Three Corners Hot and Sweet ( by Manual Defiance ) I had been warned by the guys at Biltrite tool and die, about the difficulties involved in making two shafts supporting a pair of gears meet at a perfect right angle. Thats why they wanted to charge me four hundred dollars to drill the eight holes that would be needed to form four corners at a perfect right angle for the two interactive gyroscopes I am building in a modest shop in the basement of my old landlords building. Once again, money, or the lack of it, forced me to become my own machinist, in spite of my musical upbringing. I needed a formula, or a means of measuring a corner, on a piece of round tubing so that I could make a pair of gears mesh at a perfect right angle. Even though I am using gears taken from snow blower crank chutes, which have fairly wide teeth, and are fairly forgiving of miscalculations, which are easy for me to mass produce, the more the shafts that carry these gears are mis-aligned the greater the chances are of their teeth to become locked up when they mesh in rotation. After drilling countless holes- actually I counted thirty three mistakes- I finally came up with a solution. Carpenters use a device called a SQUARE to make two intersecting joints form a perfect right angle. ( A T square does the same thing, but overlaps to form two corners ). But an ordinary carpenters square would not serve me well, as I was drilling the shaft holes in pieces of hollow tubing or pipe. How does one find the middle of a round piece of tubing inorder to align a pair of intersecting holes. Probably the guys at Biltrite have a system, but they did not want to share it with me- as they would have preferred me to write them a check for the knowledge stashed in their heads. The solution would probably never occurred to me if I hadnt gone through the agonizing process of making countless ( thirty three that is, ) mistakes. Or, perhaps if I had enough money to hire a machine shop to make the corners for me. But, when it did come, it felt like a monumental achievement, as I had had to figure it out the hard way- which seems to be my way. The solution was to invent a ROUND SQUARE. That is, a square, or right angle, made from two pieces of intersecting pipe or tubing, one drilled through a hole in the other. This having been accomplished, I had only to lay the corner to be drilled on a flat surface, stick my round square into it and scratch a pair of circles where the two ends of the square touched the corner. Using this homemade tool, I have already manufactured three corners in two of the existing frames of the two gyroscopes waiting to be assembled in my shop. Three corners down, one to go. Hot and Sweet.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 16:55:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015