Gday Chris here, and welcome back to Clickspring.
In this video, I make a small lathe carrier to drive this clock pillar between centers.
So I'm making the pillars for the John Wilding Skeleton clock
and I've hit a little snag.
I'd like to do the ornamental turning between centers
but if I use one of my standard carriers, at some point I'll be clamping down
on these curved sections, and I'm pretty sure that will mark the part,
I think it would be better to drive it from the spigot, but I'll need a different sort of carrier to do that.
I saw a picture in a John Wilding book, of a carrier that will do the job.
He calls it an "antique lathe carrier"
The thinned down section will grip short cylinders like the spigot, but still keep clear of the center.
and the thicker cross section at the outside can be drilled and tapped for a decent sized cap screw.
So that's the plan, lets get started.
Now I could have made this out of steel, but i decided to make it from brass
I really enjoy working with brass
its easier on the cutting tools and it should hold up ok to the wear and tear.
If it gets a little banged up over time, I can remake it from steel.
So I cut off a decent slice, and then squared it up on the mill.
And then I got on with the layout.
actually I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how I was going to make this part.
and eventually I figured it was probably best to start with the central hole,
and then work on the perimeter.
It took a bit of thought to come up with a sequence where I could make the cuts that I wanted, and still hold and locate the part
So I drilled and reamed the central hole 1/4"
I probably didn't need to ream the hole, but I wanted a nice snug fit with the pillars,
and I figured it couldn't do any harm.
Then I milled away most of the waste stock from the perimeter
so that I ended up with 2 flat surfaces on either side of the curve.
My plan was to use those as a reference surface to locate the part horizontally in the vise
later on in the process.
And you can see that I've left it quite a bit short of the line,
mainly to give me a bit of metal to work with when I'm doing the final finishing.
So with the bulk of the metal removed, I can get the curves into shape
and I did that with the bench filer and the belt sander.
I started out on the bench filer. Its a great tool for reaching into corners.
and again I've left it a little bit short of the line, to allow for hand finishing.
Now its back to the mill. You can see what I mean about using those surfaces
to keep the part horizontal.
I'm using a parallel under each side.
I then picked up the edge, and then drilled and tapped one side
and then I drilled the clearance hole on the other side.
when the part is split later, the threaded and clearance holes swap sides, and line up perfectly.
and again the reference surfaces help me line up the part on this angle plate too
so I could mill away the central sections.
I really should have got a new end mill for this
This one was a bit blunt and not quite long enough. So I had to nurse things along a bit to avoid chatter.
I ended up with a bit more chatter than I was happy with towards the end of the cut
So I tried plunging down at full depth, and that seemed to do the job.
For the other side, I figured the plunge cuts worked so well, lets do that again,
except this time it didn't work so well. There wasn't a huge amount of chatter
and I was planning on hand finishing the surfaces anyway, but there you go
no more using blunt tools.
So that's most of the machine work done, all it needs now is a cut down the middle.
I toyed with the idea of doing this by hand, mainly because it's a long cut.
and my widest blade won't go through the whole part.
I figured I could probably make it work by coming in from each end, so I gave that a go.
It worked out ok, but the cuts were slightly off.
luckily I had enough material to tidy up by hand so it didn't matter.
So first up a bit of belt sander time to tidy up that saw cut.
and I don't need those reference surfaces anymore so they can be taken to the line too.
there's a few fancy end curves to put in
and just a little bit of filing and sanding, to take off the rough edges and give it a presentable surface finish.
And I know what you're thinking: "It's a lathe dog, what's he doing?"
but I just can't help it!
Its still got to look good, at least until it gets all banged up.
I softened the edges a bit too, some of those were still a bit sharp,
and want them completely dull.
And it's done. Time to give it a run.
The spigots are a really nice snug fit,
and the carrier grips around most of the surface area
so it shouldn't mark the part at all.
and here it is about to do its first job.
I'm glad I finally got around to making this. 1/4" seems to be a standard size for pillar spigots
so with a bit of luck you'll see this carrier pop up in plenty of future video's
thanks for watching, I'll see you later.