Are makers born or can we learn the skills?

This was a question asked during #MakersHour on twitter and I thought it deserved a bigger answer than 140 characters, so here are MY thoughts on the subject:

I think that indeed makers are born. There are those who seem unable to grasp the processes involved in creating a working object from a pile of parts. Yes a person can be taught to assemble those parts but it’s not quite the same as understanding why this gear has to be here rather than anywhere else and in my opinion no where near as satisfying. You see it all the time in factories especially big construction take the car industry. you would think someone who builds cars would have a damn good idea about fixing faults but very few of them will, they just bolt part A to part B and so on till they are sick and have little idea why those parts go together. On the other hand there are some (I count myself among these) who may not know what part A does on first glance but their brain works in such a way that they can work out that part A is completing a process that needs to happen before part B can can use the result. Simplistic example but I hope it gets the point across.

I have only commented on my own particular style of making which is functional but not necessarily appealing which is where a different mind comes in. My projects (mostly) do the job I create them for but look ugly most of the time due to my eagerness to use the project or get finished. The only exception to this so far is a model carousel I am making for my granddaughter

But this still isn’t finished and I started it in 2013. Others however seem to be able to build beauty into what they make naturally, look at some of the old steam engines.

New Project

Turning a fly press into a hydraulic power press.

I have a pretty ancient fly press a Sweeney and Blocksidge no2 which has served me for various little jobs but I find myself needing a little more power to punch some square holes in some 3mm plate. With the 8.5mm square punch and die I have been using with the flypress it takes 2 good swings to get through the plate and in the future I will need to punch a 20mm square holes.

I was contemplating buying a little power press but unless you want one you pump by hand then they cost a lot even second hand, so seeing as I already have a hydraulic power pack doing nothing and various rams available to me I thought about making one from scratch and even arranged to get some channel we have had kicking around the factory for years to build it with. Then while punching 44 of these square holes today and had a eurika moment.

So thats the plan pictures and updates to follow as and when I get the things done, this will hopefully be a short project as I have most of what I need to hand.

29/05/2016

Checked on a few few things today and got the screw removed from the press which was a simple case of removing the split nut from just above the slide

However the project is going to get held up as the homemade digger I will be getting a suitable ram from currently has guests in the form of a pair of coal tits with young. They have nested in a open end of the boom and I cant think of a way of removing the ram without disturbing them, its going to take a bit of hammering to remove the rusted pivot pins. I should have closed the end but didnt even think that the local wildlife might decide it would make a nice safe home which of course it does far to small for any preditors to get into probably very dry and they are far enough down that you cant see the nest.

30/5/2016

I looked at the digger today and decided I needed to get that ram off so I propped up the boom with some sturdy timber and managed to get the pins out by twisting them until they came free and managed to do it all without any hammering or disturbance of the nest.

Next I started on the push rod? (not really sure what to call it but seeing as its the rod that will push the press down I figure push rod is as good a name as any) by turning a bit of inch and a quarter bar to fit into the press.

like so:

The bar will be held by the press and I am making a sleeve to fit into the top of the part where the screw should go this will hopefully prevent the bar from bending.

31/05/2016

Productive day today I had booked a day off but nipped into work to make use of the saw we have there but thats not strictly anything to do with this project so sticking to the matter I got the sleeve done for the top of the press.

I may alter it by opening out the top and inserting a oilite bush or two into it.

After that I started on the pivot for the top of this bar

and got it welded onto the top of the bar

As well as this I ordered the control valve to operate it which should be here tomorrow.

02/06/2016

I made a start on the frame today and got the press mounted on it

Then I used my plasma cutter to open up the middle so the ram will fit through the center.

This framework is going to be built around whats needed rather than to any real plan. I intended to mount the center pivot on the flypress itself but have decided to mount it from the framework instead and now it has occurred to me that the flypress itself apart from keeping the tools lined up will play almost no part in transferring the power of the ram to the tools, so in the future I may remove it altogether.

04/06/2016

Not sure of the correct terminology so forgive me if I get things a bit backwards but I sorted out the mechanism mostly. Still need to do one or two little bits like the center pivot on the lever (top bar) and a bit more support for the mounting point of the ram. so to make it clear I am calling the top bars lever, the upright bars fulcrum and obviously the ram is force while the press is load.

