Resurrection and Bling Fairies

[Bogstandard]

I am not doing a full runthru of engine turning (ET) because a lot has been talked about it before, so I am doing an abridged version of what I use, and how I do it. There are lots of different ways to carry out engine turning, my way is the one I prefer.

These have been mentioned before, but to save you searching, I have included them again. The first one Is Eamon Keoghs page, and it shows how a professional makes his items look. He is very approachable and gave me a few very good tips.

http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~eamonn/et/et.htm

This is a company that makes flat sheet engine turned panels, I would imagine using CNC for the patterns. I have sent you directly to the display page, and if you click on the little pics, they open up to show how the pattern is produced.

http://www.fpmmetals.com/Architectural.htm


Now my way of doing things. First off, where the ET is not being done, I polish the parts of the job to a finished state. ET will cover up slight scratches on a surface, but don't expect it to cover up the scratches if you have been using the plate as a rollerboard, without the wheels.

These are my tools of the trade, there are many others that can be used, anything within your imagination, as long as it is legal. The rules are, something spinning with a flat end, something that can go between the spinning flat end and the job, that can scratch the plate surface, and when it is all brought together, engine turning ensues.

The white mounted bobs are my main preference. It comprises of a hard rubber compound with an embedded abrasive. You can buy the same sort of material under the name of 'Cratex'. The other two bits show items that I have used in the past, aluminium and delrin rod, but again almost anything will do, but it does need to be a softish material, wooden dowel is a good one. Apply the abrasive to the end of the rod, and your are away, recharge the tip when it needs it, or for a real messy job, cover the whole surface in the abrasive and just go for it. I use the full cover method when I want a very fine finish, and so liquid metal polish is used.

So from now on, I will be showing me using my favourite bits, and if you do try 'Cratex' the following few paras will be of interest. For our Imperial cousins, all measurements now will be in yards, furlongs and miles.
If you are going to do accurate ET then you need to set yourself an easy standard to work to, otherwise, within a few passes you WILL be that confused you WILL make a b***s of it.
I will be working on a 0.500" (1/2") baseline, if you work in metric I would suggest something like 10mm or 20mm. You need an easy figure to divide into half.
You can see on this pic, my 'scratcher' is a little larger than it needs to be, it could be used as is, but some of the effect would be lost.

Normally I would spin the bit against a grinding wheel dressing stone to get it to size, but in this case, because I couldn't find my one, I used a bit of looped rough emery. It did the job, but it was a lot slower. On no account do it against a file, it will remove the file teeth without a pause for thought.

Now we got size (or near enough it doesn't matter).

If you looked at the last link that I posted, it should give you some idea of the effect you require. Most people go for the standard fishscale effect, starting at one side or end and work your way across or down. Being an awkward a**ehole, I like to do my favourite one, that is starting in the middle and by swapping from side to side, eventually get to the outer edge. I prefer this one as it gives a more even holographic effect than the fishscale one, when viewed from certain angles.
This is where my little book comes in, I find the centre of the plate, and draw up a diagram of the pattern and offsets. Doing it this way, I can always refer back for my offsets and put my mind straight again. A quick calculation and I am back on course.

'Scratcher' centred up on the job, and aligned with the end of the plate.
Notice how close it is set to the plate, about 0.100"(1/10"). This allows the handle to be moved down with a couple of fingers pressure. I do a constant count that is dependent on a test scratch on a similar piece of material. I found on this plate, down with slight pressure on the plate, count to four, release. That will be constant throughout the whole exercise.

Zero, zero, and that is my datum set up for the whole job. Everything from now on works from that point. The Y will always be a multiple of 0.250"(1/4"), the start of each alternate row will be either a full half inch number or a quarter inch number, followed by half inch spacing. I start at the same end for each row, but you could just put in your sideways and endways offset, and go back up the row. But you must remember that each row either side of centre, should be started at the same end as the opposite one the other side of centre. Confusing isn't it? Now you see why I am totally brain dead.

