Strange Bar Bell Weight Material

agree with those things are made of crap! might try finding a junkyard flywheel from an old standard shift car?
 
I'm sure that is white iron. If I understand this correctly, the cast iron is cooled quickly forming large crystals. This would make it very hard and very brittle. If you break it apart, you would see that it has a large crystal structure and don't be surprise if you find a bunch of cavities. I would not have any material that brittle for a back plate. P.S. that might explain why some of these HF vises break at the jaws.
 
Thanks for all the input, confirms what I had suspected when I first put tool to work - that this may not be a suitable material. But also give me some confidence that I could still make the backplate myself if I got the right stuff. Will start the search to source some proper cast iron when things open after the weekend.
Any suggestions on what grade of cast iron would be most suitable for a backplate?
 
I'm not a car guy. While I've done machining and welding on manifolds and carburetors for the local auto shop I never replaced my own brakes.
Thus.....
Would used cast iron disc brake rotors work?
Or do they get to hard from the heat of braking and even harder as brake shoes wear off and embed in the surface?
What about new rotors?
I wonder if rotors from a motor cycle, trailer or small car would have a small enough ID and still have a large enough OD to work.
I'd think they'd be good castings if they were designed to withstand braking forces.
I'm all for trying to make a "silk purse out of a sows ear". Grandpa taught me that. However, sometimes it's better to buy the right thing.
Does anyone know of a good supplier of stock sized grey cast? The answer is likely in another thread somewhere....


Daryl
MN
 
I can get a threaded back plate from myford in the uk but the shipping to SA is a killer and doubles the price. Seems wrong to pay three times as much for a back plate as I did for the chuck. Hence why I was trying to make something locally from available material. A suspect even getting a a proper disk of cast iron locally is going to cost me the same as the chuck cost (the chuck was from what I suspect is the local equivalent of HF over there - mainly Chinese sourced stuff).
Reworking stuff that is cheaply available locally is always my first source of materiel - bar ball weights have proved to obviously not be a good option.
Not sure if a brake rotor would be thick enough base material for a thread and a recess to register the chuck. Will look into it though .
 
if you are able to do the threading just get a slice of big steel rod
 
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