You want to touch my knob, don't you?

I had a lot of fun making a shift knob! I had some really nice stainless round stock for a long while. With my friend's recently acquired lathe, I wanted to try it out! We were both rather skeptical of the machinability of the stainless, especially on a smaller lathe like the South Bend Heavy 10, but after some tweaking, we were both really happy with the results!

Here's my friend Dave getting things dialed in:

Shiny!

I really like this lathe. It works really well, especially with a VFD running the motor. It's nearly silent with the back gears disengaged. It can turn some really smooth cuts!

We actually had to set up the 4 jaw chuck and indicate the bar in. Neither of us had done that before. It went surprisingly well. Once we turned the bar down far enough, we got the three jaw chuck on and got to work tapering one end down:

This would have been easier had we had the taper attachment working, but it isn't and that's another story.

 Final pass complete:

 Look at how shiny that last pass was! That wasn't even with any polishing. Dave has a darn steady hand.

After the tapering was done, we tried parting the piece off at about 4", but the parting tool is honestly horrendously terrible. All we got was nasty chatter:

 Ew. So, we went medieval on things and lopped it off with a hack saw (while it was spinning, and no it isn't as dangerous as it sounds).

I missed some pictures in the processes, but we flipped the knob around and I chamfered the edge by hand then rounded it over with a file.

Then we got a wild hair up our butts and decided to try to knurl the end of the knob. I figured that if we boogered it up, we could just turn off the failed knurls and no one would be the wiser! heh

Here's Dave setting the knurling tool:

He had heard a tip that you set the knurls slightly off of perpendicular, so the knurls will "bite" better and have a better chance of following each other. If you look at he pic above closely, the rollers have a spiral groove pattern, which basically rubs the surface and pushes the material into the grooves. The bottom roller has the opposite pattern on it, and when the gears roll over the same surface, they create the classic diamond knurl pattern:

 We were shocked when we stopped the lathe and the pattern came out perfect! I'd only tried knurling a couple of times before without a huge amount of success. We didn't go too deep, as that can get pretty abrasive, but the patter really shows and gives a really satisfying texture on the top of the knob! AWESOME!

We flipped the knob around again and polished the thing up with some sandpaper. (I think it was 180 grit.)

 Notice the piece of paper wrapped around the knob. That keeps the teeth of the chuck jaws from digging in to the work, and in some cases, keeping the work from digging into the chuck jaws (though that is rare since they are hardened, usually).

LOOK AT THIS THING! IT IS AWESOME!

 It's fairly large. It's about 1.5" diameter. The small end of the taper is about .750".

 It feels AMAZING. I'll try to weigh it some time, but it is pretty heavy.

The last thing left is to drill and thread it:

 I forgot the thread size, didn't have my tape set and want to be sure of what I am doing before I actually possibly ruin all the hard work and fun that went into this thing!

It's so awesome, kitty approves!

 My friend liked mine so much, he mad his own the next day:

Having access to a lathe is frickin' amazing!

Pete's Turbo Manifold: More progress, finally.

After much too long a hiatus, I got back to welding up Pete's twin scroll manifold. I made pretty significant progress, especially thanks to being able to use a lathe!

Of course, pics are the thing you come for, right?

On thing I see on some manifolds is poor access to the flange nuts. If you're making something yourself, why make things hard to get to? How do you figure out how much space you need? Simple. Use a tool as a spacer:

 Once that was figured out, I got the pipes lined up on the flange and started welding them together:

I finally got to use the torch a friend sent me to try out:

 It's different. I'm not sure if I like it yet. It works. I'll keep using it.

Now for something totally cool! My friend recently acquired a new South Bend Heavy 10 lathe. Seriously. New. New as in it had the original cosmoline packing grease on everything and he had to put it together himself! If you don't know about these lathes, they are one of the most desirable classic benchtop lathes, and after using it, I can see why. I'm really surprised by the quality of work it can do for being such a compact machine!

Anyway, my friend turned a chamfer on some straight sections of pipe while I cut stuff:

 Look at how nicely that matches the 90* fitting!!!!

Got everything tacked up:

I started welding the straight pipe to the bend:

 I'm getting some advice from my friend who sent me the torch I'm using. Stainless is a pain to weld, and I find this thicker stuff tricky. I love learning this stuff, though!

Here's how I'm figuring this should go together:

 I made the straight sections a bit too tall, though, so those will need to get trimmed down. This manifold is going in a 1G CRX. It has very little room in front of the engine, so I am trying to make this whole thing as compact as possible while still being a decently flowing manifold as the power goals for the built are 500+WHP.

I'm looking forward to moving this along. I really enjoyed

Recommended Business: Alloy Boltz

A friend recommended Alloy Boltz, a veteran owned business that stocks all manner of stainless steel hardware. I placed an order of various stuff. It came very quickly. It was packaged well:

I added them to my SS hardware collection:

 

They even provide a nice sheet with good info and torque specs!

The hardware is good quality, too. I've been using it to replace various small hardware on my CRX. Part of my "restoration" of my CRX is looking at long term durability by eliminating rust and preventing rust, and part of that is replacing fasteners with ones that don't rust. It doesn't hurt that they look good, too!

