Great news for all the people who have been hounding and harassing the Powermatic rebuild team. The special order machine shop tooling has arrived. Next step is to secure an open in the machine shop’s donated time repair schedule. We are probably still looking at a couple of more weeks, if the wind is to our backs.
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We are still awaiting the 4140 stock, I looked the other day & it hadn’t arrive yet.
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I mean unless their doing it by pm were all patient with the project, there’s literally a 8 days between replies, from the beginning stages of assessing it needed to be rebuilt, most of us fully understand the complexity and difficulty of such a task, and are very appreciative and patient with all parties wiling to donate their time to helping getting it taken care of!
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Will a used car axel work😜
Need to get that bad boy up and running so DMS can top this reddit post:
Awesome news. The steel shaft stock has arrived. The head minion of the machine shop is hand carrying it to the work area. We hope to have new shafts machined and ready to install by Thanksgiving.
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I think you ordered the wrong size lol looks a little big
Obviously I’m kidding and you ordered stock to mill
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That’s a very large package you have there, sir!
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The big day is here. Our shafts are being machined. There are multiple steps involved, so expect the process to take more than a single session.
One shaft has bern drilled and tapped for the set screw.
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Last update of the night.
The first shaft is almost complete. A key-way and key-stock has beren added. This insightful modification will prevent the same destruction of the shaft in the future.
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How were y’all able to determine the type of steel the old shafts were to know what to order, cause I’ve always heard unless it’s marked finding out the specific alloy a metal is is impossible or did you guys just order what years of experience told you would be the best type for this specific application it is it gernally always the same type used for parts like this
The old material appears to be just 1018 or A36 steel. The steel we bought to replace it is 4140A. It has a Rockwell C scale of about 30 right now. Cold rolled (1018) is on a B scale Rockwell hardness. Additionally to the materials being harder, I will be keying the shaft as well as double set screw. At that point the weakest link will be the Keystock, which can be replaced.
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Oh ok so you just used years and years of know how and familiarity, only reason I was curious was just if there was actually a method to figure out or differentiate different allows without having anything to reference I was just curious how it was done cause theres been countless occasions where I’ve wasted to know what alloy certain parts of pieces are but have a basically come to the conclusion it’s impossible to ever figure that out with only the metal itself
In many cases, I would think it would be less what the alloy is, vs what hardness is the metal. The alloy probably makes a difference in tensile strength, but hardness is very measurable.
We have a set of files in machine shop for testing hardness
Friday update:
Our master machining minion is back at it.
Drilling the hole that pins the worm gear to the shaft
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Awesome news!
The first shaft has been completed. One more to go. Afterwards, The existing hand wheels will be broached. This will keep them from spinning if the set screw happens to loosen.
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