does own Victor ;-) People seem to be really happy with it. It's an inverter-based welder ( as opposed to a transformer-based one). It cost $1000 less then the a MIller or Lincoln and only weighs 40lbs. istead of 250 or 300lbs.

One of the first projects, forks, like these, for the loader...

Pivot:
Support: