New guy, an attempt at the elbow engine.

[rustyknife]

Hey guys, I'm a lurker, just new here. I'm Eric, 25 and just another ol' boy from Missouri. Like the website alot! I'm making an attempt at building an elbow engine off plans I found on here. I'm making minor changes as I go, and converting it from metric to SAE. Feel free to offer tips and critiques as I go, I'm no expert by any means, I just bought a mill and a lathe and taught myself how to use them with books so I really have no formal training. There's a grizzly industrial not 5 minutes from the house so its hard to keep any money! HAHA. Progress will be slow as I find time to work on it, and when its not 100 degrees in my garage!

I already got a lot of the base and upright done but forgot to take pictures of the work in progress, I apologize for that.

Here's my mill

And here's my lathe

I had the lathe 2 months learned how it worked and I decided that it needed to be CNC for some reason ??? So I converted it...that's quite a new learning curve and I'm still figuring it all out.

That dewalt 12v max Impact driver is absolutely amazing by the way...

Pictures of build to follow

 

[rustyknife]

For the base I squared off a piece of aluminum to 4"

I had just clamped it to the table and used an 11/16 endmill, I wrote flywheel support but changed my mind, its actually the base.

That was all fun, but I thought it might be easier with a new self centering milling vise.

A little time elapse magic happens there

 

[rustyknife]

That was when I ended up with this.....Sorry about the no pictures of the work on this part, again I didn't think I would photograph this buildup when I started.

Ok, what I've changed here, outside holes are M5 .8, roll pins are 1/8 tension pins, and the center holes are spaced .590 apart because I really thought the blueprints said 15mm and not the actual 16 that it is. Whoops. As long as I use this measurement consistently I won't have a problem. All the sides and faces are flycut, except the bottom which I found 3 new 21/64 solid carbide endmills on craigslist for 20 dollars and wanted to try them out ;D

 

[Tin Falcon]

first of all rusty welcome to the board. Looks like you are jumping right in in more ways than one.
Intro,shop photos ,and build all in your first post.
Nice looking mill good size.
An elbow engine for your first build brave you are.
You are right on the learning curve of CNC a different way of doing things indeed.
5 minutes from grizzly you are fortunate. I have a dealer of used stuff about 45 minutes away and about an hour and a half to Mc master carr. most stuff a drive or mail order.
Tin

 

[Herbiev]

Hi Eric. Thats a neat setup you got there. Welcome to the forum. You will have a great time here and we look forward to viewing your projects and assisting where we can Thm:

 

[rustyknife]

I woke up at 3:30 this morning and couldn't sleep, off to work in the garage before it gets hot. I thought I would true up a 3" piece of 1.5" round aluminum. This will either be the cylinder or valves, haven't decided yet, leaning towards cylinder. Center drilled the end of it.

Here's a screen shot of Mach 3 that I use to run the lathe.

Then I hit a stump....I wasn't sure how I was going to mount it all on the rotary table to drill my holes for my cylinder. I thought seriously about drilling a hole 21/64 hole and tapping 3/8th's and using a through bolt to clamp it to the table, but that of course would be hard to center and could not sit flat against my table. Then I had a real good idea.

First time I ever got to use my rotary table, fairly straight forward.

This may very well be a terrible way to line up a rotary table, but it worked well for me, use at your own risk. my table has m2 taper

 

[rustyknife]

Well I remembered that I had a face plate that came with the lathe for turning between centers, that was sitting there collecting dust, it had three evenly spaced holes around the inner circle that were tapped for the studs to bolt onto the lathe. I centered the plate up from the outer edge with a test indicator. Then found one of the holes and rotated it 60 degrees. Then I drilled 3 more 1/4 holes 120 degrees apart. Counter-bored to fit some hex screws I had laying around.

Finished product, but will the idea work?

I wasn't really ready to take the chuck off, but I was excited and decided to anyway. Mark it first.

 

[rustyknife]

It fits ;D

I think it just might work

 

[Troutsqueezer]

Looks like you're on your way. Taking the time to make or modify tooling as you go takes patience and foresight, good qualities to have in the long run.

When using a dial indicator to track movement of the mill table, be sure it is perpendicular relative to the plane you are moving in or else you will get sine errors. In your pic it looks like the indicator may be slightly off but that may also be the angle the pic was shot from. Of course that is only the base you are working on there and exact measuring is not paramount. The elbow engine is going to require some pretty accurate measuring as I've heard others here say.

