Vertical Slide

I bought an old vertical slide off ebay so I can do simple milling jobs on the lathe. It's off an Atlas but I reckon I can make it fit without too much effort.

Making swarf.

I've been pretty busy as I'm moving house but I did get some shed time yesterday.

I'm waiting for parts for the TriBSA so I spent some time machining the components of the grinding rest I've started making at evening class.

Sometimes all I need is a cup of tea and time with machine tools.....

I got bored of tidying up....

So I decided to make something. A couple of hours spent cutting

...and welding

I ended up with a two legged welding table.

...I ran out of 2 inch box section at this point and the place I buy my steel from didn't answer the phone so I assume they're shut until new year.

Mushroom Shed...Pigsty more like

Now that I've sent the frame off for powder coating I've not got much to do in the Mushroom Shed, which has led me to notice just how untidy I've let it become. So this week I'll be tidying and sorting in preparation for getting the frame back.

Forging ahead.

Yesterday I spent time re-organising the workshop to give me more space. This meant I didn't do any work on the bike. However I did play with my shed-built forge a bit.

I connected the blow side of my shop vac to the forge and checked that that worked.

Even if it's a rubbish forge at least I'll have a ping pong ball levitator...

We'd given a lift to the workshop to some of my OH's friends who were visiting the pottery a couple of units down. They brought some coal with them which I used to build a small fire on the grid of the forge. It took a while to get burning (and a shed load of BBQ fluid) but eventually it lit, switching the shop-vac on made the coals glow nicely...

And allowed me to heat some bar up to red hot.



At this point I was a bit limited by the lack of a suitable anvil, even red hot the breeze block gave way before the rod but I did manage to bend it.

Here is a shot of me being all blacksmithy..

As a proof of concept I think it worked pretty good, but I think there were problems with the choice of fuel. The donated coal was smokeless which I think may have contributed to it being hard to light. I've got some charcoal lying about the place somewhere so I'll try with that at some point.

Who needs oxy gear?

One of the things I've often wished I had in the workshop is oxy-propane gear, cheaper than oxy acetlyene and still good for heating and cutting. However I still can't justify paying rent on an oxy bottle I'd only use a few times a year. So when it came to cutting some steel plate I just used my jigsaw.

I then drilled some holes so I could bolt it to an old brake disc (off a car or possibly van) before sticking it in the lathe, machining the plate into a more round shape and sticking a 38mm holesaw through the middle.

Some more holesaw action on some 38mm pipe and working on an old toast grid gave me this.

The idea is to weld the pieces of pipe together, then weld the pipe to the plate bolted to the disc. That should give me a usable forge for heating stuff up. Total cost 3 quid from the scrappy (and I got some bar and strap at the same time).

I got the idea from Blackjack, you can see his in action here.

Blimey, over a month since my last blog....

... I just wish it was due to a flurry of workshop activity. I don't really know where the time has gone, but it has.

I've started a side project to build a foundry to sand cast parts in aluminium. The logic behind this is that in the long run it will save time as I will be able to sand cast items like my rear brake hanger rather than building cutting, filing, grinding and bolting up from sheets of aluminium. I'm not entirely sure if this argument holds water but what the hell, building a foundry is a cool project and I reckon casting aluminium will be a good way to keep warm in winter evenings.

This is as far as I've got....



Next step is to line it with refractory, which means finding a reasonably priced supply of fireclay. Oh and I'll be needing some kind of crucible, current plan is 4" pipe capped with either a screw on cap (preferred option) or with some plate welded on.

Oh and I sold my house two days ago which means I need to find space for all the crap I had been storing in my old garage. It also means I now have some disposible income so hopefully progress will not be held up while I save for parts/materials/tools.