Adventures in metalwork and machine restoration!

[TFrench]

Another job I'm currently working on is an absolutely colossal boring head. It's a d'andrea TA220, in case you're interested. I've had a couple of these in the last year and I have a (much) smaller one of my own for my deckels. This is by far the biggest I've seen! I can't actually lift the box on my own with all the parts in it.The taper is ISO 50. The longest bar is 600mm, so in theory you should be able to bore something around 1m diameter. The head itself isn't too bad, but the extension bars were all a bit rusty. I knocked up a nice warm bath of citric acid for them - the "after" picture is after just an hour in soak. It's good stuff!
Just need to do some more cleaning to the head and some repairs to the box and it'll be ready to go.

 

[Moriwaki]

Finally, some progress! Made a decent lid for the collet chuck box (I've added a latch as well since I took the photo)
Collet chuck box
I picked up another job lot of tooling for a ridiculous price on ebay. As well as these brilliant old engineers boxes there was a red mechanics topbox full of tooling and a plastic tub with loads of cutters. It then took me a week or so of lunch breaks and odd hours here and there to sort it all out into the proper tooling drawers so I can find everything!
More tooling!

We finally got a free afternoon at work and set about making room for the new lathe. First time this area has been tidied out in years! First job was to get the tool cabinets in place at the back - had to remove all the drawers to be able to manhandle the big one into position - its seriously heavy filled up!
Space!

To move the lathe we've got a set of machine skates, but they are a bit temperamental - moving over any uneven surface allows them to drop and whatever is on them becomes very unsteady! It's also hard to change direction with them - you need to keep jacking up the machine to adjust the angle of the skate. This is my solution:
skate boots
The box drops over the skate, and you can bolt them to the machine. They then pivot on the bolt easily just by tapping with a soft mallet. They also allow the skate to drop by 2" before they come out, so they can go over a lot trickier surfaces. Here they are bolted to the lathe:
On the move
Made it a very easy job - 2 pushing the lathe and one tapping the front skates to steer. Easiest machine move we've ever done!
Eagle has landed!
It still needs to move back to the wall quite a bit but I still need to finish cleaning it up and swap the motor back to 3 phase. Big step closer to having a man sized lathe though!

Lovely thread btw

 

[TFrench]

Well it came out pretty well. Included a picture of it next to a (admittedly small) drill press just to give some scale to the thing. What a beast!

 

[TFrench]

bumped this thread up for the discussion on power files - pg12 is the last pics of mine - I should get round to updating this post!