I've been putting more time into all the projects.
The bug pan painting is finally finished and the pan is back in the garage.
The Devilbiss gun worked well. Not quite the finish I would have liked, but good enough for the unseen bottom of a car. There are some nagging details about the air pressure that I never was able to get figured out- like when I release the trigger on the gun, there is an instant, higher level exit- pshhhh of air that, within about a second, settles into a lower pressure which stabilizes. Instead of a constant flow that's on or off, I get this ramping down effect. Also I never quite believed the indicated air pressure at the gun gauge. You're supposed to measure when the trigger is pulled, but the number was always way lower- like 12psi, when I'm pretty sure the gun was at something more like 25 or even 30. So in the end I just used my ears and what felt right in terms of material making its way onto the surface and how wet or dry that was. I gotta say I'm a lot less excited about it all in retrospect. I get super stressed out the moment I open the cans and start mixing. I know there's a time limit that's far longer than I'm going to use, but something about wearing the full face respirator, the compressor trying to keep up, the toxicity of the materials, the constant threat of dust and bugs and how many ways it can all go wrong. I wish I could enjoy it all more.
I added another overhead fluorescent fixture which made a huge difference in the Millrite corner.
I threw together some soft jaw covers for my cheap vise, and finally fixed the handle ferrules with CRS round stock and setscrews.
I bolted the front beam on and now I'm working on a special tool to compress the rear suspension on the Volkswagen. It's a shop tool that looks very nice and very expensive and rare- like made by Stahlwille.
It's a threaded rod-type thing but at my basic level, I think something I could easily make. So I started to. It felt good. I used the 4X6 saw. I used the Millrite to carve out a semicircle in a bracket.
Then threw the steel round stock on the South Bend 9A to turn a boss end to weld to. I busted out the welder and buzzed it together. I was on a roll.
Next I went back to the Millrite to drill a couple holes. I grabbed a 5/8 collet and I got stopped cold by the finicky old collet drawbar that I've always wondered how to get out of the machine. It's a "captured' drawbar, which, no matter what I did, never seemed to reveal how it was going to come out of there. I had a bad habit of being unable to grab certain collets, and also seemed unable to push them out again. I will go into more detail in another post about this. I'm getting more and more into the Millrite. I'd like to go into the spindle, but I know if I crack open that machine, I'll have a Clausing in pieces, a Millrite in pieces, an Okamoto grinder in pieces (see video above) and as of this evening, I'll also have a South Bend 9A in pieces as I'll get to in a minute. But I finally figured out how to get that drawbar out of there. It looked like this:
After putting the surface grinder back together, I had some success in actually grinding something. Just a small block of cold rolled steel. It was far from perfect though. And this is the part where you have to graduate from just taking something apart, cleaning it and putting it back together. Now it's more about the details. As Charles Eames said, "The details are not details, they make the design.".
Right away I noticed that the finish had little repetitive marks in it. Tried a couple different wheels. The first wheel was a Norton 32A46-JVBE.
This was recommended by some experienced folks on Practical Machinist as a good all around wheel. It's a purple wheel. a 46 grit wheel. (Newbie mistake is trying a wheel with too fine a grit). This is, I'd say medium, or medium fine. The J is hardness. (A is super soft and Z is super hard, so, right in the middle).
I also tried a completely different wheel. Another Norton. 39C60-IVK. This is a silicon carbide wheel. In a long and detailed journey of Instagram posts, I watched Spencer Webb bring a gorgeous Brown & Sharpe Micromaster 618 surface grinder up to a very high level of precision and performance. This machine is at a whole other level than my dinky little manual machine. He was struggling with grinding the cast iron table surface itself, as well as the magnetic chuck. This is done to true up the table surface to the plane the machine's own travel. Robin Renzetti recommended: "Cast iron likes green silicon carbide wheels. That Ruby wheel is never going to be happy. Once you try the green silicn carbide you're going to go wow can't believe the difference."
