Concrete and dowel

This evening I filled my lathe bed with concrete. I said I was going to buy some 10mm dowels and grease them up before putting them into the bolt holes, but that wasn't possible. Because Magnet Mart are so good at stocking usefully sized lumber, I had a choice between 9.5mm and 12.5mm dowel...

Obviously, I chose 9.5mm. The process I used was only marginally more complex than the grease option. I wrapped each dowel (which was cut to just a little longer than the height of the bed) with a small piece of standard printing paper, fastening it with a piece of tape. Then I wrapped each piece with thin plastic packing tape, hopefully preventing the conrete from adhering to it.

The goal of this approach was two-fold: to make up the missing 0.5mm, and to facilitate the removal of the dowels with minimum fuss, ideally without leaving anything but air and concrete behind.

The concrete is curing now, so I'll let you know how it went in a while.

A new project: ambitious, but possible

OK, I have a new major project. I'm going to build myself a Gingery-inspired lathe. If you don't know who Gingery is, google him. In short, he was a man who needed a machine shop, but lacked the funds for one. He had plenty of time though, so he decided to build one. He made many machines out of cast aluminium, which he melted in a furnace in his back yard. I admire his ingenuity, but feel that his lathe design is somewhat lacking in some areas. Those areas are:

size - his lathe is very small

fittings - his lathe has no standard tooling fittings

engineering - there are numerous engineering points that I disagree with, I'll cover these as they appear though

So, the first part that needs doing is the bed and ways. (Engineering flaw #1) Gingery cast his bed out of aluminium, making a 60cm hollow ribbed block for rigidity. Being aluminium, though, it is not particularly rigid. I imagine this lightweight casting introducing many inaccuracies, mostly through flexing and sagging. The other major downside to the bed is that it's a very big casting, especially for novices, at whom the series is mostly targeted.

To counter both of these problems, I have decided to skip casting the bed, and opt instead for a steel I-beam. This should give me the extra weight and rigidity that I yearn for, while also allowing me to scale the whole lathe up a bit (this addresses flaw #1, size). I plan on scaling it up to a 75mm swing, with around 60cm between centres.

Here is my basic idea for the bed: The black I-shaped section is, strangely enough, the I-beam. The thin grey piece is an aluminium match plate that I will cast up, and the red is a piece of bright flat bar.

The purpose of the match plate is simple. I will first scrape one side of it to fit the I-beam perfectly, then I will scrape the other side to match the bright bar perfectly. This will mean that the inaccuracies on the surface of the I-beam won't matter, as they will be averaged out by the aluminium plate. Then, given the very close tolerance of the bright flat bar, the matched aluminium surface will be almost perfectly flat. This will mean that I can bolt the bright bar onto it and not have to worry about it deforming.

Now, the only problem I can see with using I-beam is that it is not designed to withstand torsional force, which is exactly what I will be putting on it. I have two thoughts on this:

1) it may be so grossly over sized that it doesn't matter

2) I could weld straps into it, between the two parallel surfaces, and perpendicular to them. This would change the side view from being a long, wide channel, to a series of boxes. I feel that this should strengthen it sufficiently against the torsional forces.

So, those are my current plans. I'll update you as I build. But for now, google Gingery and see what he's all about.

Have a look at my shed

Here's my shed cum pool room, bask in its glory.


And my wine-case tea cupboard. I made it from a Yattarna wine case that I got for $5.