Saturday 22 February 2014

Lathe tinkerings...beer cans to bits!



Got a little bit of shed time today and managed to get a couple of useful bits (above) made. The simpler of the jobs was an aluminium coupler that fits onto the 5mm shank of this stepper motor but is bored to 6.1mm for half it's length to couple it to a shaft for something I'm prototyping for someone. The m2 screws will be shortened at some point!

The other job is a die holder...I have a large die holder but had need for one that holds these smaller diameter ones..of course one could buy this but it was a nice little job and afforded me the chance to practice a bit of boring. So both these jobs are made from aluminium thats been melted down in my furnace so contains old beer cans, tv aerials etc etc..the silver steel rod through the die holder also came out of a scrapped printer so lots of recycling here as well!

I've also since last september been doing an engineering operations evening class locally which has been great and I'm just getting beyond the bench fitting stage to use the big lathes and mills there. (The lovely emco 17d lathes they have put my old lathe to shame but there we go!)...here's a couple of pics of 2 jobs from the course that reflect MANY hours of filing!!