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DonLibro writes:
So there I wuz, late in the afternoon with a monster flywheel from
the treadle lathe I've been building this week, and the stinker needs
to be trued. No matter how carefully you drill a center hole in a big
disc if you can't fit in under the drill press, you will not get it perfect.
And I couldn't, and I didn't
(I will change my construction strategy for the next one).
On the axle it wobbled a little more than 1/4" of an inch each way.
Not too bad considering the freehand drilling through almost 3 ½"
in the center of a 30" wheel, but being anal, I'd already built the
flywheel frame with such close tolerances that anything exceeding
a total run out of more than 1/16" put the kabosh on the whole deal.
It's almost supper time, I want to start the real deal assembling tomorrow,
and this 90 lb. chunk of white oak I've been saving for 15 years
(that crap was so hard and dense I was shearing off
#14 screws in it like they were made of breadsticks.
And this was in predrilled holes!)
has to go under the knife.
We ain't got such a tool at the lab, never had such a thing actually,
and I know nobody who can do face plate turning like that.
Heck, the only people I've ever known who did that were patternmakers,
which of course I was lo these many years ago.
I took the motor off my bandsaw and mounted it
to a piece of 4x6 weighted down with bricks,
drilled pillow blocks out of scrap 2x
and soaked them with oil,
and draped a piece of sash cord around the wheel itself
which was hanging on its steel axle between the jaws
of my twin-screw face plate on my workbench.
Fortunately I had some colophony to rub on the sash cord
so it stayed pretty tacky on the drive pulley from the bandsaw motor.
Simple is as simple does, but I was able to maintain about 180 rpm,
and using clamped on wood-block tool rests cranked out a whole lot
of shavings in three hours, resulting in a trued and balanced wheel.
Took me back more than two decades to my days in the foundry,
turning gigantic pump shells and the like (this was a mere pup
compared to those, some of which exceeded ten feet in diameter),
as this was my first large scale turning
since the day I walked out of there in August, 1981.
The lathe itself is really for demonstrating at Revolutionary War
re-enactments with my daughters. One is upcoming in two weeks,
and I will send more pictures if there is interest.
I based my construction on the designs recorded by Steve Shepherd,
whose terrific web site is all about archaic woodworking:
http://www.ilovewood.com/
I ordered the plans from him,
combined them with Holtzapfel and my own ideas,
and viola!
DonLibro
DC
