"and you want it to do what?!"

Ok, Need some help. Friend bought a statue. It's about 12" in diameter and 24" tall. (Haven't seen it yet) She has asked me to build a pedestal. Ok, that should be kind of fun.. the kicker is, she wants it to TURN, slowly with an electric motor. (SWMBO actually didn't immediately say NO when I suggested the pedestal would have to be round, thus requiring the purchase of a lathe!!)

Round or Square or Otherwise. How do I make it turn? This infrastructure will dictate the final form I suspect. Suggestions? Websites? Sympathetic chuckles?

Pat.. patrickdfischer_at_att.net

Reply to
Patrick Fischer
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try the following link:

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to the second listing... for robot motor $10 well spent..

FWIW..... BG Micro has been this "gadget guy's" favorite place for several years.... You will need a "wall wart" to power the robot motor, but they can be had for $2-3...

Rotsa Ruck..

Royce

Reply to
Turkish

You never build this sort of thing - buy it ready-made instead. Find the right sort of scrapyard (big industrial machinery, scrap aircraft, whatever), and start looking for something that's already a pedestal, it just doesn't know it yet. Then you dress it with a casing over it.

Friend of mine has a swivel chair made from an ejector seat. The swivel for that is an old front hub from a Saab (front wheel drive is easier).

The advantage of a car hub is that you need to make a fairly tall pedestal and have it stable. This either needs a long axle with a bearing at top and bottom, or something very rigid mounted low down. The wheel hub is easy and cheap to get, and rigid enough. You'll also need plenty of ballast to stop it being knocked over, and the hub would help there.

To power it, I'd use a chain drive, with a motor mounted off to one side. Large chain sprockets with hollow centres come from pushbikes, small sprockets are cheaply bought, with centres to fit standard motor shafts. Chain pitch is pretty standard.

The motors I'd use (as I have them to hand already) are geared synchronous motors that used to be in a coffee vending machine. One is driving the bellows in the organ doorbell project:

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Reply to
Andy Dingley

Good morning Pat,

Sounds like an interesting problem. Here's my take:

Using a lazy susan bearing (also used for television swivels) (1) and an appropriately sized disk to hold the artwork. Rotation provided by a small gearhead motor (2) connected to the center of the upper disk (install a tee-nut from the top, and connect to the turntable with a piece of all-thread and a jam nut. File a flat on the bottom end of the all-thread and use a shaft coupling to connect to the gearmotor. Provide ventilation for the gearmotor (might even put in a small fan if temperature rises too much). Oh ... you'll need to drill a small hole for the all-thread to rise through the top of the base. Gearmotor mounts to shelf inside base, if you leave the back open you can gain access and eliminate the cooling fan idea (may want to make a face frame to help keep things rigid). Fun part, you can probably make the entire thing from solid-surface (Corian) countertop material to compliment the artwork if you don't want to work with wood. Of course, you can always make the base from plywood and apply the veneer of your choice.

HTH

Rick

(1) Available at Woodcraft, Rocklers and other mail order suppliers as well as some of your local woodworking stores (2) Available from various electronics surplus houses such as BG Micro (as someone else already reported), All Electronics, Electronics Goldmine, American Science and Surplus, and so forth. You'll probably want a 110 VAC gearmotor (which will drop the cost because the robotics crowd won't bother with them).

"Patrick Fischer" wrote

Reply to
Rick

Paddy: Two words: small block Chevy.

Bob Smart-Ass Intellectual

Reply to
Bob Schmall

There are many ways to make something go round and round... I suspect the tricky part will be finding something QUIET that does the job. Presumably a motor will be involved mounting it on a cushion of some sort might be useful so your pedestal doesn't become one big sounding board. Of course, you could in theory figure out the resonant frequencies of the pedestal and make them mis-match with the motor. :)

Wish I could have been of help in a more concrete fashion ....

hex

-30-

Reply to
hex

You can buy "Lazy Susan" hardware...ya know, the hardware used to support a manually turning center piece for your dinning room table, so the family can get to the food without reaching.

Attach the motor to the base. This would facilitate the use of 2 separate pieces for the pedestal...base and turning platform.

I would imagine the pedestal could be any shape using this approach

...do

Reply to
David O

Convince her that it would be hopelessly tacky. It would look like a department store window. (In which museums do the statues rotate?)

-- Ernie

Reply to
Ernie Jurick

How about building the pedestal with a rotating top, but without the motor: rotate the statue by hand a few degrees whenever the mood moves you....

Reply to
Dan Dresner

I just finished sharpening my first chisel with Steve Lamantia's Scary Sharp method and now stand before in stunned testimony: this technique is life-altering! I now have an ordinary, off-the-shelf bench chisel (Stanley, for Pete's sake) that is at least as sharp as any razor blade I've ever used. It's going to take a month for me to regrow the hairs on my arm after "testing" the edge over and over again. I'm not kidding, folks: it slices them off just by pressing the edge - lightly! - against the base of *a* hair.