-Trout

 

[SBWHART]

Hi Rusty

I recognise those plane nice to know someones putting them to use.

On your last picture if you put your centre in the mill then winde it down into the cylinder mounted on the rotary table, it will pull it on centre, just clamp the rotary and zero your dials and bobs your uncle you,re set to go.

Elbow engines are tricky little beast to make good luck

This is a link to my build log:- hope it helps

http://madmodder.net/index.php?topic=820.0

Stew (potty)

 

[Maryak]

Rusty,

Welcome to our forum. wEc1

Best Regards
Bob

 

[b.lindsey]

Welcome Rusty...looks like you are making great progress so far. Thanks for the intro and the pics!

Bill

 

[steamer]

Welcome Rusty ....Good thinking and process on those parts ...keep it coming!

Dave

 

[arnoldb]

Welcome to the forum Eric

Nice methodical approach Thm:

The Elbow engine is a lot of fun to build - and a good way to spray oil all over the show ;D

Regards, Arnold

 

[rustyknife]

Thanks for the warm welcome. It's really awesome to have a forum filled with very intelligent people and to share ideas with. ;D I'm sure I will have plenty of questions in the future.

Special thanks to Stew, without any plans, none of this would be possible :bow:

I had obtained the plans, looked at several threads of builds, built the whole thing in solidworks, looked at each measurement as I converted the numbers, and still did not really realize how small this thing actually is!!! Once you start making the pieces you realize this is a very small beast haha.

Let me know if the pictures are too big and if I need to resize. Feel free to tell me I need to clean the wd-40 off the lens and get better lighting as well lol ;D

I took a little nap after work and went out in the garage about 9 thinking it might have cooled off, but it was still 90+ degrees and I couldn't keep the sweat out of my eyes(any future mistakes will be blamed on this fact )I mounted my chuck in the face plate I adapted and trued it to the table, at the very top of the cylinder, (which I presume would have the most deflection?) I was able to measure only .001" runout, so I think this was a good setup.

Ran to grizzly after work and picked up a 1/4 chucking reamer. Drilled a couple holes in some scrap to figure out how the reamer worked. My 1/4 bit left way too big a hole, I ended up settling on a .221 diam #2 Drill. Worked good with my reamer. I also found that my setup was too high/tall for the reamer to be put in a chuck, I really didn't want to cut my new reamer off since I was reaming a 2" deep hole or better. The reamer had to be used in a 1/4 collet, which worked perfectly fine.

Tall as my machine would go

Plenty of room in the collet

My chihua-saurus-rex needed attention

 

[rustyknife]

I went ahead and found the center hole, drilled and reamed it. I really think I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had done this on the lathe haha.

Poked and reamed the other 3 holes....

Well I ran outta wd-40 so I guess I better call it a night. Tomorrow I have to part....eek. I must have some mental handicap but I just can't figure out how to get my parting tool in the holder and cut a perpendicular groove. The left side (most negative Z) is always perfectly flat and faced off and the right side is always convex, and it was this way before the cnc conversion(which has helped my parting tremendously, step-over is amazing ). I think I need a better tool or something.

 

[mgbrv8]

My chihua-saurus-rex needed attention

[/quote]


I like your quality control inspector Sir

Dave

 

[rustyknife]

Well, more progress.....

Mounted chuck back in the lathe and parted off each cylinder, faced each down to the correct size. On one cylinder, my pinky slipped onto the "shift" key which defaults the feed of the stepper motors to 100% and I proceeded to launch it out of the chuck, Whoops It was not clamped tightly and suffered slight exterior damage. I was able to clean it up a bit and I believe its still usable....Note to self, be more careful in the future

Today I started to make the pistons....Thought I would get them all done tonight boy was I wrong....took about 2.5 hours to make just 1, the other 2 will be much faster, as I have the set up figured out now. I used some 3/8 drill rod I had purchased.

I turned a section of it down to .252. I got my mic out and locked my micrometer at .248 and polished it down with 400 grit sandpaper followed by a ultra fine (red) scotch brite. Ran the mic over the entire surface checking to make sure it was perfecto-navidad.

Test fit the cylinder....everything is looking great so far.

Whittled it off...and ended up with this......

The actual length is not yet cut...

That's it for tonight!

 

[rustyknife]

3 shiny new pistons.

 

[zeeprogrammer]

Belated welcome to the forum.

Looks like you're into it deep.

Missouri and 5 minutes from Grizzly? Sounds like Springfield. I consider Springfield my hometown.