Long: sorta funny. Made a grinder, or, half hour job takes 5 hours

I had read recently, somewhere, I think here or in one of the YouTube links about sharpening tools and blades, that the blue grinder wheel was the one you wanted. This afternoon, while at Lowes, I saw they had a pretty good blue wheel, but only in 8" size. No problem, I thinks. I got plenty motors and arbor adapters around, I'll whip something up.

Funny how grabbing a motor and throwing and adapter on it to mount a 7 buck wheel can turn into an all evening project.

Seems I did not have the adapter I thought I did, but I did find a 1/2" reversible motor, and a 12" x 5/8" shaft with pillow block bearings and an arbor already mounted on one end and enough pulleys to get the job done. I thought that that would be great, to not have the motor in the way all of the time, so I set to work.

Found a good piece of 3/4" ply with Formica mounted from a sink cutout, and thought that that would do nicely for the base. Marked it up, and cut it and mounted the shaft and motor, and proceeded to mount my wheel. All that was left to do was plug it in. I did, and the motor cycled in and out of the starting windings. Then it blew the breaker. There were a few other things on the same breaker at the time, but still, this was a major problem.

I had used a little bigger pulley on the motor than the shaft, because I thought it would handle it, and the motor was only a 3450 motor. Plenty of rpm's to not exceed the max speed of the wheel. Back to the pulley drawer, and come out with a larger pulley for the shaft.

Rats. The little pulley on the shaft was only a 1/2" pulley, and the shaft had been turned down. No appropriate pulley in the drawer to deal with that. Oh, how about putting the pulley between the bearings, then my pulley would work. OK, that will do. But then the motor will need to be remounted. OK, whatever.

Disassemble, cut slot in base for pulley to fit through, re-mount motor in new location, put on pulley, grind a flat in the shaft for the pulley set screw, reassemble it all, and try it out. Runs nice and smooth, and the slower rotation is ideal for not burning tools and blades. I like it!

As I stand looking at it, I look at the lonely end of the shaft formerly occupied by the "too small" pulley. I got to thinking that it would be pretty cool to mount my wire brush wheel on that, rather than have to swap it and a cutoff wheel back and forth between another grinder motor I have set up. So I start rummaging in my bins and come up with an arbor with left handed threads, which is what I need! My lucky day! And the time of the job marches on.

The arbor appears to have a 5/8ths inch shaft, so I will have to come up with a union, or coupler for it to mount it on my 5/8ths shaft. I dig around and don't come up with anything, so I grab a piece of pipe to drill out and make my own coupler.

I found out that the new to me, used 18 volt drill I got recently, running on closer to 20 volts of lithium ion batteries has a hell of a lot of torque while trying to remove just a little pipe material. It grabbed, and as it did so, my finger only pushed the trigger harder until the battery came around and knocked my cheek and my body out of the way. That's gonna leave a serious mark. (And it did)

OK, I learned how to deal with this problem somewhere. Grab a dremmel tool and put a cutoff wheel in it, and grind 1 degree negative hook angle on the bit. Done, and it worked just fine. Go to slip the bored out pipe onto my arbor shaft and it doesn't fit. What? I checked the drill bit with the mike before I used it. It was 5/8ths. Get the mike out, and the shaft is some bastard size, like .658. Crap.

I don't have a metal lathe yet, so now I have to decide whether to chuck it into the wood lathe and use a very careful angle grinder or drum sander to take it down to size, or take it to a machine shop. By now, I am almost to the point where I couldn't decide what to decide, so I hung it up for the night. I'll probably take it down to an interference fit on my own with my limited tooling, and do a heat and beat to insure no slop fit, along with some set screws. It is only going to be holding a wire brush wheel, anyway. It will be more fun to do it myself, anyway.

So, long story to short conclusion. A half hour job is still not done.

But you know what?

I had a blast!

Reply to
Morgans
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Good story. I feel your pain. ;)

Reply to
Swingman

"Swingman" wrote

But it was a good hurt! ;-) Finished it this morning. I looked harder and found a 1/2" arbor for the wire brush. It had a rusted shaft stuck in it, but I got it out and used it. It was not left handed thread, but I put a jam nut on it and called it good enough.

I'm pleased with it. It is smooth. I wonder if a link belt would make it even smoother?

"Finished but never done!"

Reply to
Morgans

LOL ... You suck. Must be nice to live in a hardware store. ;)

Reply to
Swingman

"Swingman" wrote

Yep, I'll have to suck up the "you suck." I have 225 drawers about 7x7x12 full of parts and tools of every description. Then there are the number 10 cans full of nails and screws and such. Plus I made some bigger boxes for bigger tools. Then there are the shelves equal to more than 200 square feet.

That's what happens when you let your stuff be totally disorganized for 25 years, and keep buying duplicate stuff because you can't find what you know you have somewhere, then you organize and clean it all up. Plus the fact that my dad (engineer) had a pretty complete wood and metal shop when he passed, and his dad was a machinist by trade. I got three generations of stuff. I have a tap holder that is home-made, and grandpa stamped his name on it and the year he made it, which was 1911. It's the best tap holder I have.

My son is going to love it when I give up the shop, but I already told him to not get in too much of a hurry, if you know what I mean!

Reply to
Morgans

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