Member postings for Richard Kirkman 1

Finally, the new tubing arrived. 32mm ID on a 34mm wheel.

It pushed in very nicely, snug enough that I can't get it back off.

I'm very pleased with the result, now to put it to use!

Thanks to all for comments and advice

Trevor, thanks for your message, I will look into this if I need any more wheels coating in the future.

I bought the wrong size...

Measure twice

Ended up getting a refund, and then reordering from a different seller.

Ebay says the package has arrived, so I will attempt to fit the rubber this weekend!

It still hasn't arrived...

This may take longer than expected

Thanks Clive

I think I'll give the 35 ID tube a go then. I'll order now and update at the weekend

Another weekend spent fitting the new tooling. (and a few other minor upgrades)

Last thing left to do is to make a tool rest for it, but that will have to wait until next weekend.

I did run the sander at its minimum speed to see how it went, and it ran okay, but I still think i'd like to cover the wheels.

I measured them and they are 38mm diameter. I found some radiator tube that's 35mm ID, will this be easy enough to stretch over the wheels? I know radiator tubing is tough stuff, but after soaking in warm water, will it be supple enough?

Thanks to all so far.

Ian- I think Heat shrink tubing may be a good idea to try out initially, but I don't see it being very hard wearing?

Clive and Dave- I think the tubing would be the best option, but I am unsure of what size would suit. How much are you able to stretch the hose? I am also unsure of the exact diameter I turned the aluminium wheels to, so I will double-check when I'm home this weekend.

Bob- I had the material for these wheels already so I just wanted to make use of it. I'm sure skateboard wheels would have worked fine.

Bill- Coincidentally I joined that group last week, it is a good resource. However, I thought I would try here first as generally, I find the people on this site to have more knowledge on things. I may try it as well and see what others think.

It shouldn't. The wheels will be spinning alongside the belt as I have pressed the bearings in, so there will be less abrasion but still some. Hence why i'd like to cover them in some rubber.

These products are usually sold with rubber wheels but are significantly more expensive. I looked into castable rubber but decided it was too messy, and I was unlikely to get it to be concentric.

Hi all,

I built a 50x1500mm belt grinder back in the summer of 2021. Recently I decided it would be nice to have a few more attachments, such as a contact wheel and a small wheel attachment.

I wasn't in a rush, so ordered a contact wheel from AliExpress, and I found a very cheap small wheel attachment on some dodgy website (Weirdly it has now been put up from £32 to £85, so I may have got it for the wrong price).

Both arrived and I began fitting them. The contact wheel was very simple to fit and I'm very happy with it.(Very mucky, it has been cleaned since)

For the small wheels attachment I decided that I wanted to put some idler wheels around the small wheels so it pinches the belt down so I can fully utilise the small diameter of the wheels.

I have made some idler wheels from some aluminium tubing and I have press fit some bearings in.

My though is, these wheels are going to be running on the outside of the sanding belt, which will likely cause wear over time. As a preventative maintenance kind of thing, it would be nice to coat them with some kind of rubber that will not wear away as quickly. Possibly some kind of tubing that I could stretch over the wheels and replace over time when necessary. I had thought about using a bicycle inner tube but there must be something more suitable out there?

Does anyone know of any suitable tubing and where to get some? Or perhaps any other alternate suggestions?

Thanks in advance

Thanks everyone. Really interesting stuff. I'm sure Norman will be interested to read up on whats been said.

My dad's friend (Norman) told him about this little steam engine he has, so today my dad and I went to have a look and a play. See the link below for pictures and videos. It has a few little machines with it, a small power hammer, a shaper, a pillar drill, and a few saw benches. It's quite cute.

LINK

So, Norman wanted to know what the other parts on the engine are for, the larger red wheel and other assembly attached. In the 3rd last picture, you can see part of what looked to me like a line shaft. I imagine the line shaft must mount somewhere, perhaps on the top of the green tower so it can then power all the machines or something. I was wondering what the second piston would be for, as it's in a small well and It has no steam going to it?

He said he bought the little engine from a woman in Australia many many years ago for 35 dollars or something. So he doesn't know too much about it.

Does anyone know if there are other products out there like this, partnered with the little machines?

