What are you building?

[Peter G. ShawParticipant @peterg-shaw75338]

Not building anything, just trying to improve the machines, make my own tooling, and improve my personal skills and knowledge. On reflection, I think the knowledge should come first, followed by the personal skills, and then everything else.

 

Like others, time is limited, eg going singing, taking the caravan 100miles for servicing, then taking the memsahib off in it (actually to see if a place we saw on the telly is where we think it is!) , mending a door (when it arrives!) for my daughter, and all sorts of other things keep cropping up. And funnily, having this am been to the doctors, been told that he would expect me to still be feeling tired and weak for another two months following an operation early July (true actually, but am improving). In other words, engineering has to come at the bottom of the pile.

 

Nevertheless, it still holds my interest.

 

Regards,to one and all,

 

Peter G. Shaw

[Anonymous]

Hmmmm, where to start? There’s always a danger that I’ll get depressed if I write down all the things I haven’t actually got around to doing yet, but here goes anyway.

 

Models:

Three quarters of the way through building an ‘Economy’ hit ‘n’ miss engine

 

Design, build and test a microprocessor controlled ignition system for the above engine

 

Not very far through building two 4″ scale SCC Burrells from the LSM drawings, using the John Rex castings, most of which are still un-machined in the kitchen

 

Work:

 

CNC mill the prototype boxes for a battery management system

 

Design and weld up three stainless steel battery enclosures

 

Machine, or farm out to the professionals, all the other bits for said battery enclosures

 

Other Things I Got Talked Into:

 

Machine two wheel hub spacers for my neighbour’s Moggy Traveller

 

Machine Tool Fixing:

 

Get the internal attachment running on my cylindrical grinder

 

Get the swivelling head attachment running on my cylindrical grinder

 

Weld up a wheel guard for the surface grinder

 

Fit a new coolant pump to the Bridgeport mill, to replace the two that have failed already

 

Design and make some bending rolls to make the wheel rims and ‘T’ pieces for the above traction engine

 

Design and make a cross slide guide for the hydraulic copy unit

 

Get around to fitting and using the Ainjest high speed threading unit

 

Wire up a new three phase switch and socket to the guillotine

 

Learn how to use the Clarkson tool and cutter grinder

 

Get the hardness tester cleaned and working, and work out what the hell the results mean

 

Finish repairing various Coventry dieheads

 

Other Stuff

 

Design, weld and fit some stainless steel brackets to the house, so that the grape vine will pass over the patio doors rather than draping everywhere, as at present

 

Drill and fit some stainless steel angle in the garden so I can get the Kiwi fruit plant out of the greenhouse

 

And so it goes on………………………………..

 

Regards,

 

Andrew

[dcostaParticipant @dcosta]

Hello Ian  and  David!

 

I thank to both of You.

 

 

Ian,

As I told You before I’m preparing myself to start making an hot air engine and  I, whenever possible, look for information about other people experiences and ideas.

I hope that when I have the shaper finished I’ll start preparing materials and data to start making an hot air engine. Meanwhile I can only dream and read the messages from other engineers (like Yourself).   

By now all I can do is to collect all data to this goal.

But in my dreams I would like to build a “ST 05 G Stirling Engine 300-500 Watt”, see, please, http://www.odts.de/esg/ST5engl.html and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9xIXGB2vFU&NR=1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ZcpiUVHB0.

In a motor like this I would like to test wood pellets as energy source.

That engine, as You will find in the site, was conceived by Mr. Dieter Viebach, an German gentleman.

 

 

Best regards

Dias Costa

 

[William RobertsParticipant @williamroberts98085]

Well my friends very interesting to know what you all pass your time  with, I come from a woodworking back ground and am a newby to this hobby. I always wanted a metal lathe and as planned when I retired I got myself one, but ,yes theres always a but as all you retired people will know when you retire there is less hours in the day , I should have had the lathe when I was working when I had time for eveything. A great hobby I enjoy every minute I can spend at it, Thank you all for the knowledge in the forums they are a gold mine.  

                    Bill

[William RobertsParticipant @williamroberts98085]

Chris B

            Interesting to see you are at Lincoln I am about 40 minutes away at Retford ,can you tell me where the Lincoln MES meet and what days, Thanking you best regards

                                                                                                                               Bill

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

Andrew,

 

You shouldn’t have mentioned microprocessors or DIY but… I think I’ll hold my tongue, especially as I’m supposed to be resizing this computer desk, not sitting here using it…

 

Neil

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

John Olsen, yes I am but I bought the castings part finished from someone who has corrected the drawings so hopefully I won’t have a problem (other than of my own making!).

 

John

[Paul BoscottParticipant @paulboscott25817]

I’ll use this thread to give you an update on the extrusion press that I am making. The butt shear is finished and working see http://www.boscott.co.uk 

 

I am still looking for information any thing may be usefull I am putting together a stand to show the pictures I have of the press at the Banbury Model engineering exhibition on 9th Oct 10:00 to 16:00 at St Mary’s Church Banbury I will also have on display some of the other models I have made in the past.

 

Paul Boscott

[Anonymous]

Wot? The cheek of it! The grape vine supports will be a fully engineered product. Designed in 3D CAD, stressed to cope with the weight of grapes grown this year plus a safety factor, formed by guillotine and folder and TIG welded where required. And what about the project to design and make my own spark plug for the hit ‘n’ miss engine? Electrics or mechanics?

 

Regards,

 

Andrew

[John OlsenParticipant @johnolsen79199]

So John, you will eventually be needing a boat to put the Leak engine in…what do you plan for that?

