2015 POTD Thread Archive

Needed a pulley for a motor I rebuilt for a squirrel cage fan in the garage.
Smallest I had was 6" so I just turned a scrap piece of round 3" Aluminum into what I needed.
Drilled 15/32" then reamed to .4990 Fits the 1/2" shaft perfectly. Drilled and tapped for 1/4 x 20 set screw.
Took about 1- 1/2 hrs total. For me, it was cheaper than driving to hardware store 30 miles and paying $12 for one.
Plus, I got to play on the lathe and mill. :D

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The greatest part is after removing over .300 in 3 passes the part wasn't even warm, that insert geometry puts the heat into the chip as seen by the pretty blue. No coolant, no cutting oil
 
A little while ago I noticed the tailstock on one of my lathes was having a little trouble holding a drill chuck. I switched chucks and it was better but still seemed a little iffy.

I thought about it off and on for about two weeks.

Then it hit me...

To quote Bugs Bunny, "What a maroon!"

I reamed it with an MT2 reamer that I've had sitting in my tool box. It works great now.
 
I've had a hard time obtaining the UNF Allen key capped machine screws so I didn't want to waste any by making them wrong for I only had four screws off eBay .

As a result I made a little jig yesterday to help me quickly and accurately get all the replacement gib screws the same length and with the same spigot size on the end .

To get the jig accurate I put a brand new half thickness nut on the new Allen screw and wound it in the threaded gib screw hole till it stopped then recorded the remaining distance showing between the nut outer face and the thread side of the lip of the cap . Unsurprisingly all were exactly the same to within 3 thou .
I then turned the jig over length and counter sunk the end to take the securing nut using a twist drill a little bigger than the diagonals of the nut in the lathe tailstock chuck

On putting it together I then calculated how much I'd need to turn off the jig to allow me to re put the screws in and turn of the unwanted material but to leave 1 & 1/2 threads of unused thread once the gibs were reset . The MK 1 eyeball came into play I couldn't be bothered to try and work out what the 1.5 threads clearance would be as I couldn't find my feeler gauges
Anyway it worked well, once all the gibs were reset I was puzzled because the compound would only traverse so far back & forth .
It took a few minutes and a mug of coffee to realise that the new half thickness nuts I'd also used were 1.2 mm more across the flats than the ones that came off with the old well wrecked gib screws .
A quick session of waste bin diving saw me rescue the original nuts and put them on the new Allen screws , once I cleaned up the slip burrs on the old nuts . This all happened because I'd had a lunch break between taking of the old gib screws out , making & fitting the new ones I'd failed to measure the new nuts and I didn't realize that iI had to use a different spanner to tighten them up.

All's well that ends well it's all back together now and it's as sweet as a nut .
The securing nut was drawn into the aluminium to hold it & the screw secure whilst I turned the screw to end shape & total length.
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Set up
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Various stage for the gib screws .. forefront screw is correct and properly tensioned .

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Note how much the new nut on the left & right is so much bigger that it will foul the base of the compound slide once it hits the anti rotation locking screw part of the casting .

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I must remember to check to see if that during the 70 or so years since the lathe was made that any other nuts & bolt head dimensions have changed . Fortunately the nuts thicknesses were identical so it didn't matter when I put the original nuts back on.
 
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Put together a Trammel for my Mill to check the spindle alignment. I noticed a few nights ago while doing a test face milling on a piece of scrap that it milled off more on one side than the other. So I made the Trammel after watching the video from Metal Tips and Tricks "DIY Spindle Square". It was pretty simple. Works great as I found my head was .003 off on the G0704 even though it shows it set at 0 on the dial.

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Nice job, I spent my career swing my indicator around using a small pocket mirror to check the back side.
 
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