05/06/2016

got the lever completed today

and even managed to bore it out on my old but still rather good lathe, its a Harrison 14″ which when I rang the makers was told than they had no records for and not even the eldest members of the company could remember that they had even made a lathe like it. here are a few pics one when it was halfway down my uncles garden path and one after a bit of a tidy up in my workshop.

My uncle had owned it for 20 years before I brought it off him because hes getting on and had not been anywhere near it for many years. It was still set up for the last job he had done on it. Given the time I would strip it down and do a proper refurbishment especially since the cluth/brake mechanism is very hit and miss but alas I am pressed for workshop time as it is without such a major project. Anyway I can swing 14″ (355mm) from the center on it and boring out the lever used it to near its limit.

07/06/2016

I managed to get the support bars welded in tonight and got the ram mounted and that about it for the actual mechanics.

next I need to mount the pump.

11/06/2016

Pump is mounted along with the electric controlled valve

like so.

Its all piped up and ready to go. The pipes are a little on the long side but I should be able to keep everything inside the machine reasonably well. Notice the bit of 3mm plate over the hole? Well I decided to see what it could do with that and a bit of 12mm square bar and here is the results.

14/06/2016.

I have now put the wheels on so I can move it about as needed still need to make a few washers and put pins in the rear wheels but at least I am not chewing up my workshop floor moving it around now.

I have also made a start on the electrics, to start with I have made a box to house the limit switches that will control the travel of the press.

the plan is to mount a limit switch above and below the sprung bit of M6 allthread which will have 2 sets of locking nuts so the allthread will move up and down as needed and activate the switches. I also want to mount some limit switch/s that will act as a failsafe in case anything goes wrong and had intended to put them in this box but I think this will require a rethink.

I have worked out the electrics and got it working as I need it to. Not 100 percent happy with electrics as I have been unable to figure out the failsafe for it but will keep thinking it over and come up with something for now here is the diagram of the electrics.

The lower diode is circled because this was a addition after I nearly crashed it while it was in manual mode. Oh and its not run by batteries I only put that in to show the power as I couldnt find plus and minus on the application I used to work this out.

Here is the control box with its fancy labelling LOL big red button is quite obviously ON/OFF “A” and “M” stand for “AUTOMATIC” and “MANUAL” while “F” and “P” stand for “FULL” and “PART” so the press can work in 3 different ways.

In “MANUAL” mode the press just moves by pressing the footswitch in the direction you need and stops in place when released.

In “AUTOMATIC” mode the third button determines the way it is working so “PART” will send the press down while footswitch is pressed and will return to top as soon as you let go while “FULL” just requires a quick press of the footswitch and it will come down to the stop and return to the top.

Here is the incomplete footswitch.

I still need to put a guard around it so that it cant be activated by accident. It is quite simply a few bits of brass out of connection blocks which come together to make the connections.

How valued are you?

The company I have worked for for 13 years has quite recently accepted the resignation of a really troublesome employee, he in return posted his p60 (a yearly run down of earnings and deductions for those in other countries) on facebook and so we found out that he was on almost double the wage of the rest of us. In my time there I have made many improvements to my area of production. I am the only steel welder at the place and so make the frameworks for nearly* all the items that go out of the door I speeded up my end of things by developing jigs to make the jobs quicker and saved money by making some bits we used to have machined elsewhere myself. One such change was some little blocks we used to have made at a machine shop for use in adjusting motors up and down to tension V belts which they where charged an average of £1 per block and each of this type of frame used 8 of these, I calculated about 11 years ago that it was saving around £7 per frame and all they had to buy to make it possible was a tapping head and a more powerful drilling machine to use it. I am first aider for no extra money (this I do not quibble about, it is something I am glad to do regardless), I went for my forklift licence so I could handle some of the bigger frames we make more easily again for no extra money and it seems that now I am the smuck who gets called to offload deliveries and load up the completed pallets of goods.

However all my contributions for this company seem to have gone unnoticed and/or ignored for it seems my value in this company is about 5/8 of someone who they are glad to be rid of.

there are some items we make that dont require a steel framework *.

Li’l Scarlet electric furnace

For the sake of avoiding any problems arrising from accidents I DO NOT suggest anyone try this themselves, its more a “what I did” rather than a “How to” so if you decide to make one and copy the way I did it then its down to you. One other thing if you do decide to do this then please protect yourself I have seen youtube videos of people casting in sandals and shorts, NOT a good idea at the very least long jeans and a pair of boots and ideally a leather apron, a good pair of gloves and a face shield.

