(teaser) Homemade Metal Shaper

[Andre]

Not much to update on, just little things have been done. While looking through pictures I found one I hadn't posted.

 

[Andre]

Putting the cart before the horse, but some work done to the brass way wipers. Slots drilled out for the knee locks and the table bottom gib bolt holes corrected. Next will be milling the slots to final width and length.









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[Andre]

I was away for a week but now I'm back to the shop and can get to work on the shaper again. Slots drilled and milled, and here I'm single point boring a clearance hole for the key seat cutter I'll use to create a T-slot through the central rib of the H-beam. The slots will be clearance for the carriage bolt heads which I'm using as the knee lock.


And here is the minima and maxima of each axis travel. The ram stroke is 3.25, table traverse is 4".





Sorry for the terrible photos, but notice the brass way wiper covers. They are for the most part complete and have oiled felts under them.

Next on the list is more screws to hold the ram base in place, 4 gib strips, tool holder clamp, and two feed screws. I also need to throw the base back onto the mill and oval-out 4 holes with the boring head to allow those Z axis runners to adjust for wear and alignment with other way axis.

 

[Andre]

Wood is fine with stainless steel, but steel will rust from the moisture in the wood. Just a thought. Perhaps dunk the wood in keosene then store the parrells Tom

I've considered your concern in the past, but I've made wooden holders for socket adapters, punches, collets, emdills, etc. The flycutter set I have shipped in a wood storage block, and every Starrett box is made from wood. Never had any rust problems in my shop

Besides, parallels get oily and will end up giving the wood an oil finish in due time

 

[Andre]

Looks like a few of my other posts in other threads were unintentionally moved here during the subforum creation (Thank you by the way, Nelson!) so just disregard them.

Work on the shaper will be continuing soon, I'm still working out a table feed. I never thought about that before mounting the table ways and it bit me. No room for the 5/16" screw behind the table.

Thinking about a rack and pinion with cam-action screw. The rack and pinion will aid in rapid traverse for indicating and the cam-action worm screw (imagine the anti-backlash adjustment on some rotary tables) will be used for fine feeds and maybe milling....oops I said too much already.....

Maybe some rack shaping and gear cutting in the future?

 

[Andre]

Table traverse has been finalized. Table will have a mounted rack, and the pinion will stick up through the knee (think of a surface grinder that uses a gear rack). The pinion will be mounted inside the knee on ball bearings inside aluminum pillow blocks. That shaft will have a worm screw reduction for table feeds.

The worm screw and its mating worm pinion will hopefully use an ACME thread form. I will hob the worm gear pinion in the lathe. The gear rack will be shaped in the lathe by broaching, and the straight cut pinion and rack will have 20 degree pressure angle for strength.

The O1 to make the worm, and worm hob out of, and 606 bearings will be ordered soon. In the meantime, I'll finish up some little things I've been procrastinating on.

 

[Andre]

Found some perfect gears to copy. The same piece of gear rack that I used on my homemade height gauge actually. Although these two gears mate perfectly and would work I will remake them in steel. They will serve their purpose as a profile gauge to grind my HSS tool bits to for the gear cutting.

They are 14.5 PA gears, so I will change to that for the real gears.

Gear rack blank cut, and ground on the sides, milled flat the edge the teeth sill be on. I will cut the rack gear on the lathe using a line boring bar, hopefully it'll work out. Some pictures:











The gears have 8 TPI teeth, so everything is real easy to work with! I might cut the pinion on a friend's Bridgeport or Enco mill, I don't know. I might need a mill with a tighter spindle than mine for the job.

I can't imagine how much that boring bar is going to chatter LOL

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[Andre]

Gear cutting going OK. Not quite to depth yet, and I need to change the setup a little before I continue.





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[Andre]

Some progress on the gear milling. I will run through all the teeth, raise the QCTP holder .025" and run through them again. This way the steps from the 3" radius of the bar to holder will be minimized to the point of being a non issue. There will be slight scalloping in the teeth but it will be minimal. I won't be in the shop the next few days so I'm posting this update now. Hopefully this gear will be done in a week's time. I've been pretty busy and haven't had much time in the shop recently.



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[Andre]

I guess these are daily updates now....maybe I should start another thread.

I "ruined" the rack today....something happened and two teeth got cut too deep. I will have to mill some off the tooth tips and try again.

Giving up on using the lathe for gear cutting. I will try the mill next.

I ground a 14.5" per size single lip cutter using the lathe with a 56k RPM pencil grinder....don't know what happened but the inner spindle started to badly vibrate so towards the end it got pretty choppy...going to try using that same cutter I used for the line milling and try that in a fly cutter..

Also somehow damaged my Shars test indicator....I'm not sure how it happened so I'm going to email Shars to see if they can do anything. If not I'll tear into it and try and repair it.

One of those days...