Any ideas would be welcomed. Just a post of curiosity in case anyone knows anything. Thanks

No worries Pete. Yes, I received it through email. The code is ARC821-5

It's 5% off all accessories until the 30th of August 2021

Thanks

Cheers Phil, I hope the tractor restoration is coming along well. I still need to catch up on last week's videos!

I'm just placing an Arc order since there's 5% off. Just for fun, I looked at the price of the tools to broach an 8mm key in a 24mm bore (not the complete broach kit). It came to a total of £70 or so! I think I'll stick to my current method...

Meanwhile, I think it's about time I cleaned my lathe. The belt sander build has involved a lot of turning, so it's time to tidy. I suspect I may have another leak in the lathe to solve too...

No bodging here, and no youtube either... This may have been quite a challenge for me, but that's why I've found it so enjoyable.

Today's progress should finish the job completely (as far as the wheel is concerned. The belt sander still needs fixing up somehow, but that's a problem for another day and thread)

The day commenced with turning a 24mm mandrel to remount the wheel onto. I make sure it was a very tight fit with no slop. Then I double-checked the runout on the outside to make sure it was the same runout that I'd seen on the motor shaft. This meant that it was accurate enough and taking a cut was likely to result in a better concentricity, so I decided to take the plunge and skim the outside.

After skimming the outside I decided to put a tapered crown on the wheel to *hopefully* help the belt sander track a bit better. This went quite well, just like when I did the same thing to the tracking wheel.

Next step was to create the "dutch keys" for the 'braces' half. I put some layout fluid on the surface where I thought the holes needed to be, then I marked the holes and drilled to 4.2mm, ready to tap to M5.

Once tapped and deburred, I dropped a blob of locktite 271 onto each of the M5 grub screws then tightened them down.

Howard, I understand you were saying to use long grubscrews or as long as the thickness of the wheel. I just used what I had lying around already, It's better than nothing. I just hope they're not needed at any point. The shrink-fit will hopefully do enough and the belt sander won't have a hard life anyway.

With that completed, the wheel was remounted onto the motor. All finished.

I checked the outside for the concentricity and it looked to be about 1.5 thou out. This may not be perfection, but it is significantly better than before. Plus, the vibration is practically gone, which is exactly what I wanted. No shims are required either...

Thanks to everyone for their help, I'm very grateful for your knowledge.

Perhaps the centec owner should read this and see how easy the proper fix is!

Very tired today, but progress has been made and I am very happy once again.

I started off looking at what tools I had already for the lathe. There was a quarter-inch square boring bar/ keyway cutter that I purchased last summer in a job lot, which I had almost forgotten about. There was just enough HSS left to grind down the opposite end of the tool into the 3mm cutter I needed.

I didn't bother grinding it to exactly 3mm as it was getting hot and I was getting impatient as it had taken a while. Then from the bench grinders fine wheel I took it to my tormek whetstone grinder and finished it off on there. I ended up with a 3.3mm cutter. Not the easiest to take pictures of, The camera makes it look rougher than it was. Most importantly, it was quite sharp and relieved on the front and sides.

Then I put the tool into a tool holder and set it to close enough to center. I did this by eye and looking at where the scratches were in the bore. Once the scratches were even I stopped.

I started off by taking smaller passes, especially since the full cutter was being used in the center pass. Starting with 1 thou depth of cut, although once I was a bit more confident I tried some larger cuts up to around 5 thou.

I did find that I occasionally got a bit of deflection, so I did more than one pass on 1 depth to ensure it was cutting parallel to the bore, this seemed to work fine for me.

Once the first slot was to depth, I used an indicator to move the tool up 2.4mm from the center. Then I cut another slot. This slot was smaller so I attempted a few heavier cuts of 7 thou or so, but generally, I tried to just do 2.5 thou cuts.

I then lowered the tool and cut the other path. I found this to be easier than cutting two slots on either side and then taking out the middle. This way I started in the middle, just my preference.

I can't imagine how much I would have struggled if I hadn't upgraded to a QCTP this summer. Thanks again to Phil for his help.

I found this to be quite enjoyable. Definitely not as quick as broaching the hole, but much lower cost (zero in fact) and the satisfaction of doing it myself.

I thought the chips pinged off quite nicely.

I deburred everything with a file and deburring tool, then I attempted to fit the wheel. It fit perfectly!

