home made tools and equipment...

HA! Yeah, looks like they could be. I'll check it out...

 

I've seen a LOT of Lancaster shrinker/stretchers converted to a foot operation but yours is the best looking stand I've seen!

 

Thank you,Kerry, and GizmoJoe, and plym49,
Your compliments are much apprciated

 

I see your posts on MM.com and WOW. That's really saying something.

 

Buffer stand thing....I guess I could pretty it up a little, but why? It'll just get covered in goo.

 

Put a sheetmetal cover over the motor???

 

i think i'd put a little cover over the belt as well, might not feel to good comeing off and slaping you in the face. but i like it and think i'll make my own, thanks

 

Another buffer version - no belt needed.

Also a little one with a belt, made of wood.

I do like the one that gahi made from a pipe, also. Good use of scrap materials!

 

Here are 2 pic's of my home made polisher. 2" shaft 54" long. 2 8" wheels with a 2HP motor at 1740 RPM. While I'm polishing I'm standing on the square base so it doesn't move.

 

Is that a go-kart axle? Really clever.

 

It's not Go Kart rather, the shaft is from a closed Machine shop. Not sure what they used it for.

But:

My next setup is a rear axle from a 4-wheeler with right & left threaded ends about 36" wide. I calculated the RPM on the axle vs the tire diameter & the bearings would be looking at about 60 MPH as compared to the original tire diameter so I'm thinking I won't over speed the bearings. I'm planning on finally having 4 grits to get a good finish & not having to change buffing wheels. All of this stuff is free & the only cost is retirement time in my shop with good tunes.

Movin/on

 

I like home made tools! Here are some pictures of my home made louver press, english wheel, planishing hammer, electric bead roller, beater bag stand and Corona Bottle opener all in one.
The louver press uses Mitler Brothers Press and plans. Since I had such a huge base to begin with I decided that I should also incorperate a few other goodies as well. The bead roller was a Harbor Freight $99.00 Special that was modified to strengthen it and electrify it as well ( I couldn't figure out how to turn the crank and hold the sheet metal at the same time). The planishing hammer was made from a donated CP zip gun with home made dies. The english wheel is small, but works well on fenders sheets etc. I also added a beater bag stand just because I could. I am trying to figure out where to put my shrinker strecher next.

 

Just a few more pictures of my louver press. We also offer discounts to H.A.M.B. members, see our ad in the H.A.M.B. O'dex

 

THE HAMB FINALLY GETS TO SEE THE "MONSTER" HUH..HAHAHA Hope all is well Dave, I gotta get up to your shop and check out the going on's

 

that's pretty cool,I like the though process here

 

Made a Lazy Sussane hammer holder out of an old sprocket.

 

Probably the handiest tool in the shop is the crane I built. The tracks and trolleys are for sliding barn doors and rated for 450 lbs each for a total of 900 lbs. The tracks are welded to a 2 x 4 x 1/8" tube 12' long. The winch is a HF 1,300 lb and the mounting holes line up perfectly with the holes in the trolleys. I have lifted a 750 lb bench mill out near the end a to load into a truck.


I built the helve to mount to my steel bench and run off a sewing machine motor mounted under the table. Makes it handy to remove and store under a workbench when not in use. Moves metal in a hurry and hits about 300 beats per minute.


I made the ring roller to do a gentle curve in 1" round tube for a cowl edge but have used it for tons of other stuff since then. The hand wheel was the first project.


The problem with most rotisserie designs I looked at was that you couldn't pick a car up off the floor. You had to somehow raise it up to get it into the rotator. I used two HF worm drive winches and ran the cable up and over two gate support V pulleys and back down to the sliding yoke. The winch is mounted to the yoke so it pulls itself up the vertical member. I drilled holes in the vertical so a bolt can be inserted through as a safety catch. It's a little slow raising it up because you have to walk back and forth so much if you are alone but is sure a lot easier and safer than trying to raise the car up to attach to the rotator.



I am just finishing up rebuilding the frame on my English Wheel and will post pictures when it is done.

Jim

 

what is the car on the rotiserrie??

 

What's left of an MGB roadster that was widened 11" and and has C4 Corvette suspension and an LT1 6 speed for power. It is a lot further along than that picture shows. I need to quit building tools and finish the car.

Jim

 

Jim, how about a few how-tos with photos so we can build some tools like that? Esp. the Helve and roller.