A few posts later he posted the results which were remarkable refined. So with the softer, cold-rolled steel block I was using as a test, I tried that wheel too. Didn't make much of a difference. This is all detailed in the video, but when I finally measured the runout of the tapered spindle mount, I found that it had about half a tenth out at the end. And if that's there, then the plate that is the grinding wheel or diamond wheel or whatever, will be wobbling. I would like to try dressing the wheel on all sides next- to completely cancel out the angualr variation to see if that makes any difference. I could live with it but I would prefer not to struggle with shims and always dressing out the wobble. So of course now I'm obsessively looking for replacement spindles on ebay. I'm looking up spindle repair places all over the country. At some point I think I will be pulling the spindle but now now.
Believe it or not, the priority is the Clausing 5914. I decided to go after the tailstock. Something not very glamorous about that, but when I think of all the little things I make on the South Bend, I realize I use the tailstock ALLLLLL the time. It has a ridiculously short travel (like 2 inches, max) but I am drilling and boring all kinds of things. So having a tailstock that works is such a critical part of what a lathe can do. The thing that made it click was accepting the clapped-out sag in the bed and compensating for it with shims so I could drill on center: truly on center. So it works quite well now.
Everything on this machine is so gunked up with coolant and swarf. It a couple days of scrubbing and waiting for paint remover to do its thing but I got it all stripped. Randy Richard in the Shop has one of these lathes and he's gone through it in a nice detailed YT video.
I had the exact same issue: the brass alignment key was as loose as the one on his machine. So making a new one helped. But the headstock itself appears to be bell-mouthed by quite a bit. Fixing this would be a very involved job that I'm not up for at all. At least not right now. But another Clausing owner on Instagram suggested I take a look at Stefan Gotteswinter's tailstock on his little Chinese lathe. Stefan completely reengineered the tailstock with a drill press-style capstan / rack & pinion quill. It's bold and brilliant and makes it look effortless, like everything he does. That would be a cool mod, but again, I'm not doing that either. What the IG user was pointing me to was the quill lock. It's a clamping collar that sits out at the forward end of the tailstock. It's a flexure that is secured on only one side, and tightens with a lockscrew handle on the other, and it's bored to a very close fit on the quill. This does two things very well: when you want to lock the quill it very firmly locks it with no side deflection, but also, no matter how worn out of imprecise the tailstock bore is, this collar resets the fit of the quill in the tailstock to be very tight again. So this is what I intend to do.
Apparently this is based on his observation of the Haas TL-1 lathe. You see these kind flexure collars on his mill as well. They are something I would like to get more experience in making and using.
Last bit of news is that I was polishing the end of a homemade crank handle for the Clausing's tailstock. I was running the lathe at a very high RPM. Must have oil starved it, because all of a sudden the spindle seized. This is not a new thing. I've had that thing apart before but this time I think it's gotten worse. It's terribly galled and scored in there. I had bought another tailstock and spindle about a year ago for not very much money. I was bluing the spindle and thinking I was going to get a new machine, basically. But the new spindle seemed to run so roughly in the new headstock. I thought, why am I doing this. Just clean it, but the thing back together and run it. So I did, and I put the newer headstock parts away. Yesterday when the lathe seized up, started thinking about what I would do. And I was getting sick of being surrounded by old worn out machine tools. The Millrite is far from perfect. The Clausing is in pieces and it's basically a clean, worn out lathe instead of a filthy, worn-out lathe. The South Bend is a worn out lathe which was now stuck. And the surface grinder is just messed up enough to make me think it might be better to get rid of if. Earlier this evening I went out to the shop and take a look at the "new" headstock and spindle. The new one is the segmented bearing journal type- supposedly the the best version they did. The spindle is hardened- remarkably so compared to the one from my original lathe. I assembled the parts again. This time I stopped messing around with bluing and checking fits. I poured Velocite in all the oil holes. It still needs felts but I think I might actually have a solid assembly there. It ran smooth. And I think it just needs to be run in and kept clean. So I ordered the felts tonight and the South Bend might live again.