I stuck an indicator on the flat face(about where my thumb is in the picture above) and the runout is now 2 thou, a significant improvement compared to the 10-20 depending on shims before.

The circular face is now 1.5 thou out of round, compared to the 10 thou before. Also a significant improvement.

I turned on the motor and put it up to full speed, the vibration has gone. It's honestly like a new machine, it works a lot better. And the belt seems to wobble a lot less.

Opinion time-

I am tempted to turn a mandrel and remount the wheel and skim the outside face to true it to the bore. Is this likely to make it better, or am I more likely to do worse than the 1.5 thou already achieved?

I am also considering crowning the wheel to the same as my tracking wheel so the belt sander *should* track better.

I will also be adding the "braces" of the grub screws at some point once the tuning is done.

Thank you to everyone so far for your help. If only I had made the wheel myself originally and enquired earlier!

Thanks everyone, I'm really happy with the results so far.

Not done it yet- That sounds like a good idea, just to go the extra mile and add a bit more. I'll put some m5 set screws along the joint

Howard- I've ran out of aluminium so I won't be able to make a plug and drill the bulk out. But that does sound like a good idea for the future. I really should have worked it out and drilled the hole before I bored the center out.

I've been away in Ireland this weekend, so I'll attempt to cut the keyway tomorrow afternoon.

I think I have a boring bar type tool that would be perfect. The only issue I can think of so far is that I can't use by belt sander to shape any cutters so I'll have to get the bench grinder reassembled.

What sort of depth of cut should I look at trying to take?

I'll try to make a tool smaller than 8mm, perhaps 4mm then I can do it in two passes. If diogenesII did 4mm in steel then I imagine 4mm in aluminium will be fine

Progress update, today I managed to turn the plug to size. It ended up at around 39.985mm.

So I bored the hole out to 39.905mm, somehow it worked out perfectly.

Then straight off into the oven, and the plug into the freezer. Left them both an hour. Then it slipped right in. Pretty much immediately wouldn't come back out. I left it to cool, then chucked it back up and faced each side. Then on the second face I drilled and bored to 24mm

It's nice how the plug sort of disappeared when I faced it

Thanks to everyone for their help so far.

However, I could do with some advice on the next task.

I now need to cut a keyway in the bore to accept an 8mm key, about 3mm deep. Last time the wheel was made, I managed to cut the keyway in myself using a piece of 8mm hss which I ground a bit of relief on, then i just took passes to shave off bits. This worked with varying success and I ended up having to file the slot a bit more to get it to fit.

Does anyone have any tips on what sort of angles I should try to grind into the cutting tool or any tips in general for cutting a keyway in a lathe.

Ah yeah that's a good idea too. It's made me think, I have a small electric oven in the workshop which I usually use to temper metal. That should get hot enough and have enough space for the wheel.

Thank you, no it's not Jeremy Schmidt's design, its my own design of an amalgamation of my favorite features of ones I've seen. Plus a few different choices to make it easier for me to make with the tools I have available. I have the Solidworks design if anyone wants it, but it's relatively specific to the motor I had already, and uses the metal sizes my local metal place has.

Okay right so I'll bore everything and forget about the reamer.

Yes, I suppose they should expand and contract together so that should be alright. I've never noticed the back wheel getting massively hot, but I don't tend to touch it much!

The only issue I can think of will be the difficulty of heating the wheel and cooling the plug at the same time, since I don't have a freezer in the workshop. I'll have to heat up the wheel, pop in the house and grab the plug from the freezer, then heat the wheel back up again, then press it in.

Another issue will be recutting the keyway! I'll worry about that later...

I'll have a go at this soon and update you all. Thank you all for your comments so far!

The wheel was initially machined by a technician at the college I went to. I'm not even sure the college had a boring bar at the time so I think he just drilled it. The outside was turned on a mandrel but I believe the mandrel was not a tight fit in the hole, so the outside wasn't turned correctly. It really is just the center hole being oversized that has caused issues.

The bolt on the centerline holds the wheel on the shaft. I'm sure a setscrew would be better, but I don't think I have the right set up to try and do that.

The taper lock bush is also a good idea. It looks like the standard ones for 24mm motor shafts have a dia of 57mm so that could be a third option if the other two fail. Once again I don't have access to a milling machine so drilling the half holes may be troublesome.