This is the first run from datum to the other end with a 1/2" pitch.
Before going further, I will explain about lubrication, if you are using this dry stick method. Without lubrication, the stick will quickly burn out and erode away.
Eamon Keogh suggested to use WD40 as a lubricant, rather expensive if bought in the spray cans, and on this job I have used it for convenience. Normally I would make my own lubricant out of either white spirits or paraffin, with a dash of 3 in 1 oil, shaken not stirred. I usually paint a stripe of it down the line run and just go for it.
So using my pattern, wind back to the datum start.

Then put my offset in for the next run. The third run will be on the opposite side of centre and so on.

I had had enough by the time I got this far and couldn't concentrate any more, about two hours accurate work. I am lucky in that when I turn my machine off, the DRO remembers where it was, so I could pick up the job again anytime, as long as the plate wasn't moved out of the vice. If yours won't allow you to do that, or you are handballing it with the dials, you have two choices. Either carry on and finish it, or stop when you reach a known datum, and write it down, then restart on the known datum of where you stopped.
This pic looks like a crap finish, engine turning never looks right in a straight on light.

This is what it looks like in oblique lighting, and shows the normal effect the eye would see.

There are very many ways of doing ET, from handballing with an electric drill, thru running down the edge of a ruler under a drill press chuck, to what I am doing here. None are wrong, if the effect suits yourself, it is correct.

Give it a quickie go, you just might impress yourself.

I will finish this job off when I can get back to it, and show you the finished result on my next post.

Bogs

 

[Twinsquirrel]

Superb, thanks for the run through John very detailed and enough info to get me started.

David

 

[BobWarfield]

Leave it to the English to have DRO doilies when doing a proper Victorian job of engine turning!

Bogs, nothing like some nice plumbing fixtures attached to the engine to give a bit of character too. Cylinder drain cocks and all that rot.

Cheers,

BW

 

[Mcgyver]

For our Imperial cousins, all measurements now will be in yards, furlongs and miles.

isn't that just saddest thing, that a Brit doesn't even take ownership of the imperial flag but relegates it to the colonies.... while they subordinate themselves and succumb to the french way of doing things. I really must get over and see the sites while they all still use soap ;D ;D

 

[Hilmar]

Zero, zero, and that is my datum set up for the whole job.

Hi Bogs what is with the "Ale " so early in the morning? ;D :

Hilmar

 

[Bogstandard]

David,

Glad it has helped.


Bob,

The Victorians were renowned for being perfectionists. The engine turners in those days most probably started their apprenticeship at eight years old, and for the rest of their miserable lives, they would do nothing more than scratch circles by hand and eye co-ordination. I think you might get rather good at it, after the first twenty or so years, after you were promoted from gruel to dry bread.

In my situation, when the brain is giving up, I need all the help I can get, and so I utilise whatever is available.

The plumbing bits are already waiting in the wings.


Mcgyver,

With myself being a bimeasurementalist (a Bush type of word, make it up if you need to), I thought that our colonies might need a bit of assistance with this one, as they seem to be incapable of understanding metric. It might be you all have twelve fingers instead of ten (all that interbreeding in the backwoods is no good for the general population), hence the problem with metric and not with imperial (I do hope you know that there are 12 inches in a foot, otherwise I am wasting my time).

We gave up a fair time ago on soap, we use blue wode now, and eat our enemy's offspring. We are reverting back to Celtic roots (that is of course, if the Scots, Irish and Welsh will let us, they have been back there for years now, and have really got it in for us former landlords).

Hilmar,

Being a coffetotaller, I am looking at a way for it to say 'break' or 'brew', and getting it to send a message to the better half that I am thirsty.


Bogs

 

[wareagle]

Bog,

It is so nice to see the Bling Team (AKA the Bling Faries) at work in your place!! Excellent tutorial as always. And a darn fine job on the base!!!

