Made an actual real world part with my cheap China tools yesterday

- B
- Bob La Londe
  
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posted
13 years ago

Sun, Jan 16, 2011 7:32 PM

Ok, nothing special. A buddy of mine had a broken plastic bushing in the top of his seat pedestal on his bass boat.

I took a piece of aluminum stock and bored it out to .500 on the cheap mill drill with my cheap chinese (didn't know that when I ordered it as it came from Chicago) 5" vise holding the round stock nice and straight. Then I squared off the face where I did a lousy job of cutting off the stiock to begin with.

Then I the a 1/2" bolt in the Harbor Fright mini lathe and made the head nice and round. Then I turned it around and center drilled the other end. This made a nice arbor for the piece of aluminum stock. I turned it to round and to shape between centers. Then back on the mill / drill and bored it out to 3/4 for his seat base.

It was a perfect mallet (press) fit into the tube. The seat base dropped right in.

What I found particularly satisfying is I just did it. Didn't have to stop and think about a single step.

- J
- James Waldby
  
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posted
13 years ago

Mon, Jan 17, 2011 2:01 AM

I modified half-a-dozen wheel-mounting parts (shoulder bolts, carriage bolts, axle spacers) yesterday, and had to stop and think about a couple of steps. I needed to attach a positioning lever to a wheel strut, with less than an eighth inch of clearance for bolt heads. I decided to thin the heads of carriage bolts rather than of hex-head bolts; which was easy to do. The part I had to think about was how to round the corners of the short square section under the heads of the bolts so that they would seat better. There was interference between lathe tool and chuck jaws, lathe tool and bolt head, etc., depending on whether I chucked the head or the stem of the bolt. Ended up using a parting blade for this step, which worked fine.

- B
- Bob La Londe
  
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posted
13 years ago

Tue, Jan 18, 2011 2:43 AM

I've tried a parting blade a couple times for turning operations, and I learned that the blade makes a really neat tone when it pops out of the holder.

- J
- James Waldby
  
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posted
13 years ago

Tue, Jan 18, 2011 5:43 PM

[...]

I haven't tried moving the compound with parting blade engaged -- never occurred to me to try that -- so I haven't heard that "really neat tone". What I did was move the blade +Y-Y+X 3 times and was done without incident.