 

I'm with Richard. I would like to know more about the roller. Specifically the dies for the rollers. Are the dies something that you made or had made or are they from something else? I really think it would be handy to have a roller like that in the shop. I can think of a dozen uses for it!

Man, this thread just gets better and better. I can't believe the amount of cool stuff in this thread!

 

Helve










I have made/bought too many big pieces of equipment and my once somewhat spacious shop is getting pretty crowded so I wanted to make a helve that I could mount to my bench when I needed it and could be stored away when I didn’t. I also want to be able to use the motor and foot control for other, yet to be constructed, machines so it will be a permanent fixture below the benchtop and the future machines will also be benchtop mounted. I used a commercial sewing machine motor purchased on the Internet and made a foot pedal to operate the motor’s clutch through a linkage built into the table base.
The basic frame is 1 ½” square tube with 3/16” wall. It could have definitely been made from lighter material but I came across a bunch of 2’ pieces of this stuff really cheap. The pillow block bearings are a great deal from Northern Tool at $6.95 each for either ¾” or 1” sizes. I used 1” to mount the top arm and ¾” to hold the eccentric shaft.
The top arm is made from 2 pieces of 1”x2” .060” wall tube spaced ½” apart that has been reinforced around the pivot attachment with 1/8” plate giving me something substantial to weld to. The arm is 36” long to the hammerhead and the back arm is 12” to the pushrod attachment. I painted the end of the arm “Safety Orange” to make it more noticeable and, hopefully, not get my head in the way when it is running.
I liked Jim Bailie’s latest spring mount because of the ease of stroke adjustability and spring length so I copied it. I used a flat head bolt in the rear position and extended the length of the top plate to give a longer flat surface the stroke limiter can bump against through its range of adjustment. The springs are from the old rear suspension of my MG project, they are 1 ¾” wide and ¼” thick. I put a shorter leaf top and bottom to stiffen it up and also try to prevent the spring breakage some are experiencing with single leaf setups.
The eccentric is a piece of 2” round stock 1” thick welded to a ¾” axle and mounted in the ¾” pillow block bearings. The original offset was ½” for a total of 1” stroke. I found that I had to move the spring mount way forward to get the head stroke under 6”. I wanted something closer to 4” of basic stroke so I drilled a 3/8” offset. This still gave more stroke than I wanted so now I have a 1/4” offset and the spring mount is moved back under the stroke limiter rubber. The connecting rod is a piece of ¾” tubing with RH and LH nuts welded to the ends. I used ½” LH and RH heim joints so the length can be adjusted by just turning the tube and retightening the jamb nuts. This adjustment allows the hammerhead to be set at the proper height at the bottom of the stroke for the particular dies I am working with. I had to reverse the rotation of the motor (flip of a switch on the back of the motor) so the eccentric spun ccw and would not loosen the bolt when it ran.

