Hole plugging. Or, step in and watch me ride the struggle bus.

[RaisedByWolves]

Ran into a problem making a die steel for one of our older dies and needed to reach back into my old school box of tricks to save my bacon.

Thought I could kill two birds with one hammer and fix this part, and also pass on a useful skill for making old things like new.

On a die steel this is kind of a bit of a hack, but like some are want to say, the difference between the professionals and the amateurs is the pros know how to hide their mistakes.

So, what got me here is the old worn out die steel I needed to copy apparently had some parallax issues in one dowel pin. This ment that even though my steel was a carbon copy of what’s left of the old steel, copying this error did not leave enough material to compensate for a few other issues I was fighting.


All I needed to do was bolt the steel in place snd shoot a new dowell, then proceed as planned.


Which I did, but it didn’t go as planned.


See that little half moon down there? Yeah, that needs to be the edge of a punch hole and my dowel hole impinged on it.

Oops!





This job got behind as there were other things to fix and being rushed I just went adjacent to the original dowel hole, and now need to erase that mistake.

Being this is a die steel and needs to be hardened I made a threaded rod out of A2 as the die steel is A2 so when I harden it everything will act as one.

This is important as I now need to insert a die bushing in place of a reamed hole. If this repair was just close I could get by without a bushing, but as is, having threads inside a reamed and hardened hole would be a disaster in the making.


I’ll spare you the threading operation and go right to fitting the threaded rod.

Here I’m test fitting it. I made the thread fit much tighter than if I were threading this to accept a nut, to help insure it will stay in place.

On a steel plate or casting I would just use all-thread. Done that more times than I care to think about.






Here I’ve threaded the hole to accept the rod and made a deep chamfer on each side of the steel to accept the peened end of the rod and lock it in place from both sides.


Chamfer with the threaded rod peeking out.





I left roughly 3/8” of rod sticking out to peen into the chamfer on each side.











Now it’s time to take out my frustrations over the mistake I made.

Time for the BFH to go to work

Iirc this is a 3# head. The steel is 9”x4” roughly.






I started with the “peen end” of the head, then used the ……. Other side to beat the snot out of it till it filled the chamfer evenly.






Now you’ll notice the hammer head has “NO NOT YOURS etched on it to prevent it from repeatedly winding up in my light fingered cow irkers tool box.

I’m lookin at you Jack.


Once it’s all nice and mashed down it will look like this.








Once this was done on one side, it needs to be milled near flush but left proud. This is so when peening the 2nd side, having the other peened end take the blow vs the body of the steel makes all of the threads expand outwards basically filling any voids.

Once that’s done I milled one side a few thousands below the surface as it’s going on the grinder next. Note that I’m also plugging the bad dowel hole with a dowel pin.

For a general repair milling flush is fine.





Next up, grinding it all flush.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

Now I just need to grind the repair flush and we’re gtg.



First I take down any high spots caused by beating it into the surface of the drill press table using coarse paper on an old surface plate that lives on top of the good surface plate.





Then it goes on the grinder.


Oooh, sparky!










Took .010 off of the bottom and .020 off of the top to clean this up and bring the steel to within .020 of final size.


Looks good and will be nearly invisible when hardened and finish ground to size.









I’ll try to remember to get some pics after hardening and final grinding.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

Got the dowel hole shot into good steel and can move on with finishing the die steel, but my boo boo caused another issue.

The misplaced dowel hole also impinged on the slug clearance in the sub section shoe where the steel lives.

This resulted in the binocular hole or figure eight of you prefer and will cause slug control issues if not corrected.

Below you can see the fancy hole along with the new dowel hole below it and the dowel pin I ground flat on one side to fill the hole.








I aligned and drove the pin home and got a nice tight fit. Then I took a flame burr and chamfered toe top edge for good measure.

I probably didn’t need to chamfer the dowel, but it’s cheap insurance against having a slug hang up, causing other slugs to build up and break the die steel.






In that last pic you can also see the new dowel hole is stepped. This is done to keep the dowel from being driven down too far into the shoe when installing the steel, as it may be removed and reinstalled hundreds of times over its lifespan.

.

 

[MrWhoopee]

Givin' me flashbacks. Fred used to build stamping and forming dies, my first job for him was running a punch press.

Nice fix! I've done similar, but never in something that had to be heat-treated.

Took me a moment to figure out what a "cow irker" was.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

Givin' me flashbacks. Fred used to build stamping and forming dies, my first job for him was running a punch press.

Nice fix! I've done similar, but never in something that had to be heat-treated.

Took me a moment to figure out what a "cow irker" was.

Punch presses back in the day were something else. Full rotation clutches so once you hit the pedal it wasn’t stopping until it went a full revolution.

I ran them before palm buttons with possum guards.

Never understood the name and felt like an ass at first walking around with green BDSM looking straps on my hands and wrists.

Possum guards in action.

Here’s how you set those up. Hope your mechanic/lead man gets this step right.

 

[MrWhoopee]

Punch presses back in the day were something else. Full rotation clutches so once you hit the pedal it wasn’t stopping until it went a full revolution.

I ran them before palm buttons with possum guards.

Never understood the name and felt like an ass at first walking around with green BDSM looking straps on my hands and wrists.

The first day on the job, Fred put me on a 10-ton press with a single button and no guards blanking out oil filter brackets from 3/16 x 1-1/4 HR.
In about an hour I had the timing worked out and was just flying, one hand on the button, the other feeding stock. The press only stopped when I had to grab another bar. About that time Harry, my instructor, showed up. He nearly freaked.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

Nice fix! I've done similar, but never in something that had to be heat-treated.

Time to be honest, I’ve never done this on a hardened part either, but it looks to have worked well.

I was curious as to how the two different pieces would react during heat treating mostly because there was a hole needed right on the border of one side of the repair.

What concerned me was that when you harden steels, any hole in the steel tends to close up a bit.

This is primarily due to the change in the steel at the molecular level, but is well known and understood, so you can compensate this way or that to get a spot on result.


I did witness one non critical area where the plug grew into the bored head clearence portion of the hole, but the reamed hole looks really good save for some flash rusting I don’t quite understand.


Picture the bushing going into this repaired area looking like a top hat, with a hole running through the middle. The bored Clearance accepts the brim of the hat and a shim necessary to make the bushing the correct height as we didn’t have a proper height bushing in stock.

Head/shim side.

You ca see the plug material standing just proud of the rest of the bore. Maybe .001-.002”.

In the first pic you can actually see where the threaded plug expanded further into the threaded hole near the bored relief than further down inside the reamed portion of the hole. This is probably why part of the threads in the bore are standing proud after hardening. Being cold hammer forged together there was nowhere else for the material to go when the steel hardened and expanded.









Not sure why this side of the hole rusted, but it will hone out just fine.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

Got it all finished up, I guess it turned out OK.

With and without flash.

 

[Eddyde]

Looks great!