 

[Bogstandard]

Thanks W/E,

Making an engine is easy, finishing it off to a high standard, is a little more difficult.
In fact, most times, it takes more time to put a good finish on it, than it does to make the part.

This baseplate is a good example, I think it took me about three hours to hack it out to shape and get to a rough finished state. Up to now, with buffing and engine turning to this stage, about three hours, and maybe another couple to finish it off.

Some people like the rough machined finish, I personally prefer to go the whole hog. But it is very labour intensive.

John

 

[John S]

Soap is something you hide your valuables under.

.

 

[DickDastardly40]

Leave it to the English to have DRO doilies when doing a proper Victorian job of engine turning!

I think my Grandma would call that doilly an anti-maccassar, she used to have lacey ones over the backs of arm chairs so the fabric of the chair didn't get greasy from hair.

Always used to slip down especially when us kids would bounce on the chairs, looks like Bog's one is more useful.

 

[Bogstandard]

Leave it to the English to have DRO doilies

It has clicked now Bob, must get a new battery for the brain cell.
Now to answer your comment.
Unlike some of you airy fairy lathe jockeys who count the number of chips you make and account for every one, we uncouth Brits work so hard at making chips and getting the job done, we have to give the machinery as much protection as possible, especially when we are digging the machines out of the chippings with shovels.

Now back to the follow on from the last post.
I managed to get it completed, and have taken two photos to show the members what engine turning looks like under different lighting conditions.
This one was taken with the point source towards the bottom left. Notice the varying pattern, and compare it to the one below.

This is with a top right hand light source, notice how the pattern has totally changed.

If you can get this semi holographic pattern change when you carry out your ET, you are there, if it just turns out flat with a load of circles, you need to practice a little more.

For those in the UK, a squirt and polish with a bit of Mr Sheen (no I haven't got shares in it) will sparkle it up no end, and will keep all your shiny bits (engines, not bald heads) like this for months on end.

Bogs

 

[Divided He ad]

Sparkily 8) ;D 8)


I really think this engine it going to WOW when finished John




Ralph.

 

[Bogstandard]

Glad you are starting to see where I am coming from Ralph. Shiny, but classical bling, no difficult bits as yet.

I can only manage a couple of hours each time, hence the split post, but almost everything from now on should be completed in that time, except for the flywheels.


John

 

[Bogstandard]

Just a little bit more done in the cause of bling, but in this case, this is a tip that could be used almost anywhere where you wanted to give a part a bit more of a profile or just to brighten up a deadpan flat face.


My little standards come under that heading, deadpan and lifeless.
You will notice that it is a parallelogram (opposite sides parallel to each other), but this would work with almost anything that has a series of flat sides and could be held safely with the side to be cut against the fixed jaw.
All I have done is scribed a line parallel to each face, in my case 1/8" away from the face. Then set your cutter position at the dimension you have scribed plus half the cutter width away from the fixed jaw.

Then just mount the job into the vice with the face you want to cut parallel to against the fixed jaw. Plunge in and cut across until the cutter edge just splits the line from the adjacent face at both ends. Move around to the adjacent face and repeat the process.

I couldn't go too deep with the cutter because there are a series of holes thru the standard, and I have yet to put a groove into the centre of the angled ends.
I have put a bit of felt tip into the groove to show the effect. After all is smoothed out (bottom of the grooves) and filled with correct enamel paint, they will look much better than this.

Bogs

 

[wareagle]

Bog,

Your ET turned out great! You do make it look easy, but in practice it is a tad bit of a black art. ET is that type of thing that takes practice and "feel" to get right, and you have it!! :bow:

Thanks for sharing your progress, and it is good to see you playing with machinery!

 

[Bogstandard]

W/E,

I honestly think that peoples biggest mistake when doing engine turning, boils down to two things, they rush into it, then rush to get it finished.

If you haven't got the patience to sort your materials out correctly, then as I said, a constant count, then you will end up with 'orrible squiggles on a plate.

