Portable Workbench Build Process
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Posted 14th March 2021
Most of today was spent welding (and waiting for recently welded parts to cool down!) but I also did a bit of turning. I started by making a couple of simple bushes out of a bit of rusty steel I had in the scrap bin:
These go together with a bit of M8 threaded rod to make some train wheels!
They then go in between the two halves of a vice mechanism body and hold the two big holes in alignment. The jam bar (a bit of 6 mm steel bar) is also inserted to make sure those two holes stay lined up too.
First body welded:
All the parts for all the vice mechanisms are now complete and tested:
The jam bars and hinge bars are still loose at the moment; I need to decide whether to bother cutting them to length (or just leave them overhanging a bit) and then I'll fix them in with Loctite 603 probably.
Here you can see the reason I added extra holes in the outer plate. With hindsight it probably would have been better to make them big enough for a long T20 bit for my impact driver, but I'm sure I'll cope doing it by hand!
Finally, I started the first bit from the very large amount of turning I have to do. I started with the slotted bushes that go in the moving jaw of the dual-screw vice. These are turned as simple cylinders and then I'll stick them on the mill and make the central hole into a slot as well as adding a hole for a pin to keep them aligned in the jaw.
I haven't done much in the way of CAD based design of metal things; I generally just make it up as I go along. These (60 mm diameter) bits looked a lot bigger in the flesh than they did on the screen! I also discovered the disadvantage of getting lots of free brass: this stuff is horrible to turn: it produces lots of stringy bits of swarf, more like aluminium than brass. I guess it might be aluminium bronze (which I've got a little of, also for free) as that turns in a similar way to this; alternatively it might just be a non-free-cutting grade of brass.
Either way I'm hoping that the other big bits of brass (which look a bit different) that I've got are a nicer grade that produces little chips more easily. The 31.25 mm stuff that I got out of the same skip as the 63.5 mm stuff was a nice free-cutting grade. I'm also hoping that this isn't too difficult to mill.
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