Please note I have moved the parts of this project into one single post so it can be read in the right order.

Needed to start melting some aluminium and after having a little coal furnace for a while I decided it was far too much hassle. Its going to take a while for me to catch up with this blog so please bear with me.

To start with I intended to make a square electric furnace and after many tries with various scrap elements I did get some aluminium melted but it was very hit and miss because the salvaged elements tended to break.

So I am not going to go into any more detail about this particular way except to say that the control gear for this will go into the li’l scarlet.

The Li’l Scarlet is based on Dave Gingery’s Li’l bertha but she is a bit cleverer than Bertha. Bertha’s control is a infinate range control which I believe controls the temperature by simply varying how long the element is energized and has no feedback.

Scarlet is getting a digital pid controller Omron E5CSV in this case, I picked 2 of these up from ebay and they came with 50 amp ssr’s and 400°C thermocouples these are obviously no good so ordered some K type thermocouples from RS components. There are cheaper pid controllers on ebay including the supposedly very good REX-C100 except most are not REX-C100 they are cheap Chinese copies and from what I have read they lack a lot of the features of the origionals so rather than risk getting one of these cheap knock-offs I bid for these ones. These raise the temperature by X degrees then let it cool for X time and work out the power needed to keep the temperature stable. So this makes Scarlet a bit cleverer than Bertha.

Getting started

I had ordered 12 metres of Nichrome wire for use in the above square effort so that is going into Scarlet but first I had to coil it to make the 12 metres more managable and came up with a little jig for doing this on my lathe.

This demo is actually 0.8 mig welding wire not the nichrome (I had already finished that when I did this video) Its just a simple bit of angle with a spring loaded tensioning plate. Once you have your wire you work out the threads per inch or thread pitch if your lucky enough to have a metric lathe and set the lathe to that. The setting for .8 mig wire is actually closest to 31tpi (always go next lowest or the wire will ride over your coil) but my lathe will only do 28tpi without changing gears and thats why there is a bit where the gaps are larger in the video.Anyway I ended up with my 12 metres of nichrome wire coiled into approx 700mm this was then stretched to give me a 2.1 metre element.

The element I made had a resistance of 12 ohm so with our power outlets supplying 240 volts ac thats:

240 / 12 = 20 amps so if you dont have anything other than 13 amp sockets then your going to have to alter it a bit to bring it down to what you can manage.

The wattage of this thing is: 20 x 240 = 4800 watts so its a power hungry beast but since it melts the metal so quickly it is not that bad.

The refractory mix

There are many types of refractory mix just do a search and you will find many different recipes, I am not going to go into which is best as I havent tried them instead I will just tell you what I have done and once we get to the end we can find out how good or bad it is together.One thing that seems pretty consistent between all the homemade mixes is perlite this is a white lightweight material that does not tranfer heat very well. Cement too is quite obviously consistent as is sand the fourth one however seems at first to be quite hard to come by in any proper quantity is betonite clay. Its just cheap clumping cat litter which you may know but cant be bothered to crush it up well dont bother just measure out how much you need and chuck it in a bucket with as much water as needed, its more than you first think by the way.

Cat litter soup yummy, basically stir it until its a quite thick soup if you have a big clump that wont seem to go add a bit more water.

So anyway the mix I used is 3 parts cat litter, 3 parts sand, 3 parts perlite and 4 parts cement put the sand, perlite and cement into a dry bucket and mix it well then add the cat litter soup and mix, you will most likely need to add a bit more water but the difference between too dry to mix and sloppy is quite marginal.

The body.

For this project I decided to cast the furnace in 3 seperate sections there are a few reasons for this, mainly that if something is wrong I wont have to start again from scratch.

INNER FORM.

The inner form on my project is a piece of 200mm plastic tube with some 14mm tube wrapped around to form the channel that the element will sit in. After I took this picture I was doing some browsing and found a blog where the person in question said that removing this tube ruined the channels they where supposed to create so with this in mind I moved the screws to the inside of the plastic tube in the hope that I could remove the plastic tube but leave the rubber in place in the hope I could cut it in half to get it out easier.

EDIT: I am currently at the stage where I have taken this out and I dont reccomend this way, I would suggest maybe some foam in place of the rubber tubes this could then be burnt out when ready.

POWER TRANSFER.

