restore – Page 2 – Twisted and Delusional

Keeping Busy…

Posts have been few and far between since I have a few irons in the fire. I’m working on some emblems for a Datsun, the garden, finding rural property, a 3d printer build, and the usual clock and watch stuff. Yet, I still hear the question asked, “but you couldn’t find just a few moments to post…..?”

Lol.

The garden is growing well. I’ll post about that some other time. This year it’s garlic, tomatoes, corn, pole beans, squash, watermelon, and the usual herbs. The coffee is doing good, saw flowers for the first time this year but I’m not holding any hope for fruit.

I’m going to make this a quick post, so here’s a bunch of pics of the Datsun emblem progress. I’ve made a mold of the original and cast the first ‘waste’ piece from the mold. Now I need to cast a good piece to modify it the way the owner wants it.

On an interesting side note, I made some replica ‘Barracuda’ emblems for a friends car he was restoring. He only had a single good emblem and needed at least a pair for his car. The car has gone on to take many awards and is now in a recent Mopar magazine. The emblems are still on it, lol. Some pics of the reproduction emblems.

Complete, right down to the production numbers on the back and the company logo.

I also decided to challenge myself with an odd project. I purchased a large box of clockworks from ebay to have damaged clock parts to practice repairs on. 5 lbs of clock parts…… lol.

Also in that box was a severely unloved little clock movement that was almost complete, so I dug around and found a couple pieces that could make it complete with some ‘re-purposing’.

Someone has tried to ‘repair’ this movement previously. Here is a pic of one such ‘repair’.

Yup, a watch gear messily soldered to the back of the plate and drilled to make a pivot hole. didn’t even bother to file down the mess, unbelievable. Man is this thing full of gunk and dirt. I think they dipped it in clock oil and then left it in a dust-bunny colony.

A run through the parts baths make a big difference, check out the clean gears in the back compared to the still dirty gear in the front. Soon I’ll have the whole thing cleaned and ready to unsolder that hack job and do a real repair to the plate.

Ok, enough for now. I’ll post again when I can find the time.

Old Radio success…..

Nothing shows proof like a short video. The oscillating coil works and the radio lives! The coil is a 3RT-319A out of an Emerson BJ-200.

More coil winding…

The wire came in so time to continue this experiment. I finished unwinding the second of three coils on this item. The third coil is looking good on the meter and shows no signs of rot, so I will leave it and save Louis some tuning work. The outer coil was that mangled mess, so no chance of counting windings as I pulled it apart, but the second coil ( post 5 to 4 in my diagram) was in good shape other than the breaks in the wire and I got a good count off of it. It was post 4: -> 5 winds up, 6th is a gap transition, and 7 to 43.5 where it drops back into the middle hole and goes internally to post5. After cleaning up all the oxide and applying a little bees wax I can start winding.

I started from the middle hole and worked my way back to post 4, that way I could keep the windings of coil 2 up tight against the remaining coil 3 just like it came from the factory. winding on this coil goes in the direction of the new wire, left in this pic. A few minutes of work making sure its all snug and I eneded up with this….

Mmmmmm hmmmm, thats nice and pretty. You can see the transition winding (number 6) in the gap between the new windings. In case anyone is wondering, I measured the gap that winding number 6 jumps as 0.088″ between winding number 7 and number 5. A quick application of some Kapton tape to keep the windings safe and insulate them from coil 1 which wraps over the top and I can start on getting coil number 1 started.

Since I couldn’t count the number of winds because this was the ‘Medusa nest’ seen in the first post, I assumed that the wire was still it’s original length and was once nicely wound. So I took all the broken pieces and cut a piece of new wire the same length as all of them added together and wound it nicely starting from where the remaining original coil started and see where it gets us. The final count is 47 winds on this coil. Time to hand it to Louis and see if the radio will tune up properly with the rebuilt assembly.

I’ll keep you all posted on the results………….

I’m back… and old radio parts

Ok, first post since returning from a trip all the way across the states…… and I’m not posting about the trip. I know, big disappointment, but I will post about it soon. Just not now.

So dont ask when I will.

Right now I’m more interested in posting about a little experiment I have going on. A friend has an Emerson BJ-200 radio that doesn’t work because the oscillating coil is busted. I wind coils, so I thought “Hey, what the heck it’s already broke, right?” The last time I thought that it didn’t turn out so well, repairing cell phones while intoxicated was a bad thing, but I still bust out with a smile everytime I think about it.

