A few years back there was a T&V show that a few of you may remember called “Connections” Well this is about connections. In case you don’t know it, I’m here digging for the truth, because I’m attempting to restore a 1950, 3604. My way is not all ways the best way, or the only way or the way you might approach the task, but it is, after all, my way!
I have complained more than my share of the time as to the quality of parts that I’ve gotten from vendors. I’ve heard it said, “If you don’t like the way I did it, then why don’t you do it your self”! So being the bull headed Irishman I am, I do! I do as much as I can myself, and this often requires more than the average hand tools. Over the years I have managed to scrounge a pretty good assortment of machine tools for fabricating what I needed.
One of my recent projects called for bending a flat weather strip for the door. If you have ever tried to bend a flat strip the wide way your aware that it will kink up pretty badly. The solution is to restrain it on the flat side while using a bending die to form it. So I had to make a bending fixture to form the part. 75% of it could be done in the mill and 6” lathe but I needed a larger radius than the lathe could swing. So out to the 16” lathe that has been sitting in the corner waiting for a reason to get it running. It’s needed the headstock to be taken on and off to fit it up and I needed to design a drive train. It was driven by a spur gear off of a counter shaft and the counter shaft driven by a belt. Since the lathe is a 1913 model engine lathe there is now documentation on what the drive train looked like. It could have been driven by an overhead pulley system or maybe stood alone with a big old motor mounted on top of the headstock, no matter, my drive was to be a 5hp 1750 motor that uses dual V-belts. After getting the counter shaft mounted up I turned to the motor, which weighed in at about 150lbs. Since I couldn’t get to my Enterpack engine lifter and once again couldn’t find anyone healthy enough to help lift the weight, I looked into a small Jib crane that would go behind the lathe. I would need it eventually to change the 200lb chuck and 16” faceplate and to load any large pieces of work. A commercial Jib would run into the thousands of dollars by the time I got everything together and since I’m retired that was out. I came up with a design that would only require a few bucks for parts and maybe a hundred or so for material. That is the problem now, finding the material. Since my family and I got out of the fabricating business years ago I don’t have any contacts nor do I buy in large enough quantities to buy from the large steel houses. I spent most of yesterday searching the web for metal suppliers to get an order together for rectangular tubing and came up empty handed. This seems insane since I live just outside of one of the largest manufacturing centers in the US, i.e. Chicago, IL. I’m open for suggestions for metal suppliers online or in the Chicago suburbs if anyone knows of any.
Now back to the “connections”! Needed the mill to make the parts to make the crane to mount the motor to power the lathe to make the dies to bend the parts. And maybe some day after all of this, I’ll be able to use the truck to get the material to turn in the lathe and machine in the mill, for the next project.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
