A friend who learned that I had a metal lathe leaned on me to make a bunch of aluminum clamps for a wood assembly system he is building. Since this was just simple turning I thought it would be a good way to get some practice on the lathe. After a lot of calliper measurements we decided on a 0.885” head diameter, 0.785” barrel diameter and an overall length of 1.33”. He also needed spacers 0.4”X1”. It wasn’t all that critical to get the sizes accurate (this is woodworking after all) but I practiced hitting the numbers as close as I could. So facing, turning, drilling and threading. Each clamp has an M8 thread in the bottom. It was good practice on getting a lot of parts to match. Sort of like a radial engine. I’m not quite ready to launch into a P&W Wasp yet but do have a start on my first simple wobbler steam engine. Got 10 clamps done for my friend. Now I just hope he doesn’t want 40 more!