So, no drinking during this attempted repair.

My friend Louis (who is repairing the radio) pulled the coil out for me to repair. I couldn’t believe what he handed me, it looked like this….

What the hell is that mess about half way up the coil? I mean really people, it shouldn’t look like a fishing reel after my ex-girlfriend tried her first cast. All of that should be nice and orderly, smooth layers of even windings. So, either this radio saw a REALLY bad day or someone else has been playing with this. I started deconstruction of the coil to see where everything was loosing connection. I had a pretty good idea where some of it would be when I saw the the green death-rot on some of the exposed windings.

See that ugly little bit of green on there? That is the pure copper wire turning into oxide powder. Oxide powder doesn’t conduct, it just crumbles into dust and leaves a gap where wire should be. I needed to look deeper so I did, and found more rot.

Mmmmm. Tasty, like licking a penny when that green rot-powder starts floating through the air. And yes, this is where all the problems are at. Time to order some of the proper size wire and get to winding. So, as soon as I get the wire I just ordered in the mail we will continue this experiment and see if we can get the radio to work again.

Continuing work part 3

It was another productive weekend in the garage/shop. I’ve been needing to get the valve work finished on the Fairbanks-Morse motor so I decided to tackle that. I wasn’t comfortable with the bronze valve guide expansion rate in the cast iron when heating while running. We used Bronze valve guides in the cast iron heads when I worked for Harley, but replacement heads are easier to find for old Harleys than they are for this engine. So, I made a new set of guides in cast iron, to go in the cast iron head, and everything should expand approximately the same and nothing should crack. I won’t go into the making of the guides as the machining is the same as the bronze guides. After the guide is cut then the head needs to go on the mill table and be prepared for machining the previous guide hole to accept the new guide.

The head is locked to the table and I have chucked a piece of material in the spindle that is the same size as the old valve guide bore. This is my home-brew way of aligning the work piece to the mill machine, and it works good enough for this kind of work. I keep adjusting the mill table until the chucked material moves freely in whatever I am trying to align.

Once it’s a free slip vertically in the hole, I consider it aligned and its on to the next step. Make sure you use a straight piece of material in the spindle, otherwise your hole will still be off. Next I removed the locating piece and chucked up a 21/32″ HSS drill bit and started roughing the bore in.

I always take it easy when starting a hole in soft material like cast iron with a large bit like this. It’s too easy for one of the drill bit flutes to bite and ‘grab’ the work, pulling the drill bit off center and throwing off the bore. It goes against proper machine work, but I kick the spindle speed up really high and then lightly ‘peck’ at the hole a few times to get the bore started and just below the surface. Then I slow the bit down to proper cutting speed and cut at normal feeds/speed. In the above pic the bore looks centered and it’s cutting good.

Done with the drilling portion and there is a nice even amount of material still left around the hole. Hit it pretty dead on center and I’m happy. Now I need to ream it to final size. Since the reamers I have are of different types, chucking and hand reamers, I sometimes have to get creative about how to ream a hole. I would prefer to have all chucking reamers so I can just drop the drill bit out, chuck up the reamer and keep everything concentric, but my budget isn’t going to allow that. Lol

So here is how I keep my hand reamers in line and concentric. I have a brass center I turned up and mount it in a collet, which sets in the pilot hole in the back of the reamer. I use small amounts of manual down feed to keep the center ‘locked’ into the pilot and then turn the reamer with a wrench till it feels free in it’s rotation. Apply a little more down feed and repeat. It’s slow but it works.

You also get a visual indicator when the reamer is through the material. That concludes the work needed on the head until it’s time to insert the new guide. The next step is to take measurements from the hole that you just made in the head, and a measurement from the outside diameter of the guide that will go in the freshly made hole. The reamer finishes a hole to 0.6875″ and the outside of my guide was at 0.710″. I turned down the outside of the guide for a proper interference fit of 0.0015″ larger than the hole. I then put a chamfer on one outside edge of the guide, put a tiny bit of high pressure lube ont it and checked the fit.

Well, that looks about right. Feels about right. Astute readers will see a line cut toward the top of the guide. I part most of the way through the guide at total length plus about 1/8″, it comes in handy during the install of the guide. Time to smack it a few times with the hammer and see how it seats.

