Still working on the Crane. It's mostly together. But finally decided to add some rollers to support square drive shaft inside the drive tube. Racking my brain on how to make the roller holders, and finally decided on some small steel blocks with recesses, and half round pins pressed into bearings.
With the CNC these were easy parts to make, so that's what drove the design. Small carbide, overcut the corners, leave a raised 'boss' to support the inner race, etc. Maybe half hour of CAD/CAM, then sawing/squaring up material.
I was grumbling about the cutter life, but maybe I'm getting greedy. That little $3 broken 1/8" carbide ran for 80 minutes in some miserable steel, at 5K RPM, 4.9 IPM, 0.125" axial DOC. If it had made 2 more minutes, it would have finished the batch of parts! It held tolerance, but eventually broke at the collet. Sickout was maybe a bit long, so there is that. Trochoical milling, and finishing with the same cutter. The round pins were done with different mill.
The worst part was making those pins. Didn't have material the right size, so ran some knurls on some 416 stock, then milled to length, and milled flats. Had to slap together a quick fixture to hold the pins for milling. That was a NO-CAD, NO-Measurements design. It allowed milling the pin to length, and milling the flats. Maybe can't see the screw clamping the pin in there in the photo. After than, pins get pressed into the bearings.
And they fit together.
Next steps will be to mill the openings for the bearing rollers in the square drive tube, and drill and tap way too many holes. Because it's the same thing repeated, I'll let the CNC do that work too. There is some math to do yet, to properly depth the pockets. Want just a little bit of 'squeeze' on the square tube from these rollers.
Oh, yeah. Had to prune the apples before they bud. As you can see the foreman was inspecting this job the whole while!