Friday night I finished up machining the banjos, and I have to say I’m very pleased with the results. Initially, I was concerned that the jig wouldn’t be rigid enough, but it ended up working perfectly fine. I had one minor machining related issue, and that was that the hot rolled 4140 I used to make one of the pins, machines very poorly. It was east enough to work around, it’s just one of those things that annoys me.
This is the first video I’ve done with the new mic, and I had some interference issues in a few clips. I wasn’t able to correct them in post this time around, but thanks to my buddy Doug and some testing on my part, we where able to figure out the cause so I won’t have any issues in the future. As a side note I’ve been playing with post processing audio with the Auphonic web service, and desktop application. It does an amazing job of automatically cleaning up the audio, with not real work on my part.
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Part two of the series starts off with drilling and boring the banjo mounting hole. Boring with a quality boring head is easy to do, but it can be laborious if you have to remove a lot of material like I did. After finishing the mounting hole, I show drilling and tapping for the clamping bolt. The video finishes up with one of my personal bugaboos, slitting the banjo. If you stick around to the end of the video, you’ll see me point out a dumb mistake I made.
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I’ve never really been happy with the change gears set-up for my Harbor Freight 8×14. Don’t get me wrong it works exactly as it’s supposed to, it’s just finicky to the point that I never want to change it. Now that I have a mill and the appropriate tooling, I’ve decided it’s time do do something about it. This video is the first in a series that will document the changes I’m making in the hope of improving the change gear system. As unusual, I’ll post plans and relevant photos.
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Some shots from Jillian & I’s trip to the Monticello Railway Museum, where week took a ride on a train powered by a 100 year old steam engine.
After the honeymoon and vacation it took a little time to get back into the swing of thing, but I’m finally back in the grove and knocking out projects. This project was a quick one to help store & organize my new turning tools.
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