Almost fully inserted to depth, you can see how much is left thanks to the groove that is cut. Now the lube isn’t on the portion that is driving into the head and there is more resistance to the guide going in the hole. If I got everything right, just about the time it gets to the right depth…..

Perfect. The valve seated to depth and the last tap with the hammer caused the groove to fracture, leaving about 1/8″ standing proud over the hole. Now the head goes back over to the mill table.

A nice pic of the guide and you can see the parting line where the top snapped off. I like to finish this off in the mill with a cutter to bring the guide flush with the old castings, making everything look nice and neat.

That takes care of the outside of the guide, the inside is already done, and we are finished with using machines to do the work. From here on out, it’s all by hand and feel just like I was taught.

A quick run of the reamer through the guide to make sure any burrs or debris is clear of the hole and I can slide the new valves into the head. The valves look and feel good, I get a satisfying whump when they drop into place, the sound that says they will take just a little lapping to seal up good and tight. The sound you dont want to hear is a tinny ring when you drop the valve in the hole. That ringing means some part of the valve isn’t seated against the head. Final pics before lapping the valves.

Continuing work part 2

I did quite a bit this weekend and didn’t think to get any pics of it. Just for the fun of seeing how it would turn out I stared the fermentation of 15lbs of red flame raisins in my main fermenter. It’s just the raisins, a couple pounds of sugar for starter, and the yeast. I’ll post more on it when I get the first taste and see if it was worth it. I also worked on the cast iron treadle base from the table project. I tried to braze one of the cracks but couldn’t get enough heat for the rod to stick and silver solder didn’t like the cast iron. I may have to get a specialty braze for it. The mead is still giving the occasional bubble in the water lock, so the ferment isn’t done yet. I am looking forward to pulling that batch and getting the first taste once it’s done, I’ll be posting that moment for everyone. And I spent Saturday morning partly on my Kenwood TS430S radio talking to people on 40m Ham bands and partly playing my bagpipes.

Yes, you read that right. Bagpipes.

I began the machining of a new valve guide for my 1929 Fairbanks-Morse hit-miss engine in part one HERE. It’s a couple weeks later and I felt like spending some more time on it, so here is the next bit in it’s making.

The inner bore where the valve itself rides is done, now I need to turn the outside down to be an interference fit with the reamed hole in the cylinder head. An interference fit means that the part to go in the hole will be just slightly larger than the hole itself so that the parts ‘wedge’ themselves together. They have to be a tight enough fit that when they get hot from running the engine, and expand at different rates, that they stay ‘wedged’. This also means that I have to turn the whole length of the guide to size, and I cant grab on to it with the chuck in the usual manner, instead I’ll have to hold the work piece from the inside while I machine the outside.

In the picture above you see the valve guide in the middle with and expanding lap on the left and a ‘live’ tailstock center on the right. The expanding lap goes into the guide bore and the center does the same from the other side. The pointy part of the center is mounted in bearings that allow it to rotate with the part it is contact with, thats why it’s called a ‘live’ center, it moves. All together in the lathe it looks like this.

Now that it is all in place it’s just a simple matter of turning the outside diameter down to size. Any machinists out there who look at the next picture, yes, I know that I’m cutting using the back side of the insert and it isn’t proper. I did it on purpose because there is just enough ‘spring’ in the insert holder that running the cut backwards gives a smoother finish. And since I need a fine finish for the press in fit, it works for me.

And the guide all finished inside and out, ready to be sized to length and pressed into the cylinder head.

Watch Bench

It’s another post from the watch bench, continuing on with the Lord Elgin watch. In the last post about this watch I disassembled it and put a new mainspring in the barrel, and you can see that post here.

This is the plate that most everything else in the watch movement attaches to. It has gone through the ultrasonic cleaner a couple times and a quick look at the jewels show they all look good, meaning there aren’t any cracks or jagged edges in the holes to damage any pivots that will be running in them. The next step is to put the gears (gear train) into the watch without breaking anything. This is a bit of a challenge for me still since it involves putting 4 small gears and a toggle into those jewels with steel pivots about the thickness of a human hair. Once you have them kind of aligned, you have to put a ‘bridge’ or support for the top of the gears in place aligning all the tiny pivots into the bridge.

