Good evening LADIES, and ,GENTLEMEN !
For tonight entertainment ,we have a trip , a mill , and and.. other stuff !
To make a short story long , i had a bit of a problem ...
The head is 31 inches long and 9 inches wide , so i needed a mill with a bed that could travel 31" plus 9" , so the tool would pass clear over the head ,and the cutting tool needed to be at least 9 inches in diameter cut , so it cut the full width of the head.
The two local mills to me were both 32 inch movement beds , so hunting around ,i found one that was a touch larger ,an hour away , that i could have a look at and see if it could cope with my length ..and girth .
Off i set , on Wednesday , thinking ,hmm looks a nice day , only for a megadonastic deluge of biblical proportions to descend on my poor little Astra , and i splashed/aquaplaned my way for the next 60 minutes ,hoping i was not wasting my journey .
i got there in the end and was faced with this ..
BEHEMOTH !!!
its the sort of machine , i don't really know how to describe its sheer presence ,best i can do, is this anecdote ..
I remember ,as a child, i would watch a program called
"LOST INNN SPACE !"
.... where there was a flying saucer, stuck on a unknown planet , and , on board there was the usual combo of hero's , domestic hotties , a baddy ,and a boy and girl..
the boy was always exploring , finding old robots , accidentally turning them on ,and they would them march around threatening everyone and trying to have robosex with one or other, or both , of the hotties (ok the last bit may be my imagination )
upon which the best part of the show was the saucers domestic robot rolling around waving its flippy floppy arms and shouting
"WARNING WILL ROBINSON !! WARNING !!...DANGER!!!...DANGER !!!!! "
Well that's just what this machine is like , its sits there .....
BODING .
HOWEVER ...bed movement was a strapping busty french mills worth of 43 inches ..perfect nes pas ?!
I rooted around in the hope i could find something to cut with , instead of my home made fly cutter i made from my lathe back plate and a lathe tool , and found this ...
After an hour of clearing rubbish off the deck ,and scraping it down to de rustify it , i hoofed that cutting head on there ,and spent half an hour trying to work out how to hold the huge cylinder head down on the deck , in the end i used an internal water way on the wide end , and was all set to go ..
er..
Well i would be, if i could work out what does what ..
as you can see , as the missionary said after 5 years as an Amazon captive ....what isn't broken off is bent !
i was faced with the problem of potentially pulling a lever ,and sending huge cogs out the side , i am guessing its a 1930's machine , so manuals are not common.
anyrdup , after a chat with its owner , and the few experimental grindngs , it worked , and i started hacking away at my lump of ally ....unfortunately i could not make its feed rate increase , and let me tell you ,1.35 "/min or whatever it was was a long time each pass took 30 odd minutes . but hey , it turned out alright so was well worth it .
i stopped at 6 pm ,came home and went back again the next day to finish off , had a slight problem ,as i was doing 15 thou cuts ,and letting it skip a bit thinking i would correct that on the last two 10 and 5 thou cuts ,only to realise i had not noticed a thin bit of casting i did not want to remove , so had to try to clean it up with a 10 thou , which was not perfect ,but i think its good enough .
here you can see the skipping ...
and finished ..
ok so then today i assembled it all with its sexy new rubberwear ,and so on , and its ready to plonk onto the block , which i also cleaned off ,here it is half done ..
OH ! , i also re measured the chamber size and my cr is now 11.6 :1 ,
since i only took off 1.85mm due to the thin casting ...but that's ok ,should make a fair difference , i guess around 15 % to my mpg .
next thing is to bolt it back on the block, time it up , and then onto the next head .
thanks for watching
regards
robert.