For those that dont recognise it this is a tig welding gas nozzle they are usually a couple of pound each and available from shops that sell welding equipment, as you can see this is a number 5 not for any other reason other than its what I had. Speak to the guy at the shop and ask to see the different types you may find one you like better for whatever reason. They have a thread molded on the inside m10 in this case so its perfect for creating a connection from the inside to the outside. Here I have sealed it off with modellers clay to stop the refractory mix from getting inside.

OUTER SHELL.

 

Here I am setting up the outer shell ready to fix the innerform into before adding the refractory mix. In my case I am using parts from a scrap space heater. Now you see where I got the name.

Putting it together.

The inner form is secured to the outer shell by two long screws through the ceramic tig nozzles and it is secured down to the board ready to pour the refractory mix into thus:

Actually I have to come clean here not long after a took this photo I suddenly realised I had forgot to add the sand to the mix so it all came out again to be remixed with the sand.

The base.

Its all about the base.. no stop it!

The base is a little more of the space heater which conveniently had 3 holes equally spaced around it so it was a easy job for me to add another 3 so I could tack 6 bolts to the inside which will have the legs attached to them. I had to break the connection as it had to be a bit larger to accept the main body, like so:

So after I had reattached the two ends I cut out a circle from a scrap bit of metal

and welded it to the bottom ready for filling with refractory mix. As I am a welder by trade I am not going to show you the welding I did on the base it might cause you to doubt my day job but it was the first bit of gas welding I had done since my college days.

Inner form removed.

Well I got the inner from out in pretty much one piece, I did it by drilling holes in it either side and levering it up until I needed to drill more holes to repeat the proceedure until it was free. There was a slight break at the top but nothing major to worry about there is also a few air bubbles which until it is completely dry could cause a problem by blowing out but I think as long as I dont raise the temperature too quickly is should be ok.

You can see the reason I did the edit on the “body” post when I tried to remove the rubber tube it broke the channels out quite badly meaning that now I need to use pins to hold the element in and so I believe that foam to form the channels is a much better idea as you can just burn it out with a blow torch when you have removed the inner form.

Installing the element.

Started by turning the terminals to fit into the tig gas nozzles the element will connect by a couple of m5 bolts on the inside and some terminal connectors on the outside.

Once I had put the terminals in place I packed modellers clay around them to hold them in place this was “baked” for 15 minutes with a heat gun which I tried to keep around 130°C by trapping the thermocouple on my multimeter between the washers shown below.

Finally the element in place and you will note the pins holding it in place.

The lid.

The lid is yet another bit of the space heater or should I say two bits they where cut to 60mm strips which where then tacked to the right size.

I could have cut it down to weld it end to end but figured the extra thickness would give a good place the attach the hinge for lifting the lid. I then add some thick wire to form reinforcement, it ended up looking like  an amateur attempt at a dream catcher.

The li’l Bertha as designed by Dave Gingery he puts a criss-cross pattern then puts kinks in each to tighten them I however tied the bars with twists of smaller wire. The center is a empty 1kg fire cement tub which was screwed into position in the center and the whole lot was clamped down to stop it moving before I poured the refractory mix. I changed the mix for the lid to make it a bit lighter, I replaced a quarter of the sand and clay with perlite time will tell if this was a good idea or not as it may be too weak a mix. The following 2 pictures show right after the pour and a little while later when I smoothed it out.

 

The electrics.

It looks a mess but there is logic to the mayhem.

The mains come in at the bottom of the box to the terminal block and split with one side going to the element, the live is switched with the solid state relay (SSR) and the other to the transformer via main switch at the top.

The transformer feeds 24 volt ac to the controller and to the power supply for the fan to operate (not shown on this picture)

The controller output is going to the SSR Via a switch and a limit switch which turns off the signal when the lid is opened and this turns the element on and off as needed.

Thats it really quite simple when you break it down.

The Li’l Scarlet

Finally it went together I made a hinge and handle for the lid and its now melting aluminium quite quickly too 😀

The lump of aluminium you see here took about 45 minutes from almost cold (90°C) and that includes adding extra to the pot after it had melted the origional charge. The other good thing is that just as I was about to pour it the heavens opened up and holding it to temperature was easy.

There are still one or two little jobs I want to do to get it complete the main thing being a stop for the lid and I may if I feel up to it pretty it up by painting it but thats just cosmetic’s.