You'll see them peppered around my CRX in future posts.

All RIGHT already. Here's another update. Geez.

 I'll start off with a shout out to my friend Remo who sent me the above "new" torch! It is a Weldcraft flex head with a large gas lense setup. It is a lot different than the previous torch I was using. I am not sure if I actually like it yet, but, I will keep trying it out to give it a thorough workout.

I put it to good use finishing up Dave's header!

That is a 70 something Honda CB350 that I've done a bunch of odds and ends to before, and FINALLY finished the header, which is the second to last major fab project left to do before it is all up to Dave to get back together. 

 The pipes nearly all tacked up:

 For those of you, who like me, are motorcycle retarded, the frame and engine are flipped upside down. heh

Here is what happens if your fitup isn't exact:

 It isn't horrible, but, get your fitup as good as you can so you don't have to deal with silly crap like that.

Nearly completely tacked and ready for welding:

We raided the kitchen for some aluminum foil:

 Why the foil? It is cheap, works well and doesn't leave a sticky residue like the foil tape (which still has its place, though, so don't think I'm JUST being cheap), which prevents a whole lot of cleanup.

It looks like I should have turned up the gas a bit more:

 But at least I was starting to stack dimes.

Here we were getting a sense of where the tailpipe needed to go:

 I squished the end of the tailpipe and flushed the collector off at the necessary angle, then tacked the tailpipe on:

 Above and below you can see how I formed the tailpipe to the collector:

It was a bit crude, as I took a cold chisel and bopped the tailpipe until it matched up. It is a bit trickier than that, as you have to tack the pipes together at the right spot, then apply directed pressure at the right spot. You can use anything with a blunted edge or even a drill bit, but, a cold chisel was handy and yeah, it left some marks, but, it got the job done!

The other fun thing about welding a header off the engine is how much it moves. The two primary tubes moved (ONLY!!!) about 3/8" together. It makes for an interesting time getting the header on, but it is still manageable. If I ever make more of these, I'll have a jug set up to prevent that from happening as much.

YAY!

I have more updates ready soon.

Running out of gas is not usually a problem I face.

Being lactose intolerant with an inherent love of dairy ensures that. But, today, I ran out of Argon. So, tomorrow or Friday I will have to make a trip to my LWS (Local Welding Supply, or in my case, not so local, or even open on Saturdays anymore . . . grrrrr . . . ) and exchange my 300CFH bottle.

Running out of Argon should imply that I was welding a lot. I was!

Today's goal was to completely weld up the other runner of the "inner" section of he manifold, so I got crackin'!

First up, taper the joint that I had cut in the 45* el, as started out just plain flat:

After that, it was time to finish up the inside of the other runner since it is way easier to do that when you don't have things in the way! Setting up the purge:

Section to be welded:

My friend Remo sent me some tape he has used:

This stuff RAWKS! It is way better than the other foil tape I was using before. I'll get into it more shortly.

I also decided to first fuse the pieces together:

And then run a cover pass:

I think it turned out pretty well.

The next bit of work involved more fitup. I couldn't take pics as I needed all available limbs and appendages to get things lined up and marked, but, I finally did that and started tacking:

After more cleaning and tacking and cleaning and tacking and purging and cleaning and tacking, etc., I check the fitment:

 Caching!

I took the next picture to point something out:

Keen observers will notice that the pipe and el are slightly different diameters and that the el is offset towards the right in the picture. While this might not "look right" from the outside, the inside is the part that matters. Gasses/fluid will "stack" on the outside of turn, and it is always best to keep the outside of turns as smooth as possible to eliminate as much friction and turbulence as possible.

Fusing!

I also took the time to "graduate" to a shorty cap since I will be getting into more complicated stuff soon enough. I don't like short caps because you have to "waste" tungsten by chopping them roughly in half, which increases costs and uses up more of the tungsten more quickly.

Now, here's the reason why I like the EZTape:

NO RESIDUE, even after welding for a while on the thing and it being darn hot.

Internal shot as best as I could, though it is not focused on the right spot:

External pics of the fusion welds:

Closeup:

Now, a note about purging. Argon is heavier than oxygen. Typically, you want to introduce the argon into the enclosed space so that it sinks to the lowest part of the interior of the weldment and then "floods" the weldment until all the oxygen is "floated out." In order to do that, you need to allow the oxygen to escape. Note the holes:

Since I wanted to make sure that all the oxygen was displaced from the runner I was welding on, I made sure to allow the argon to flow through that runner the most.

The holes also allow excess pressure to vent. If you get your weld hot enough and don't vent the pressure, the hot, molten metal will be forced out of the puddle from the inside, sometimes explosively. Having hot metal spewed at you is NOT fun. (I have the scars to prove it.)

After I fused the pieces together, I started capping them. I didn't do a perfect job mostly do to the fact that I need thicker filler rod that doesn't melt back from the puddle so quickly and it threw my timing off something fierce. No excuses, though. I'll have to run another cap pass to fill in the undercut:

Another inside shot:

Even with all that heat, no "sugaring" at all!