In the animation above (if I remembered where I got this from I would note it here, but I don’t) you can see how the balance swings back and forth toggling the pallet with its two jewel fingers allowing the escape wheel to release one tooth at a time. I will be installing the jeweled pallet and escape wheel first.

Time to give it a shot.

Do you see the piece that was added in the picture above? If not, I dont blame you the part is about 3mm long and just under 3mm wide. Here is the same pic with the pallet and fork highlighted.

The pallet has it’s own cock to hold it in place, so that goes on next. It’s crucial to make sure that the top pinion on the pallet seats securely in the pallet cock and that the pallet swings freely from side to side against the banking pins.

The shiny plate with a jewel over the pallet is the pallet cock. It is in place, secured down, and the pallet swings freely. To make sure I installed it correctly I place the escape wheel in it’s spot and do a quick inspection of the pallet jewel clearances.

Now for the rest of the gears.

First off to get installed is the center wheel, which is what the minute hand attaches to, and turns one complete revolution every minute if all is installed correctly.

With the pinion from the center wheel protruding out of the other side I need to use a movement holder so I dont do damage to the shaft. Then I can install the third wheel next to, and under, the center wheel.

And finally the fourth wheel is installed connecting the escape wheel to the rest of the gear train. So far, so good, but next is the tricky part. Now I have to install the bridge on top of these gears and get the pinions you can see on the top of each gear lined up in its jewel hole.

There it is. Gear train and bridge is installed. I use a slight pressure from my tweezers to shift the center wheel back and forth to make sure the gears all move freely and nothing is binding.

As a side note, while I worked on this part of the watch I realized I am completely out of my home made raspberry mead. This is completely unacceptable and the next post will probably be this weekend with details of how to make your own raspberry mead. Raspberry mead… watches…. now all I need is a spirited red-headed woman for company….. lmao!

Time spent at the watch bench

Watch repair is different than time spent at the jeweler bench. Both are nice, but usually I’m in the mood for one or the other and last night I was in watch mode. Currently I have two watches and a clock in the works, one is a Rolex in for a cleaning for a friend but I didn’t want to deal with the stress of expensive stuff, so I grabbed the other watch which is a Lord Elgin I bought off ebay. Overall, it’s a nice mens watch with good lines on the case but I don’t like the Speidel band and the face is a little worn. So, off the shelf and onto the bench. A few minutes later and I have it broke down to start the cleaning and repair work.

You can see the typical lines of a 1940-50’s watch, streamline with a certain understated elegance. I still don’t like the band though, I’m thinking a nice leather on would be better. The face looks ok in that pic, it’s not till you get up close that you start to see the effects that time and carelessness have had on it. Take a look at this closer pic.

Now you can see around the edges of the face where the finish is blistered and missing from wear against the case and lack of cleaning. I have a feeling that some of it is caused by body oil/sweat getting into the case and finding its way onto the dial. Either way, something will have to be done with it. The case itself is in good shape and should clean up nicely with a light polishing and buff.

Enough with the cosmetics, time to get to the cleaning. Someone sold the watch on ebay because it would not run. It was wound tight, you couldn’t wind it more, but you could still set the time by pulling out the stem. When I received the watch I popped open the back and could see that the balance swung freely, and it wasn’t loose, but it would only swing about 7 times and slowly come to a stop. The balance is what causes the ‘tick tick tick’ noise in a watch by swinging back and forth and tripping the escape. Hmmm, might be nothing more than a worn out mainspring not having much ‘spring’ left to it. So, lets take a look at it.

The spring is out, and it looks like maybe someone has put a spring in it before. That spring isn’t a DuraPower spring that was used at the factory, wrong color and it has the wrong curve. Seeing the spring out does confirm one of my suspicions though, this spring appears to have taken a ‘set’, it no longer has much strength due to the fact that it wants to stay coiled up on itself. The package next to the spring is a factory replacement spring, new-old-stock, from my collection of parts. Heres what a factory DuraPower spring looks like next to the old one I removed.

Quite a difference, eh? Normally I wouldn’t unwind a spring from a package like this, but it helps you to see what a new spring looks like and how much more open the coils are. The other pieces in that picture are the spring barrel (brass, top middle) that the spring is wound into, the barrel arbor (steel, top middle) which transfers the spring’s power to the watch, and the barrel cover (brass, middle right) which caps the spring in the barrel and keeps the arbor centered.