 

At least as I recall none of the errors I found were too fundamental, eg they didn’t make scrap out of any vital castings. Of course I modified mine to have a piston valve on the LP end, so making plenty of room for mistakes of my own.  I’m part way through construction of a boiler for mine, down to only two tubes weeping now. Bit of a process, take out the end covers from the boiler, expand the tubes that are giving problems, put it all back together, get a good seal on the temporary gaskets on the end, fill with water, pump it up to pressure…It takes all day just to try to fix one or two tubes, and is not a job for a cold windy day like we have been getting here.

 

regards

John

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

Dias, I like the look of the ST05G motor, just thinking on it, you could get a few more watts out of it by using argon gas or similar in it. The pressure in it is similar to the Philips engine that the local Canterbury University has in its engineering dept.,

Just looking at our local news paper, a 1912 McLaren Traction engine(full size)is being sent over to theGreat Dorset Steam Fair, it will be in England for a year, and will be shown at other fairs, there are three other engines from other parts of the contry going also. The family that owns the engine also own 5 other engines 3 of which they have owned since new. Ian S C

Edited By Ian S C on 21/09/2010 06:02:42

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Well i think I can break the Official Secrets Act.

 

Getting very close to  machining spur and helical gears using just an off the shelf end mill, no special cutters at all, you do need CNC though.

 

Test cuts so far have been very promising even though the shape isn’t correct yet. When Sam Sunderland invented the gear planer in 1900 he never reckoned on it being linked to CNC <g>

 

John S.

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

John, the Sunderland method interests me in that one cutter cuts all tooth numbers, the Fellows method looks interesting also, I’v on ocasion Thought of using a hard steel gear to cut a brass one, don’t know if it would work. Ian S C

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

I want to try helical gears, though the three descriptions I have read all make the subject complex – probably much more complex than it needs to be.

 

I’ll use the non-spiral hob method, making two cuts offset by half a tooth, possibly adding another two cuts at 1/4 and 3/4.

 

The thing that’s stopping me is that the gears I want need the spiral to be 4″ long. If I use the lathe with a 1/16″ pitch leadscrew that means a ratio of 64:1, but the biggest I can do with my change gears is 16:1 so i need to make an extra banjo and get another pair of 20:80 wheels. I’d rather use the mill, as I can get more power to the cutter, and that will mean making some sort of  spiral drive arrangement.

 

Neil

 

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Been working with Art Fenerty of Mach3 fame on his new gear-cutting program.
Basically brought about because he wanted to do clock gears and then it got all out of hand with eccentric gears and all that artistic crap.

Link to the site at Gearotic there is a demo copy but the tutorials are worth watching.

Anyway I wanted to get the program back to making mechanically perfect gears and bring in some ideas. Most of the cutting is for routers making thin gears with a vertical spindle but there is an option for doing spur and helicals travelling across the face.

Now for the good bit even though CNC is needed the gears are cut with a conventional off the shelf $3 end mill and that end mill will cut any gear provided it can reach the root, don't believe it, watch the video…….

You tube video.

Not a great picture, the white nylon doesn't help but I'll redo it later on brass or similar. Main thing is it shows the operation, the cutter blocks a slot out and then by using all 4 axis at the same time it moves away, raises the cutter and rotates the 4th axis so each pass is at a different angle and part of the involute. You have the choice of selecting how many passes per tooth.
 

But because specials cutters are not needed it's now very easy to modify gears to fit an application. I cut two 14 tooth gears to text book specs, mounted then on two pins the required distance apart and they ran perfectly, I then made two more identical blanks but cut 13 on one and 15 on the other.

 

 

 

You can swap these in any order and they run fine. Helicals are still a work in progress, they work but the tooth shape is not correct yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Again simple tooling, in most of these cases the tool was a throw away FC3 3mm end mill costing £2.99

John S.

 

 

Edited By John Stevenson on 24/09/2010 23:25:42

Edited By Katy Purvis on 01/06/2015 11:21:26

[John OlsenParticipant @johnolsen79199]

You wouldn’t happen to have a pair of 1:1 bevel gears about 8mm diameter would you? No need for them to be spiral or anything fancy. But not plastic. I think I can cut them if I have to but have plenty of other stuff on my plate right now.

 

I have made an adaptor for a Vertex dividing head which allows me to do differential dividing. With a few little tweaks it could also be used to gear the dividing head to the mill leadscrew, so allowing the milling of threads or helical gears. I haven’t tried that yet, but there should be no great problem, other than the need to angle the head of the mill to match the helix angle required. (The problem with that is it is a heavy sucker and hard to tram up again afterwards.) A standard gear cutter would be used as the cutter, or a suitable profile to mill a thread.

 

regards

John

 

 

[Anonymous]

John S,

 

Very interesting means of cutting gears. I’ve been working towards doing the same for the bevel gears in my traction engine differential. I’ve added a photo album showing the 3D model of the bevel gear pinion and the CAM system toolpath, as far as I’ve developed it.

 

The most difficult part of the modelling was the tooth profile. The addendum is simple, an involute curve. But what about the dedendum? Most texts skate over the problem and say it can be modelled by an arc. But what radius and centre? It was complicated in my case as the pinion is 10 teeth, and thus quite heavily undercut. In the end I found a website where I could download a DOS program that generated DXF drawings for 1DP spur gears from 10 to 200 teeth. Then is was just a case of importing the DXF into the CAD system, extracting the form of one tooth and scaling to 6DP.

 

Regards,

 

Andrew

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Andrew PM sent.

 

John S.

[Author]

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