Gear repair fixture !

[Bob Kelly III]

Downunder Bob : How long did that process take ? were you guys dead in the water while they were waiting for you to repair it ?
that's a good story Bob.... thank you ! one thing about life, where there is a will there's a way !
.....
My first runin with cast iron was with a henry ferguson tractor, the starter Snout busted off....so I bought some DC cast iron welding rod and welded it up.... cold.... it busted again on the second try of the starter........in the meantime I did some reading on the net and discovered that you should heat cast iron before welding it...... so I heated it up with the torch prior to the re weld and then welded it again........ it lasted about a month that time...
I knew that welding causes stress in the parts and it dawned on me that I could weld it till hell freezes over and it would just keep breaking if I didn't relieve that stress after the weld because cast iron is so very brittle.....
so I had a big brush pile burning from land clearing at the time and decided to weld it up again..... tossed the part in the brush pile and fished it out when it was red hot...... welded it and then tossed it back in the brush pile and added some more brush ... it got very hot...orange even....
i pulled it mostly out of the fire and let it cool real slow... the next day I painted it and put it back in the tractor.... the last I saw 10 years later it was still working.... it hadn't broke again after that !
most people don't know about the stress put into parts if you repair them with welding especially a stick welder ! but it will show up on a cast iron repair if you do not relieve that stress you put into it... and that is done by heating it real Hot cherry Red of better !
.....
Aluminum is much the same way I welded a crack in an aluminum head with aluminum rod.... it re cracked right next to it....
I welded it again and then took the torch and heated it to about 800 degrees it wasn't red hot yet but I could tell it was quite warm.... I tapped the weld seam many times with a ball peen hammer at that time to help relieve stress caused by the welding and that cured it knowing those little tricks can sometimes save you from having to do it all over again !
....
Bob....

 

[Downunder Bob]

Thanks for the question, No we were not dead in the water. the ship was powered by a large diesel engine that had a 1.4 Mw alternator driven by a PTO gear drive and also a steam turbine alternator about the same size.

The shaft driven set was not able to stand alone as it needed a reference frequency. We could not use the steam turbo set when we were tank washing as we needed all the steam we could get to run the tank washing setup, so we needed the diesel gen set for the reference frequency when tank washing.

The gear wheel took me just over a day and two of the other engineers repaired the other problems with the diesel gen set. so we had it up and running in two and a bit days and were able to continue with our tank washing which we finished with a few days to spare.

 

[Bob Kelly III]

that was a hard repair.. especially just with basic hand tools ! amazing that you got it done , yet alone in 2 days ! LOL......
well done !
...
Bob......

 

[Downunder Bob]

that was a hard repair.. especially just with basic hand tools ! amazing that you got it done , yet alone in 2 days ! LOL......
well done !
...
Bob......

It's just the life of a marine engineer. we are well trained for these types of situations.

 

[Bob Kelly III]

well, in the continuing saga of the gear repair boon doggel I found something interesting tonight on the lathe....
I mentioned that I had extra gears before that came with the lathe... well in reality I don't have extra gears at all... their the wrong pitch size !
I took the original shift lever out and it's gear assortment on it, including the bad gear.....
and set it next to the one that came with the lathe.... the handle is a smidge shorter but other than that they look the same, upon closer inspection the idler gears are 36 tooth not 34 and the secondary gear is much smaller .... i held the unit in place and it looked fine.... but this time i tried to rotate the spindle and make sure everything was perfect..... it started skipping teeth... I thought "what the heck" and bent down and looked.... couldn't see much in the shadows so I put my glasses on and got my flash light out and looked again the gears on the shifting lever bracket would not mesh with the spindle gear ! .... their just a tad too big.... I thought Damm, all this time messing with those things and their the wrong pitch size !
...so back in the box it went and that cured my modifying the indents so the unit would work.... I'm just glad I discovered it before I got the drill over there and drilled the indent holes ! because that was next !
.... so I am back to brazing and repairing the original gear.... I have no other choice now it's that or buy a new one from Logan, at $117.00 a pop...
no doubt as tight as money is around here, ....it's going to be brazing !!!!
HAHAHAHHA
so that is what I did this evening/night..... I am nocturnal by nature so I work at night most of the time !
so I switched tasks and cut 2 -1.5"x 1/4" bars for the bracket that will hold the clicker for the indexing setup....
there is 2 bolt holes on the face of the head stock and I will use them to mount the "L" bracket to hold the things that I decided to put on there
.... on the 3 in 1,...... I made a pair of vice grips , welded a bolt to it and use it to hold the saw blade when drilling bolt patterns
that worked very good for me and I never had a slipping problem ....not even once <GRIN>
so I am considering doing the same on the Logan.
......

