Machining on car axles.

Zigeuner

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A neighbor in my rural area keeps cattle and grows hay to feed them. He often lends me a few of them for a month or so to keep my back acre chewed down.

He often needs to move hay around in his large barn. He has been loading the bales by hand into his truck and that's getting to be a chore. He has a Bobcat machine and he asked me to cut some 45 degree points on the ends of two car axles. He will mount these on a steel plate that goes on the front of the Bobcat. With these points out front, he can spear a hay bale and easily lift it wherever he wants.

Since I know how hard axles are, I knew that I had to anneal them, at least to get through the hardening layer. I knew from past experience that the best way would be to put them in a large fire, get them dull red for some hours and then cover them and let them cool.

Not wanting to build a fire, I took the easy way out. Besides, I only needed to anneal about three inches so that I could cut a taper on the ends.

I first cut the splnes off with my home-brewed 14" cutoff saw. Despite being very hard, the blade went through in good time.

To anneal the ends, I first used a Harbor Freight roofing torch, the kind that connects to a propane bottle. I had the axles wired together and standing up outside in the dirt in front of the barn (yes I have a barn).

I preheated the axle ends for about five minutes until they were just below red. Then I started in with my Oxy-Acetylene rig using a medium rosebud tip. After about two minutes of this, I got them to a nice red hot. I kept them there for about another three minutes. I would have gone more but Acetylene is very precious nowadays. Once there, I let them cool for a couple of hours in ambient air.

The next morning, I put them in the lathe. Fortunately, they would just slip into the spindle up to the plate on the end so that I could work on the cutoff ends. I turned the compound so that the handle was on the right at about a 40-45 degree angle. We're talking about hay spears here so it was =/- 5 degrees, LOL.

I first roughed most of the metal off with an old HSS tool that I keep for that purpose. Apparently my torch work was good enough since the metal came right off. It was no worse than some hot-rolled rod. A few minutes on each axle gave me a nice taper that was about 2-1/2" long on a 1-1/4" diameter axle, I did a finish cut with a carbide inserted tool and got a reasonably nice finish considering that I had to advance the compound by hand with the crank. Plenty good enough for bales of hay, anyway.

Sorry, I didn't get pictures and the spears are now hard at work poking into my neighbor's hay bales. In any case, I can highly recommend axles for those odd projects. If you have the energy and a place to build a big fire, you could probably anneal the whole axle. I'm sure that I could have annealed even more had I spent more time. There is some nice steel in those things if you can get to it.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

:)
 
Please save me any axles that you pull from 12 bolt or 10 bolt GM passenger cars from 1971-1976 that bolt in and dont use C-Clip retainers. I will gladly trade you ;) ;) :D
 
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