Ball Turner Manufacture

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Ball Turner

Starting Work in the Shop

03-squaring_blockThe first stop in the machine shop for all projects is cutting the stock. Here I’m squaring up a piece of hot-rolled mild-steel round stock in the band saw to make the ball turner body. The cant being removed in this photo will be further sawn to make the rotation stops.

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Ball Turner Design

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Ball Turner

There are times in the machine shop when you need to make a spherical ball out of metal. You can form grind a tool and plunge the sphere on the lathe, or like Reed Streifthau of the Quorn Owners Yahoo Group, you could use an inexpensive import boring head to make a ball turner. Starting from Reed’s design, this page attempts to document what I came up with.

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Inspiration and Design

This entry is part 1 of 4 in the series External Hone

hone53As I was working on my Hodgson Radial, I needed to accurately size the crank journals, but I didn’t want to risk tapering the ends as usually happens when polishing with sandpaper. So I made myself a set of external hones (photo of my set on the left), based on a set that I remembered seeing on Ron’s Model Engineering and Model IC Engines website interestingly named the Nikapena Hone.

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Timberframe Advanced Week

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Timberframing

timberframe55_lgThe beginning of the second week, the Advanced course.  This course really tested my trig skills.  Truth be told, only two people in the class had a really good understanding of the trig needed for this week, myself and one high school kid attending the class!  All I can say is what a lucky kid to be able to partake in something like this.

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