That little bit that I have just completed, which is maybe 6" x 4", took nearly four hours to get laid down, and three of those little bobs. But if done correctly will look like that for a lifetime.

You can now see why some people can make a living at it, it is a very labour intensive and time consuming process. Hence they can basically charge whatever they want for doing it.

John

 

[Blogwitch]

After searching for a while, I managed to find this old post that needed to be finished off.

Unfortunately, I cannot work at the same pace as I used to, so this might take a fairly long time.

I had a chat to Chuck in one of his posts, and said that I would show how this engine is progressing.

Because I had been playing with these bits for the last couple of weeks and not taken any shots, I have had to set up some of the early shots, and explain what I did. The only recent bits to be done are the last few pics.

This is what the engine looks like now, recently retrieved from deep storage on a top shelf, where all the other bits I need to finish off are kept.

I am now working on the flywheels, so you will need to look further back in this post to see what they originally looked like.

After the trials of the engine, it was noted that a heavier wheel was required, so instead of making a new pair, I decided to put an outer rim on the old ones.

Divided Head (Ralph) had given me a piece of cast steel that was used for a counterweight on garage doors, very similar to a sash weight, but about four times the size, and ten times more difficult to machine.
This was an ideal use for it, because it wouldn't be much use for other more critical items. So this is a pic after the outer skin had been removed off a section of it.

The first thing to be done was to part off a couple of roughly 1/4" thick discs. One was then turned down on the OD until it was just a little bit smaller than the OD of the original wheels, and then machined down to exactly 1/8" thickness.

Two rim widths were cut off and set up in the soft jawed chuck. They were turned to exactly 1/4" wider than the original flywheel rims and bored out to 1 or 2 thou smaller than the old rim diameter.

Using the smaller disc as a spacer inside the outer rim, the two parts were pressed together. This gave me an assembly where the inner rim was exactly in the centre of the outer rim, and ran perfectly true to the old spindle bore.

Because the original spokes were fairly thin, I decided to give the flywheels a little extra 'look', dished spokes and offset rims. It is only a small detail, very difficult to see at a quick glance, but it is those little bits that set it apart from the norm when someone is really eyeballing one of your engines over.

So a little slug was turned up that fitted the 6mm centre bore and was then fitted into a collet on the mill. Then it was just a matter of putting the 'press together' spacer inside the assembly, to stop things moving about, then with a gentle push down, the spokes were dished inwards until the central boss came into contact with the vice top. Both were done the same way.

This is the effect it gave.

So then back onto the lathe, still using the soft jaws, I machined all the inside edges of the original brass flywheel rims with a curved form tool

Now comes the time for bling, removing ALL machining marks. I start off initially with a hard sponge back emery block, then go slightly softer, and eventually end up with wire wool. It is this part that takes the time.

So this is the stage they are up to. They are nowhere near finished yet. They need a little more smoothing off, only then will they be polished. That comes a little later, just before the engine is on final assembly.

It might be a few more weeks before anything else gets done on this engine, so don't hold your breath.


Blogs

 

[NickG]

Nice work Blogs, they are two of the best looking flywheels I have seen :bow:

 

[SAM in LA]

Blogs,

I look forward to reading your posts.

I always learn something new.

:bow:

The dished spokes are clever.

Thank you for sharing.

SAM

 

[Blogwitch]

Many thanks gents.

I am sorry to say that I don't think I explained the use of the spacer disc well enough, so I have done a C-o-C (a coloured version) to show how it was used, and hope that clears up any confusion that might arise.

I would also like to point out that I will not be doing the large posts as I used to. Mainly I will be trying to assist other people if I can with their projects, if they want me to, also using archive footage from my own collection, or posts that have been lost in time on here, not just mine, but other peoples as well, if needed.

My personal circumstances have changed dramatically over the last few months, and I am now not capable of spending so much time in my shop. Sometimes it can be days or even weeks at a time before I can get in there.


Blogs