Too Lazy to Post Photos

I have a few things going on in the shop. Figured I may as well write.

First of all, the woodturning tool rest is all finished. I haven’t used it yet, because I am thinking about dust collection, and I haven’t decided what to do about holding the tailstock end of the work.

When you turn wood in a lathe, you hold the left end in a chuck or some kind of spur, and the motor, which is at that end, turns the wood. The right end sometimes has to be supported, too. For that you are likely to use a live center. That’s a thing that has a point or some other grabby structure on the inboard end, to hold onto the wood.

To use my existing tailstock, I would have to extend the wood across the lathe’s carriage, and that would be a pain. I think I’ll make something that clamps in a tool holder. I’ll have to align it every time I use it, but how often will that be?

Dust collection is supposedly impossible with a lathe. You just reduce the mess as much as you can. I don’t have a dust collector. I have a shop-vac, which is made for a different job. A shop-vac makes air go fast in a small tube. A dust collector moves high volumes of air through a bigger tube. This is what I’m told.

Because there is no hope of good dust collection anyway, I think I’ll try the shop-vac. I plan to get a dust hood, which is a flat, rectangular piece of plastic shaped a little bit like a funnel. You aim it at your dust, and you hook a dust collector up to it. I think I’ll rest one of these upright on the lathe bed, with the hose going down through the openings. It should help a lot. At least it will get the big chunks.

I bought a two-tier welding cart, and I learned a lot about this type of product.

When you buy a Miller or Lincoln welder, you get a serious industrial product made in America, except maybe for the strange items Lincoln sells at Home Depot. I don’t know about those. If a cart comes with your welder, it will probably be a dubious item made in China, from Chinese sheet metal.

My welder came with such a cart. It works fine, but it’s not the greatest cart on earth. It’s a little short, so the tank bumps against the welder. Also, the sheet metal could be stronger where the tank sits. There are little locating tabs around the tank base, and they bend easily.

I also have a plasma cutter, which is similar to a welder in size and weight. It didn’t come with a cart. You can screw wheels to the bottom, but then you have a plasma cutter with no area for tool storage, and it’s way down on the ground.

I got an email from Eastwood, the company that sells reasonably good Chinese tools for working on cars. They advertised a two-tier cart. You can put a welder or plasma cutter on each tier, and it holds two tanks. The weight capacity is 350 pounds, I believe. It looked good, but it’s Chinese, so I looked at other products.

I found out that you can pretty much forget about finding a good US-made welding cart. Cornwell makes one (it may be Chinese, but it has Cornwell standing behind it), but they only sell them from Cornwell trucks. I’m not going to chase some guy in a truck. I ruled that out.

There are a zillion two-tier welding carts on the web, and almost all are the same model, made in China, rebadged. The weight capacity is not great, and they get mixed reviews. I decided to give up and go with Eastwood.

The cart arrived, and it took an hour to put together. It had one defective part, but I’m going to make them replace that. Basically, it’s a nice solid design. It has two shelves of fake diamond plate backed up by horizontal supports. The shelves aren’t bulletproof, but the supports are very strong, so the shelves are more than adequate. It has hooks for holding cords. It has tubes for TIG rods. It also has two trays to hold little items like consumables.

It will hold two large gas bottles, and it uses a wonderful system of sturdy steel hoops.

They must have had issues with the rear wheels and axle, because now it comes with a thick steel rod and two very heavy wheels with bearings.

I put my plasma cutter on the bottom and my welder on the top. Suddenly my garage seems twice as big. What a relief. I highly recommend this product. They say welders are supposed to build their own carts. I could not have made anything this nice, and the parts would have cost what I paid for the entire cart. Go ahead and make a cart if you want. I feel like I got a deal.

I would say the footprint of the cart is about 3′ by 2′, so it’s not small, but it will seem small once your welders, cords, and bottles are off of the floor.

In other news, a neighbor blessed me by throwing out a treadmill. I put it on my truck and hacked it apart. I came away with a 2HP motor and a linear actuator. There was also a lot of metal I might have used for welding, but I didn’t have any place to put it.

I am now working on a control apparatus for the motor. My first treadmill motor came with an MC-60 control board, and for that, all you need is a potentiometer. The current treadmill has an MC-2100 board. People on the Internet insist it requires a PWM (pulse wide modulation) input. I found a schematic for a simple add-on circuit, and I’m waiting for the parts to get here.

I’m thinking I’ll make a mandrel with a 1″ shaft and make myself a two-buff variable-speed buffer. Do I need one? OF COURSE. What don’t I need?

I did some research, and it looks like you want 5000-9000 SFM on a buffer, so I’ll want 8″ buffs and a fair amount of speed. The shaft has to be thick because buffers need long shafts, and long thin shafts wobble. With a long shaft, you have access to deeper areas on parts, and you can also mount sanding drums on the buffer.

Should be pretty cool. If I go through with it.

I also learned that you can use a 2×72 belt grinder to drive a buffing attachment. You buy a 2×72″ drive belt (not abrasive), and you make a buffing attachment that fits on the end of a tool arm. The belt drives the attachment. You can use it for anything that will work on a small arbor. It’s brilliant. Some day I want to try it. Depending on the VFD and the size of the pulley on the attachment, you can get a crazy-wide range of speeds.

Last thing: I’m turning a chunk of mystery steel into a bench block. I found it in an abandoned warehouse. It’s about 3″ x 2″ x 4″. I tried to fly-cut one side, and I learned this: fly-cutting is not for steel. With a 3″ fly cutter and an HSS bit, you have to do something like 90 RPM, and that takes forever. I burned up my cutting bit several times. With aluminum, you can run flat-out, but steel is not as friendly.

I suppose I could put a quality left-hand lathe tool in the cutter with a carbide insert, but for the moment, I’m going with an indexable 2″ end mill from Shars. I happen to have a box of TPMR inserts I bought by accident (no screw holes), and they will work with this end mill. It should be a lot better for steel, although the finish may not be fantastic.

A bench block is like a miniature anvil. You put it on your workbench and rest things on it while you work. You can put a groove in it to hold long things horizontally, and you can put vertical holes in it so you can drill things on the bench and go all the way through them. It’s a nifty item to have, and making it is good machining practice.

That’s about all I have at the moment. I may post photos later when I have more time.

More: Eastwood Rocks

The cart I bought from Eastwood had a minor defect, as I mentioned above. I got on the phone with them and told them about it. The cart has four tubular supports that hold the top shelf. Two are big tubes which are part of the cart’s frame. The other two are smaller tubes, maybe 5/8″ in diameter. On my cart, one of these tubes has crooked threads in the end, and it’s about 1/4″ too short. I had to shim it with washers to make it work.

Guess what Eastwood’s solution is? They’re sending me a new cart. They can’t pull the part and send it, and they don’t want the old cart back. Translation: free cart. I can fix the old one. It already works with the washer shims, but I can weld two ends in a piece of steel conduit and thread them, and it will be a perfect replacement for the defective support. I can even paint them black so the part looks OEM.

This is sweet. I don’t need two welding carts, but the cart doesn’t know it’s a welding cart. I can put my bench grinder on it, and I can put a buffer on the bottom shelf. I can put up to 350 pounds of stuff on it. I can even store extra gas bottles on it, if I choose to get into TIG or something that requires gases other than Argon/CO2.

Eastwood is kind of a neat company. They specialize in finding low-cost stuff that works reasonably well, and they are very aggressive about courting customers and making them happy. They’ve put a lot of self-help videos on Youtube.

I have a free 2HP motor, a free treadmill motor, a free linear actuator, and a free welding cart. What else do people want to give me?