POTD- PROJECT OF THE DAY: What Did You Make In Your Shop Today?

[great white]

so I started making a pulley for my lathe the other day. Then covid came and knocked me down a little. Now feeling like I can get some more work done, I went into the shop for a couple of hours, and reached my physical limit.

The pulley is made of Aluminum, My Clausing Mill has Aluminum (pretty sure it's not zinc) pulleys. I made mine from 6061 T6 T65..
Do you think I will need to anodize it to prevent it from wearing out? I don't know if the Clausing is anodized.
The reason for the new pulley is so I can attach a bicycle brake rotor to this and be able to stop the lathe in a heartbeat if necessary. The existing pulley didn't have the needed stickout.

I run a couple 3d printed abs change gears in my th42 Atlas. No evident wear on them after a few hundred running hours.

I think you’re probably good with straight aluminum…

 

[mksj]

First time bluing some parts, these are machine jack screws, I boiled the parts in purified water twice to remove the oil, then did cold bluing (parts were hot). The bodies which are 4140 didn't blue as consistently, might be because of the metal composition, the jacking portion and locking rings are 1144. I applied the bluing solution X3, and used some fine steel wool to polish them up before oiling. OK,, but not quite as deep a coloration as I would have liked to have see.

 

[WobblyHand]

First time bluing some parts, these are machine jack screws, I boiled the parts in purified water twice to remove the oil, then did cold bluing (parts were hot). The bodies which are 4140 didn't blue as consistently, might be because of the metal composition, the jacking portion and locking rings are 1144. I applied the bluing solution X3, and used some fine steel wool to polish them up before oiling. OK,, but not quite as deep a coloration as I would have liked to have see.

View attachment 437256

Look pretty nice! Was this a commercial cold bluing compound? If so, what was it?

 

[mattthemuppet2]

I think they look fantastic. But if you want to make really sure that there are no surface contaminants, scrub them in hot water with Dawn a couple of times, then wipe down with acetone, then wipe down with isopropanol, then finally rinse in distilled water. That's what I do for anodising aluminium and it works for hot blueing with ammonium nitrate too.

 

[mksj]

I used NU-BLU Gun Metal Bluing, have nothing to compare it too, but did take quite a number of applications to get it to darken. I did clean the parts reasonably well, but I noticed that the 1144 steel would rust more and may have blackened a bit more consistently than the 4140CR. I will spend a bit more time cleaning the parts if I do this again.

NU-BLU GUN METAL BLUING 8 oz | eBay

NU-BLU Gun Bluing is not your average Cold Bluing, it is designed as a reverse Hot Bluing, without the need for dipping tubs and the use of gallons of product. This eliminates blotchy, inconsistent results.

www.ebay.com

 

[Just for fun]

They look great Mark, good job!

 

[Shotgun]

Those look a lot better than mine, but that sounds like a lot of work. By comparison, I threw them as-machined into a toaster over for an hour at the highest temperature, then dropped them into a metal bowl of used motor oil. I have parts that I treated that way on the shelf next to untreated parts. Not a speck of rust on the treated ones.

 

[snoopdog]

Got the little atlas put back together, after not total disassembly, but enough for my needs , cleaning, lubricating and some minor stoning, seems pretty good now, can't wait to make some chips. Oh, after finishing reassembly, the motor belt promptly let go, so a trip to the parts store was in order.

 

[francist]

@snoopdog
I’m sure you’d figure something out for yourself but I was down on the little miller this evening and every time I use my chip shield (which is pretty much all the time) I realize how much I like. So I thought you might get some ideas from it too.

It’s just a piece of 0.060” polycarbonate, aka Lexan, that I mounted to a pivoting arm. It takes advantage of the two existing holes already in the top of the casting and easily adjusts fore and aft by way of the wingnut mounting block. It’s even easier if there’s two wings on the nut instead of just one, but whatever.

Similarly, the same one-winged nut adjusts the tension for pivoting the arm and once you find the sweet spot it flips up and down like a sunvisor. I rarely have to take it physically off the machine, only the odd time if it might be in the way of an awkward setup, and it just stays flipped up until I’m cutting.

I like it because there’s no loose parts that have to set somewhere; I can easily see through it to line up cutters; and it flips up and down or anywhere in between with a couple fingers of one hand.
So there you have it, maybe something in there that takes your fancy. Sorry about the state of the machine, I’m mid-project with tiny bits of aluminum and a very obnoxious looking plywood setup board!

-frank

 

[pontiac428]

This weekend, I didn't get out to the shop. Anniversary... But I did do something related. I succeeded in failing to successfully install my working copy of SolidWorks 2014 onto my new Windows (Alder Lake i7) laptop. My previous laptop runs Win 7 Pro, works great, but it's a 10 year old machine. It's an i7 Clarksfield chip with what was once high end past-gen discrete video, still runs SolidWorks very well, I chose to move it to the shop to run the Langmuir when I get to it. My current shop laptop is a 1st gen Nehalem i7 that is barely good enough to stream music and surf McMaster with. So I'm lifecycling my laptops. The SW licensing scheme and the Windows 11 UAC are ruining my plans. I refuse to run SW on a virtual machine, and the Win 11 package needs a $$ upgrade to run VM anyway. So it looks like I'm stuck on the old laptop for CAD for the time being. Maybe It's time to consider alternatives for CAD.