We are halfway through the month of begging and have not met our goals.

Please consider purchasing: 1 Month server Hosting, or 1 Month Web Services, or just a A Cup of Coffee.

J.Kb. has some items for sale there in The Shop

Yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the delivery of my machine shop. Wednesday, I was working in the shop and felt like I actually knew what I was doing.

I have a new project, making springs. This is to repair an oil can check valve. I also noticed a need for custom springs in certain objects that are dealing with reciprocating masses and loud noises.

I need to make mandrels and a wire feed device. The choices are: Blondihacks, This Old Tony, simple stupid, and simple not stupid.

My current inclination is to go with simple, not stupid. This is a cylinder with an 1/8 hole down the center almost to the end. The end is cone-shaped. The top of that cone is cut off, exposing the center drilled hole. A V notch is then cut from the end of the hole to the tip of the cone.

This is a standard design. I am going to augment this with a flat cut on the top for alignment purposes and a tensioning screw on the side. It looks like I can use brass or a brass tipped setscrew for this.

We are looking for the Supreme Court to do something on the PICA cases from Illinois soon. We are waiting for the Supreme Court to issue their opinion in Rahimi any day now.

Have a great weekend! Please let us know what you are thinking about, any stories we should have covered, and so forth.

Yesterday, I finished the machining on the toolholder bodies. I need to make 5 adjustment nuts to complete the project. This means there are four toolholders that are good to go, as is.

Comedy of Errors

I do not think there is a single toolholder that is 100% right. There is the one where the tool in the collet grabbed it and chewed on the edges.

There are the three where I cut the dovetail 0.100 too deep.

There is the fact that the adjustment stud is too close to the dove tail. There are the edges where I missed the chamfer and have a ridge where there should be none.

Which takes us to

Hot Bluing

This was so much fun, not.

The formula that I used was 13 cups of water to 4 lbs of sodium hydroxide to 2 lbs of sodium nitrate. Bring to a boil, cook each piece of metal for 30 minutes. Rinse in hot tap water and then coat with WD40 or other oil.

First, I purchased a 5 qt stainless-steel pot to do this in. The stainless-steel handles were attached to the body of the pot with aluminum rivets. This formula will eat aluminum in short order.

Which it did. The pot sprung a leak and the boiling, caustic bluing mixture went everywhere.

I have more cleanup tomorrow to recover from that mess. That stuff started eating my hot plate.

As prep for each piece going in, I first deburred them all, used air to clean them, washed them in the parts washer, used air to dry them. Then Hagar cleaned them with acetone.

I don’t think we got them clean enough. We should have used more acetone and got them 100% oil free.

After they were cleaned, they were hung from spring wire in the pot for 30 minutes. Then rinsed under hot tap water for 2 or 3 minutes.

Finally, they were sprayed down with WD40. I then used a Scotch Bright(gray) to lightly rub the flash rust from them. The results are what you see.

I think they are beautiful. They are not that deep black I was looking for. They have a sort of case-hardened look to them.

Yes, one of them is still in the white. I forgot I had three machined, so it wasn’t processed into the pot.

Next time, I will clean each part better. I believe that the aluminum might have reduced the quality of the bluing solution.

We’ve put it all in a jug for use next time. I might have to remake it, making sure not to get any aluminum in the solution.

It is amazing watching aluminum bubbling away…