Thank you Bronson and rleete. To Bronson, just start on the engine! Your skills will improve along the way and in 99% of the cases of a mistake it can be corrected. I can strongly recommend to start a build over here, you will get all the help you need when you are in need for it. Hope to see your progress here soon!
Made some more progress, not so much but better then nothing.
Made an adapter to hold the sole plate in the lathe
Here it is mounted in the lathe, I am surprised how tight the sole plate is clamped with such a simple adaptor.
Again I hit some hard spots in the castings. The shiny surfaces are the hard parts. Broke a tool on this again :-\
To setup the soleplate straight in the vice I use an electronic angle measurement device that I use to adjust the angle of the rotor blades on the RC heli. Its very simple and quick, zero the device on the top of the vice and gently hit the casting until its zero degrees.
Found the middle of the 17mm bore
and used a really nice feature of the digital readout system, it can calculate a hole pattern. You enter the number of holes, X Y middle point, radius and starting angle
graphical overview of the programmed data
and to position the axis a graphical indication of the target positions
Piece of cake to drill the holes
Finally I can start on the crank! Cutted a piece of round 30mm, faced the ends and milled a flat that will be used as reference to drill the 3 center holes on the side
I had a bad surprise when setting up the lathe to work between the centers. According to the documentation it should have a MK5 taper in the main spindle. When trying to fit, it did not fit! An MK4 is too small, so its something in-between
..and something I do not have.
So another challenge arrived unexpected.
Started to set up the top slide to the correct angle in the spindle nose, which is more or less 2 degrees (does anyone have a clue what kind of taper I will be making?)
Cut of piece of round 40mm and clean up one side and start to turn the taper
I tested a lot to not have the taper too small, with a cam lock the chuck is removed quickly and I let the piece chucked up to not loose centricity.
And to my surprise it worked
Its a very nice fit all around, put it in by hand and I cannot remove it without hitting it from the back
Got lazy during turning and missed my auto feed
So I use my cordless drill to move the top slide back and forward, it worked very well, did not get tired and the finishing on the part also improved by having a constant feed rate.
Time to make the center tip
And we have a lathe ready for turning between the centers! Since the fit was so good, and the machine is set-up I made another 3 for future use
Hope I have time tomorrow to start turning the crank and that I did not tire you will all these pictures. I will keep you posted about probably how to NOT turn a crank :big:
Have fun, regards Jeroen