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My order for the replacement tap through our local Ace came in a week early (unusual for them, and very nice for me) so I will start these guys again tomorrow. (It is indeed brand new and not used, returned, and sold again as new, as was the case with this last one. (Still pissed off about that one.)

I plan to try and cut my quarter-inch-thick nickel silver bar stock with my Proxxon mini miter saw. I am not confident in it going well, but we shall see. I am hoping the Proxxon will cut accurately on thick bar stock. It is great for thin-walled tubing, but I have never used it for this. Supposedly it can do it, but we shall see.

Last resort: cutting the parts with my jeweler's saw, which will be brutally slow and will wear my hands out quite badly. The three cuts I have to make would easily take me a full eight-hour day with a #4 blade. (Actually, it would probably be ten or more of them as they break all the time when pushed.) I definitely do NOT want to have to do this using the jeweler's saw!

The Proxxon, if it works, ought to be able to do the three cuts in an hour. Too much faster and I think the motor would burn out.

Anyway, I can get back to work on this again, and my second attempt ought to come out looking pretty nice, now that I have had a chance to figure out how to do it.

Today I made a Lego… a very expensive, and highly inaccurate Lego.

In the second video, please excuse my constant throat clearing. I was out in the pollen all day and am sick as a dog right now from it. I was having trouble keeping my throat clear and breathing with some labor. It is an annual Fun Fest that I have gone through each "Vernal Hell" since I was born.

Here are a few pics. I am too beat to type much. The two videos do a much better job. Each is about six minutes long, disorganized, out of focus, and — well — as lame as you've come to expect from me. So ENJOY!













Videos in the next post…

Your tool rant cracks me up!

However, you made what you needed with the stuff you had available.

Anyone could have made that if they had a mill. I think its more impressive when done with what you got.

"Run what you brung"

That mini anvil originally came with a mini hammer! Very cool!

That prompted me to do some research. (Advanced Degree, here I come!) It turns out that these tchotchkes (among others) were class projects of students at Purdue University who were enrolled in classes that were a part of their extensive metallurgy and engineering courses. They had to sand cast these at the University Foundry. They did castings of different types and made different things. I think the school allowed them to keep them, but also made extra to sell at the school book store to raise funds for these projects.

These were the most common project to make it out into the wild and were mostly made in the 1920s and 1930s. They were cast with different qualities of iron, some were brass plated, some were not, and some only had the letters PERDUE plated. I have not seen any examples of the little hammer, though. Where did you get that photo? I want to look into the hammer.

Pretty interesting stuff. I do not even remember how I came across this little anvil. I guess I will stop using it as it is antique and worth a whopping $40. HAHAHA!!!

I wonder if research will reveal that they were originally designed for shoeing seahorses – until they realized that seahorses didn’t have any feet…??

'Round and 'round the cobbler's bench
The seahorse chased the weasel,
The seahorse thought 'twas all in fun
TING! goes the Purdue Univeristy Foundry mini paperweight anvil!

Wade, my own scholarly research ended at this webpage:

https://www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/ ... 8ff44718c4

This is everything I know. BTW, it's Purdue, with a "u", which is in Indiana. Perdue is the chicken farmer.

Maybe you said in the video and I forgot... Where did you get the little anvil? Pretty neat, and I love that it actually kinda sorta gets used.

finally...
Wade's (per Bart's, Winston's, and Harvey's ill-fated attempt to coin a word - a half-century ago)

a "tubist".

bort2.0 wrote: ↑Sun Apr 24, 2022 8:49 am… BTW, it's Purdue, with a "u"…

Oh, I know. I typed it while looking at it. However, Autocorrect seems to have changed it to the "e" spelling at least once. I am not sure why. I have it correct all the other times. It was made at the Purdue University Foundry. Ain't no chickens involved in it, except perhaps as lunch one day for the student who made it.

I have a gig at an odd time today, which makes working difficult for me, as the prep time and the actual time I am gone from the house fall right in the middle of the time I tend to work in my shop. I had planned to make a new "Lego" today, but that won't be happening. However, I might at least get the two halves cut and squared up.

Maybe.

And maybe not…

If not, then I will certainly do it on Tuesday. I have everything figured out so that the third attempt ought to be a solid keeper.

It's halftime, kids! I am eating lunch and surfing around the WWW. I got a new thumb ring base plate marked, and made the first of the four cuts to give me its shape. I'll get to it sometime in the future — it is a low-priority item right now.

I also cut two new halves for the pillow block. There will be no Lego II, I am sorry to say. I decided that the use of eight screws was overkill and cut the number to six, which, TBH, is still two more than I need. Anyway, the two blocks are not as perfectly matched as the last pair, but they are close enough. I scribed my screw Mittelpunkte, center-punched them, and am about to head out back to try and not FUBAR this step as I did last time.

Here is the proof that I did not mark them all screwy. I hope to have a photo later that shows the six screws located nicely in the block. Fingers crossed…

I have to hog out that large curve again. It was a cast-iron female dog to do, last time. The screwy "Lego" is at the top, and the new blocks are below, scribed and punched.


