Shop Press Part II

Saw....

 Drill...

 Bolt together...

Getting there, need to make a way of holding the jack and the workpiece. Reckon a decent day in the shed will have it finished.

Shop Press.

Take one 20 quid hydraulic jack

...add some steel from the scrapyard

and you have the ingredients of a shop press.

First step was cutting the rectangular box section I will be using for the cross pieces in half.

Next step was to remove the bits of plate welded to the box sections that I will be using for the uprights. This killed my grinder.

So I turned to drilling the holes in the cross pieces.

By doing this on the mill I know that they are exactly 650mm apart (+/- .01mm) this is possibly a bit of overkill.

So this is where I got to...

I reckon I've got enough scrap about the place to finish with little extra cost.

A black bag of swarf

....is what I cleared up from on, under and around my lathe. It now looks like this.

I think I need to get into the habit of clearing the lathe (and mill) down after every use.

Before heading home I slung the XR seat on the Sportster to see how it looked with the 19" wheel on the rear.

Obviously the rear mudguard needs to go but it looks like quite an east job to fit.

Rear wheel nearly done.

I machined the last of the spacers for my front to rear wheel conversion.

Everything seems to fit, I need to paint the wheel to match the front and fit the flattrack tyre.

Tailstock unbroken

I fixed the tailstock on my lathe today. I drilled out the brass pins from the tailstock quill with a 6.5mm drill then used a 1/4" slot drill to make location holes in the ram nut. I then turned some brass down to a little over 1/4" for the replacement pins.

I then put some loctite bearing retaining compound on the sides of the holes (to accommodate the slightly oversize holes in the quill) and pressed the pins in place. This meant that once the loctite has set I could use the lathe to remove the excess on the locating pins.

So I ended up using my lathe to fix my lathe.