My father has had an extensive cooking knife collection for a long time, but for some reason he never purchased any sharpening stones. I thought some Arkansas stones would make an excellent Christmas gift this year, so I ordered him 3, soft, hard, & black. The stones were excellent, but the boxes they came in were less than desirable, so I decided to make some more appropriate ones.
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The final step in my change gears/banjo project was to make the special flange nuts that hold the gear bushings onto the studs. Compared to the other parts in the project, these where simple and fast to make, mainly do to the fact that they where small and had large tolerances. I got them done just in time to, because a cold front has rolled in and its now 22 degrees Fahrenheit in my shop.
Now that this project is done, I have some woodworking projects (presents) to get done before Christmas, and then I will be onto my next machining project, an articulated camera arm for the shop. I’m really looking forward to this one, because my current Rube Goldberg set-up is annoying to work with, imagine that.
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After almost a month long layoff, I’ve been able to get back into the shop and make some more progress on the change gears project. While they where fairly easy to make, the mounting studs where the part I was least looking forward to making. Mainly because I had to make several of them (7 in total), and because each one had a lot of individual steps.
One part of the process I thoroughly enjoyed, was making some custom thread relief tools. I used to avoid making custom HSS tool bits with my old cheap grinder, as it vibrated a lot and was slow at removing material. The new Baldor & CBN wheel combination are silky smooth and remove material very quickly. The surface finish is almost good enough that I don’t need to hone the cutting edges.
Now that I have the studs done, I feel like I’m over the hump, and hopefully I can wrap up this project within the next week.
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Some shots of Jillian and I’s quick trip to Washington D.C. early last week.
This past weekend I was able to finish of the gear bushings. The bushings are an interesting part to make, because they require what most would consider tight tolerances for a home machine shop. As you can see in the print below, the bushing bore, and outside diameter had tolerances of only a few tenths. Thankfully extreme concentricity wasn’t required so a simple jig/mandrel could be used to hold the parts.
Overall it went pretty well, because while it was repetitive all the steps where pretty simple. I did however scrap the very first part because I was overzealous. I was trying to turn down the outside diameter to close to the final dimension, and ended up undersized and out of tolerance. After my initial mistake, I made sure to leave a little extra material on the remaining parts, so I could bring them within tolerance with wet dry paper.
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