There! Proof that I did not simply eyeball where the screws go, just like last time. But this time I have figured out how to avoid having the drill bit walk out of the divots. I hope…

the elephant wrote:That prompted me to do some research. (Advanced Degree, here I come!) It turns out that these tchotchkes (among others) were class projects of students at Purdue University who were enrolled in classes that were a part of their extensive metallurgy and engineering courses. They had to sand cast these at the University Foundry. They did castings of different types and made different things. I think the school allowed them to keep them, but also made extra to sell at the school book store to raise funds for these projects.

These were the most common project to make it out into the wild and were mostly made in the 1920s and 1930s. They were cast with different qualities of iron, some were brass plated, some were not, and some only had the letters PERDUE plated. I have not seen any examples of the little hammer, though. Where did you get that photo? I want to look into the hammer.

Pretty interesting stuff. I do not even remember how I came across this little anvil. I guess I will stop using it as it is antique and worth a whopping $40. HAHAHA!!!

At Ohio State back in the day (like, 30’s and 40’s), they made bench top drill presses. I’ve seen one recently. Nice drill presses!

Rick “didn’t make a drill press at A&M” Denney

MUCH better, this time! I'll take that. However, I still have the little issue of drilling the through-hole and making sure it is perfectly straight. Today, thin "shoebox" cardboard served as shims to correct the faults of my tools.

I spend an hour redoing the setup of the drill press and it is much better now. The vise, though, is not warped on the bottom. It is PAINTED with some hard, plastic Chinese imitation of powder coating that is more like super-tough plastidip or even truck bed liner. It has lumps in it and must be machined off. I think I may have fixed it for now, after some hardcore sanding until it stopped wobbling. I really need to get a mill or at least a drill press X/Y vise.

One screw is not in line with the other five, but it is good enough for the kind of girls I date, as my grandpa used to say…

the elephant wrote: ↑Tue Apr 26, 2022 6:05 pm

What do you mean?

They make 2x6 LEGO bricks.

But I’ll conceded that they aren’t that long and the studs would be closer together.



Looks good.

It’s really tough to drill a long hole that straight. Perfect set up, very low pressure so the (very sharp, perhaps sharpening or replacing part way through) bit doesn’t flex or wander, and standing on your left foot while sticking your tongue out the right side of your mouth are all proven tricks that may help.

I am looking into an alternative routing for the 6th valve linkage rod that is not as elegant but will be MUCH EASIER TO MAKE.

Here is my first idea. It would also involve the use of a guide, or supporting pillow block, but it would be much more reasonable to make. Disassembly would take much less time. Linking to the 6th lever would be easier and cleaner, and would be less likely to bind or make sounds when the valve is used.

So far: I like it.

I think I may go this route. I did not like it when I considered this routing before, because it would have necessitated my making a new RH 5th lever. Well, I have to do that regardless, so this new 6th routing will work very nicely. (It is a good thing to realize that an obstacle you worked hard to avoid is no longer there. It gives you backtracking options.)

This new routing is the one that would have been my first choice, but I could not work it out when the valve was not yet on the tuba. Now that it is installed I can more easily see what has to be done to bend a rod to fit the space. It will now run on the same side of the pistons as the 5th linkage rod. This will make hooking it up to its lever much easier, and also gives me better ideas as to how I need to build the new 5th lever to work with both hands.

Here is a coat hanger wire mockup with the brass rod I had been planning on using.


Other than the complexity of this brass rod's shape, the need for two short or one long pillow block guide makes this a PITA. And note how the angle of the top end is pretty much perpendicular to the direction of travel. I would have to bend the end upwards 90º or so to allow me to hook it up to the Minibal on the lever underside. ¡No es bueno! The green one ends in the correct orientation, and the force travels straight down, and not way over to the side and then down, which will have a much less happy feel to it when used. Green is good, in this case.


I will have to add a guide/pillow block to this 90º elbow, but it can be .25" wide and not the 1.5" wide behemoth I just made. Much better!


The connection to the valve's mini-link arm is the same.


The two link arms will travel right next to one another, and, so far as servicing these goes, this greatly simplifies things. Now that I know I am doing this, AND I am making a new 5th lever for RH I can place the union between the lever and the Unibal link wherever it needs to go to work around the new 6th lever. This greatly simplifies things in this regard, too. WIN-WIN!


Note that I took these photos on my bed, where Zoe naps at this time of day. She is on the tower by the window, suspiciously eyeing the tuba and hating me for occupying her territory. Poor baby… HAHAHA!!!

Other than the convolution, you remind me of me - in that you're slipping moving parts into tiny little available alleyways.

Cats...
are complicated, but - having shoehorned the first cat into my family sixty years ago (Beaver-Cleaver-style - when my Mom was taking a nap) - I believe I (well, sorta) understand their mechanisms.

Well, I thought my convoluted pathway was being clever, but actual cleverness only evinced itself after I decided to stop trying to be so damned clever and re-subscribed to the KISS principle.

Oh, and Zoe would just as soon kill me as look at me. The fact that she lives much of her life sitting in my lap is feline smoke and mirrors. I think it is actually her way of calling dibs on my carcass after I die.