(I know, I know - I need to get a better life, but still....)

The only change to the system that I made was to add a final polishing with crocus paper, which seemed to improve the sharpness somewhat over the

2000-grit level.

DanD

For anyone who doesn't know what the heck I'm talking about, here it is:

**********************************************

Condensed Version of How to sharpen a plane blade with sandpaper.

Mercilessly butchered into a Condensed "How to" Version by J. Gunterman from the Original by the Steve Lamantia.

To lap the back behind the cutting bevel:

Use a very light coatings of 3M "77" spray adhesive to temporarily glue small 1-1/2" x 3-1/2" rectangular pieces of sandpaper along the edge of a sheet of 1/4" plate-glass.

The paper to use is Aluminum Oxide in grits 50, 80, and 100, and Silicon Carbide (wet-or-dry to you lay people) in grits of 150, 180, 220, 320, 400,

600, 1200, and 2000. The plate glass should be placed with its edge flush to the edge of the workbench. Grits can be skipped, if desired, but more time on each grit will then be required to fully remove the scratches from the previous grit. Using the gradual progression as listed, however, will require only about a minute or so with each grit."

Lap the end one inch of the back of the iron on each grit in turn. You could use it wet or dry.

About every ten seconds or so, stop and brush off the sandpaper with a whisk broom and wipe the blade off on your shirt.

About ten minutes after starting, you should have gone from 50 grit on up to

2000, and there will be a mirror finish on the back of that iron the likes of which must be seen.

Then jig the blade in a Veritas honing jig or go it by hand--

Clamp the blade down in the Veritas blade-holder device, taking care to have the bevel resting on the glass perfectly along both edges. Adjust the microbevel cam on the jig up to its full two-degree microbevel setting -- and hone away on the 2000-grit

Flip the blade over on the sandpaper several times, hone and lap, hone and lap, each time gentler and gentler, to remove the little bit of wire edge

The resulting little thin secondary bevel should be quite shiny by this time.

Remove the blade from the jig, and perform the "shave some arm hairs off" test, or the sharpness test of your own choice.

Of course, the ultimate test of a plane iron's sharpness is what it does on wood.

When it is all done, peel the sandpaper from the glass and throw it away. Then, scrape the little bit of residual adhesive from the glass with a razor blade, a quick wipedown with acetone on a piece of paper towel, and the cleanup is done in a minute.

No oil, no water, no mess, no glaze or flatness problems to worry about, and a cutting edge that is Scary-Sharp (TM).

Reply to
Dan Dresner

Hmmm. I don't know how practical it would be, but I'm visualizing a planetary gear from out of an automatic transmission with the mating gear somehow mounted on the end of a motor. You might need to scrounge up some more gears in order to get enough reduction to have enough power to move the statue, and to get it slow enough that the statue doesn't fly off.

I've never done anything with gears, so I can't make any specific suggestions. Sounds like a fun project though. I've always wanted to make something with gears.

Reply to
Silvan

I'm not sure how heavy the piece is that needs to be rotated but I was thinking an old belt-drive record player with the platters reversed might do the trick. Instead of rotating at 33 or 45 rpm, gearing it to turn at 1 or

2 rpm might provide enough power to work.

Lee

Reply to
Lee Gordon

OK Folks, I'm not feeling the "love". Suggesting that she forget the rotation factor seems wonderful but what if she doesn't?! Patient guy that I am, I'll allow you all some more time to think on this... Pat..

Reply to
Patrick Fischer

infrastructure

Reply to
CW

A "lazy-susan" type bearing, a "ring gear", and a small, relatively low- RPM motor turning a worm gear to drive it.

It's really _not_ very difficult to do.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

Chains are pretty quiet at low speeds. They get noisy when they run fast and the chain starts to slap back and forth.

If you're worried about noise, then use a flat toothed belt. The drive sprocket is easy to get (many of my motors came from old photocopiers, and they nearly all have one already). For low torques, you don;t need to tooth the large diameter pulley, just turn a smooth wooden surface and use friction.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Nebraska Surplus is also worth a visit.

Reply to
Robert Bonomi

panty play to your gear

Reply to
Chazc

I have a question about sharpening in general. I have used the scary sharp method with amazing results on cheap chisels as well as my plane irons. What I need to know is if I'm doing it correctly. My question is: Do you both push the blade down the paper as well as pull it back, or do you only move the blade in one direction (eg push the blade down the paper)? I know that when I sharpen my kitchen knives that I only hone in one direction, but wanted to verify the same information for chisels and irons.

TIA Bill

Reply to
Bill Hodgson

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