2019 POTD Thread Archive

jdedmon91 said:
Finishing a simple project today. It be a while before it makes it into video. My sister in law wanted a wall bracket for her hair dryer and curling iron. She seen Chris’s hair dryer bracket and asked me to make her one for both.
this is the one in our house
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Can't wait to see your toilet paper holder.... lol

I love making overkill holders for simple everyday household items. Great Work!
 
francist said:
Another little clean-up project that has been sitting on my books for a long time. I hate to admit it, but I started this one all of fifteen years ago. Then parents started dying and estates needed to be settled, so here I am finally getting around to putting the thing back together.

It's a forge blower in case you haven't figured that out yet. Made by Canedy Otto, a "Royal" Western Chief from around the turn of the century (I think). No stand with it, and when I bought it there was some damage to a few of the screw bosses as well as a particularly offensive green and black colour scheme. The crank handle was also reduced to a stub and missing the ball counterweight. But aside from that, it seemed to work okay.

When I tore it all down the insides looked really good. Hardly any wear on the gears or shafts. And there was my first surprise: one of the gears was not metal. It's like a hard rubber, and after a bunch of head scratching I determined that this was what Canedy Otto called their "whisper quiet" gear train or something like that. Basically one synthetic gear intermixed with the regular gears to make a quieter running train. I can't put my hands on the ad where they talked about it, but I may still have it in a file somewhere. That's what happens when stuff drags out for so long.

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My second surprise was the paint colour. I knew the green was wrong from the get go, but I wasn't prepared for the traces of burgundy with gold letter highlights that I found underneath it. But I guess if you were offering a model called "Royal" that'd be one way to make it distinctive. They picked out the fan, visible only through the side intake hole, in red.

Here's some of the body castings getting the new burgundy colour. There was enough original left for me to get a pretty good match, and even though in this picture it looks a little bright the colour will darken in as it dries.

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The fan needed a bit of balancing I guess, so there's a small tab of lead riveted on to the end of one of the blades. You can barely make out faint remnants of the red paint around the rivet heads.

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I happened to have this brass stopcock in my drawer of salvaged bits. It's not far off the proper vintage and a dead ringer for the oil drain cock that originally came on these blowers. 1/8" national pipe thread, it fits perfectly. For the oil filler cup on the top I ended up turning one up from scratch. Even though I'm not going to be filling the gear case with oil any time soon, I want everything to work like it should for anyone who might have it after me. Still haven't made myself a knurling tool yet so I just cut fine grooves around the top of the cap using the lathe. It goes pretty fast, especially in red brass.

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I decided to repair the existing crank handle rather than making a completely new one. The original is cast and has an elliptical cross-section which I figured I could make easily enough on a small length but not so easily on a longer length. I was able to rough out a lot on the shaper, and the rest I took care of by hand.

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After debating several methods of joining the new piece to the old crank, I opted to make a hollow sleeve to bridge the joined sections. I got a pretty good slip fit, then used JB Weld to hold all three together.

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Turning the ball was a bit of adventure as well, actually that's not true, it was tedious more than anything. I really need to make a ball turning attachment sometime. And for the through-hole, lots and lots of filing.

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And that's pretty much all she wrote. I turned a new handle from a scrap of black walnut I had lying around, put it all together onto a stand, and set it in my living room for now. I'll sell it one day, or give it to some deserving party when the time is right. The odds of me running a coal fire again where I live are pretty slim, and I have a new propane forge that I've never even fired up yet. So for the moment the Royal Western Chief is purely eye candy, but it's still better than TV!

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As always, thanks for looking!

-frank
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Great restoration work. I have several Champion blowers. I always liked the way they sounded once you got them moving. Kind of like a plane about to take off. I didn't realize that they were once painted. I have never seen one with paint on.
 
Yes I like the Champions too, RJ. I find they actually turn easier than this brute. As for the paint, all the Champions I've seen have just been black, but that's a really common colour for second and third owners to paint blacksmith gear. This is the only piece of Canedy-Otto equipment I have, so I can't say if their other machines were as colourful as their forge blowers or not. I like it though.

-frank
 
Today weather was suprasily warm, close to 20 centigrade, so i did couple of jobs outside, one of wich was to sewing in a new leather cover on my cars steering wheel, the factory leather has cracked and started tearing in couple of places. I've order this cover some time ago and was waiting for the weather to get better and today was the day, first i fited the cover on and center it, i install the joint at the bottom and begin sewing, it took me around 2 hours to finish it, i did tied every knot every 5 mm so if the string breaks it doesn't get unsewn, and don't be fooled by the instrument panel is not an automatic anymore, i miss the clutch too much. I swapped in a diesel and a manuel gearbox close to 5 years ago.
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Was talking to a friend the other week, when the topic of hand scraping came up. My friend was particularly interested upon learning how two surfaces could be so flat that they ring together.
Thinking it would be neat to scrape some small flats and send them a surprise gift, I pulled out the tiny surface plate, grabbed a piece of scrap, and started scraping.

After a short while, a gauge block would ring to the surface:
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Thinking it would be neat to have two pieces which could be rung together, I then cut the flat in half.
This unfortunately resulted in the bar going out of flat - internal stresses in in the mystery steel.
I figured, while the plates were now bent, might as well square them up, and measure the thickness.
In doing so, I realized that the bars were only a couple thousandths over 0.500", and decided to make an exercise out of hitting 0.500" as closely as I could (while maintaining parallelism)

A good while later, and the flats were coming along nicely:
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After a while I decided to try the three plate method out, seeing how I was making technically four flats

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Eventually I was satisfied with each plate's flatness.
Checking parallelism, I discovered each was about 0.0005" out of parallel - with about that much to spare on the thicker portion of each. So several passes later, focusing on the thicker regions, I got close enough to 0.500"
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Each flat was ultimately parallel to within one or two tenths.

The neatest part of all this, is that the flats easily ring together - one is easily suspended from the other.
Additionally, because they were created with the three plate method (having four scraped sides total), they can effectively be lapped even flatter with one another as they are played with over time.

It's amazing how much force it takes to pry them apart when a drop of oil in introduced. Even when dry, they still require considerable effort to separate.
Here they are on last time, one suspended with only half of each face in contact:
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I'm actually very excited to see my friend's reaction as he attempts to pry them apart
Will probably make another pair for myself as they are quite the desk distraction :)
 
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