After reading about the virtues of Captain Kirk’s (Metalmeet.com) balanced machine I wanted to incorporate a counterbalance arm into mine so I wouldn’t be chasing my bench around the shop when I ran the hammer. The upper arm has a 3:1 ratio between the hammer arm and the linkage arm. The lower counterbalance arm also has a 1:3 ratio between the linkage and the weight so that a 1” movement in the hammerhead will result in a 1” movement in the counterweight moving in the opposite direction.
As a starting point I weighted the counterbalance arm so that the system was in neutral balance (the hammer head would stay in whatever position you put it in the stroke without the eccentric being connected). With the eccentric connected you can spin the pulley with one finger, there was no resistance to move the hammerhead at all. Unfortunately, when it ran the hammer jumped violently and would move my 650 lb table (950 lbs with the helve and my shrinking machine mounted) across the floor. I experimented adding and removing counterbalance weight to see what affect it would have on the smoothness. Removing weight made it better and disconnecting the counterweights entirely made it usable. It now looks like a normal helve and although it may not hit as hard now, it still moves the metal very quickly and I can feather the clutch for lighter hits. Oh well, you never know til you try.
I started out trying to get the max beats per minute between 120 and 180 (2 to 3 hits per second), which seemed to be a good range that people shoot for. I reduced the 1725 rpm of the motor 6:1 using a 2” motor pulley and a 12” jackshaft pulley and then further reduced it 2:1 using a 3.5” jackshaft pulley and a 7” eccentric shaft pulley. The 12” and 3.5” pulleys are bolted together and run directly in their ½” bores on the jackshaft. By varying the motor pulley I could get the following speeds:
Motor Pulley Dia. BPM
2” 144
2.25” 161
2.5” 179
2.75” 197
3” 215
It seemed that it could run faster so I switched the eccentric pulley for a 4 ½” and upped the speed range to 221- 332 BPM. I currently using a 3” motor pulley which gives 332 BPM but I still have a lot of experimenting to do.
Jim Bailie says a couple of the best improvements he made to his helve were the stroke limiter bumpers so I incorporated one at the top and bottom of the stroke. The snubbers themselves are universal polyurethane bump stops from Energy Suspension and they adjust on ¾” all thread rods.
The hammerhead itself is a piece of 1 ½” bar stock 5” long that weighs 2.5 lbs and can be adjusted back and forth on the upper arm to position it against fixed lower dies. The end has a ¾” hole to accept my planishing hammer dies and any future dies will have a ¾” stub shaft mount. There is a 3.5 lb weight on the bottom of the arm and the top plate adds another 1.75 lb making the total head weight almost 8 lbs. The striking head pictured is another urethane bumper from Energy Suspension that was trimmed to a 2” diameter working against hard lower dies.
The lower anvil post is a stainless remnant I have had laying around the garage for years. It has a ¾” hole on top to accept dies and the bottom is tapped ½-13 to be able to bolt it to the table. The hole in the table is ¾” so I can adjust the lower die position if using matched set dies. I also have a rubber pad support made from a length of 6” diameter tubing with a ¼” plate floor welded in ¾” down from the end forming a tray to hold a 1” thick rubber pad or contoured nylon female dies if I use hard dies in the hammerhead. The rubber I am using now is 2 layers of ½” rubber floor pad that was taken from a gym floor to cushion weights if they were dropped. Seems to work OK although I really like the rubber upper against hard lower dies.
This project is like building a car – you try to get the settings close enough that you don’t kill yourself on the first drive but it will be quite a while before you get everything set up just right.

 

The ring roller was made from the same scrap 1 1/2 x 3/16" square tube as the frame for the helve. The top die is locked to the handwheel axle by a set screw against a flat on the shaft. The lower dies are free rotating and can be moved away from each other for more gentle curves. The lower die support is jacked to apply the bending pressure and is guided up and down by telescoping tubes on each end.

I made the dies from some 3" stock. I started by chomping out the rough shape of the groove by plunging the endmill down with the blank held in the mill vise by the flats (90* from how it is shown in the picture). I would make a plunge cut then rotate the blank a few degrees and make another cut. It took about 15 minutes to rough the groove into the blank. I then used the fixture shown in the picture to dress up the groove to its final form. I have dies up to 1" but will make larger when (if) I need them. Larger dies will require a different technique to make the grooves.

I have made several handwheels (the one for this machine was the first project). The last one was a 12" diameter out of 1" round tube for my English wheel adjuster, it only runs out about 1/16". Because of the straight piece at the ends of the bend, you have to make wheels in 2 pieces and weld them together. Makes for 2 welds instead of one but it makes a really round part. You can also bend flat stock and square tube although I haven't bent really tight radii on square yet. It makes perfect bends on 2' radius on 1" x .060" square tube with no deformation.

 

Oh hell yes. The shop crane thing got plumb outta control. I started withe a crane to lift engines from the run-in stand and the next thing I know I had built this upper deck to hold engine cores. Now there's over 100 engine blocks up there >>>>.

 

Here is the E-wheel I have been working on. It is massively stiff with a 29.5" throat and made from 4 x 8 x 1/4" tubing. The upper yoke is adjustable side to side and the anvil holder is adjustable forward and backward to get the line-up perfect. Both are indexable to be parallel to the frame for doing wide parts. I made the adjuster handwheel on the ring roller shown a few posts up.







Jim

 

I made this 1" belt sander

 

love the english wheel mike. when did you build it? What else you been working on ? I need to get out there soon and drink a few beers and shoot the shit.

 

A basic start would be using the post of the drill press to stop the part from spinning, then maybe a Vise grip, east, quick and fast to find.

 

I didn't make it but it is home made. 10 ton porto power w/ a 10,000 psi hydraulic ram some dies, a butt load of steel and viola louvers!!!
Talk about one hell of a find on Craig's List!!

 

I have a 18" hunk of Railroad Track Rail that makes a most EXCELLENT anvil.