in trying out my Die holder today with a sharp die..... I discovered a problem....
the lathe stopped..... the belt slipped just when it started to get a good bite.........
which I find odd because I can take .020" cuts with the lathe easy, but it can't handle a 3/8" die ????? I backed it off by hand and it was hard to do but not that bad !.....
....
when I first got the lathe it was very DRY so I went over board and oiled everything 3 or 4 times.... now there is oil on the pulleys in the headstock ...I wiped it off with a rag but I don't think that helped much !
i need some belt dressing, or rubber cement that would certainly give the pulleys some grip !
I've contemplated using a can of quickstart to clean the pulleys but that would drip on the back gears below it and I don't want to do that.
..... maybe just running it a while will dry it out more.... i dunno
i remember soaking a v-belt powered water pump at the ranch when I was a Kid... caught hell for that too !
but I got it working again by cleaning everything with gasoline and then finally taking a bit of sand paper to the running pulleys
soon as I did that it quit slipping..... so I did the belt too ! LOL....
my Dad asked me how I got it working again and I told him he said Boy don't ever put your fingers near those pulleys again ! you could have lost your fingers ! then I explained how I did it.... with a roll of sandpaper between the belts I reached in very carefully and pressed the round bulge of the paper into the v of the pulley if the paper would have caught on the pulley it would have just ripped it out of my hand....
probably hitting the bottom belt that was heading toward the engine but my arm would not have reached that far !
I had it all figured out,.... but Dad was not happy I took such a risk, 20 miles out in the boonies from the nearest doctor !
....ahhh those were the days !
lots of learning went on at that Ranch ! LOL....not all pleasant either !
LOL
later guys !
Bob..........

 

[Bob Kelly III]

Anyway.... I decided to make a aluminum gear blank so I can cut teeth into it with my handy dandy self indexing gear repair fixture !
i found a chunk of 3/4" thick Aluminum (6061T6) that was about 18" long and 3" wide so I cut off a 3" chunk drilled a hole in the center on the flat side and put a bolt through it as an arbor and chucked it up in the lathe.... thinking I would turn it round in no time.... well my depth of cut was limited by the arbor slipping if I went too deep so I kept it at 20 thow for the depth of cut...even through the intermittent part ... turning a square round is a P.I.T.A. ! ....but this even more so as I busted one bolt and had to find another ! .... once it was round I had about 1" of solid metal to trim down
....that took a while ! but this afternoon I finished making the gear blank and decided to test out my idea on the mill....
I cut a trench or tooth valley in the gear blank then put the gear in the fixture.... then cut another one with the pin of the fixture secured in the tooth valley on the back side.... .....
HOWEVER..... I neglected to mark and measure where each tooth should be and that new trench is probably in the wrong spot ! I'ed almost bet on it !
as I didn't adjust the height of the quill on the mill at all..... so all that work making the blank was just good practice I guess !
tomorrow I will see if the gear blank can be saved ....if not I'll just have to make another one !
and I discovered that my tooth profile on the milling fly cutter ain't so great it's leaning more to one side than the other !
.....I know I will have to repossion the spindle height in order to pull this off but the question is do I cut below the tooth slot or above it ?
and sense the teeth centers are something like 70 thousandths apart there is no room for error !...and I don't do very good on super pression stuff
.... I may pull the blank and scribe a line to the center for each tooth but that is prone to error too ! but it would give me a better idea of what I am dealing with ....
I am trying to index a gear by itself while making it.... to my knowledge that's never been done before
I can already see the need for a revised self indexing gear fixture....one with an adjustable pin that can go up or down at least 1/4"
that would cure having to reset the mill Quill......
oh well.... time will tell if I can do it or not LOL.....
later all !
Bob.........