So how do I get that long spring wound into the barrel without bending it, going insane, and raving like a lunatic? I use a spring winder. I found an old set after trying to install springs by hand, which is about as easy as wrangling two wet and angry cats into a small burlap sack. (I should have taken pictures of my hands after trying to install springs without a winder, you would have thought I had actually tried the cat thing). I’ll show you the spring winder using the old spring…

After you determine which way the spring needs to be would for the watch you are working on, you put the inner eye of the spring on one of the winding mandrels. This locks the inner coil of the spring to the winder mandrel just like on the watch barrel arbor.

Still holding the mandrel with the spring on it, we take the other half of the winder and place it’s four ‘fingers” over the spring and allow the excess spring to hang out of the winder between any two ‘fingers’. Enlarge the pic above to see the details.

Then you turn the mandrel or the other half of the tool to wind the spring inside the four fingers of the tool. If you do it right then it looks like the pic above with the spring all coiled up and ready to install. The fingers are adjusted before you wind the spring to just fit inside the spring barrel so that the tools with a wound spring can be inserted into the barrel. A button on the back of the tool allows you to slowly press the spring out of the tool and into the spring barrel just as nice as can be.

And there is the spring nicely installed into the spring barrel with the barrel arbor installed into the eye of the spring. All that is left is to put the barrel arbor cap on top and move on to the next item on our cleaning/repair. For those that repair watches, I used Novastar winding grease on the mainspring before installing, I haven’t found any definitive proof on using grease with DuraPower springs but I also haven’t seen an Elgin document that says not to.

Next comes the gear train that takes the power from the spring and makes it a time keeping device. the gears went in to the ultrasonic cleaner three times (cleaner, pre-rinse, rinse) and came out looking really nice. All the old oils and dirt are cleaned off so we won’t have any gummy residue from previous servicing, and no dust to combine with new oils and make abrasive paste. Here is a picture to show you the size of the gears in this watch.

That was the extent of the work last evening, since I had a few other things I wanted to do like look at the 400 ft of different colored pyro fuse USPS dropped off earlier, and clean some ammo casings since I had the ultrasonic cleaner out……

Continuing work….

Last night before I fell asleep the thought crossed my mind to bring the materials and tools for a valve guide I need to make to work with me. This morning I miraculously remembered to bring the tools and materials, and today at lunch I began the construction of the second valve guide for my dad’s Fairbanks-Morse hit and miss engine. I had already made a set of guides from cast iron to go in the cast iron head. Those guides didn’t work out, so I decided to try bronze this time since I have successfully used bronze guides in cast iron Harley heads when I worked for a dealership. And since I need stuff to blog about, you can suffer through it with me….. lol.

That’s a 1″ diameter chunk of solid bronze rod all ready for me to abuse it and coerce it into some kind of usable object. to begin i need to put it in the lathe and turn one of the ends flat. The process of turning on of the ends flat is called ‘facing’, probably because we are dressing up the ‘face’ of the material. When done it looks like this

The next thing to do is to make a dimple in the exact center of the area I cleaned up so that when I go to drill through the material the drill bit stays centered. It may seem weird to think that a drill bit almost 1/2″ in diameter would flex and drill off center, but they do. It’s a strange thing to see in person, but I have and it will mess up whatever you are working on really quick. So, out comes the center drill (funny they would name the tool that) and I get it set in the tailstock chuck. Center drills look a little odd, not like a regular drill bit.

The shape gives the tool extra strength so it won’t flex or move, perfect for doing it’s intended job.

Now I can run a drill down the center of the bronze and get the bore for my valve opened up. Pop the center drill out of the tailstock chuck, get a 27/64″ drill bit in there instead and start drilling!

Wait….. WTF?!?! Really? Dammit! Remember what I said about drills wandering earlier? That is just what happened. The drill bit is a little bent, not enough you can see it but enough that it is cutting off center and leaving a little cone of material right in the middle where there should be a hole. Now I have to center drill the mistake out and try with another 27/64″ drill bit.

The ‘cone’ in the middle is removed, borrowed a bit from one of my co-workers, let’s try drilling that bore again.

Oh yeah, now we are getting somewhere. It took another 15 minutes to get this hole all the way through the rod. You can’t rush this kinda thing or you break tools, machinery, and parts in a very impressive way. Usually the results of carelessness or ignorance is a shower of drill bit shrapnel, broken or badly damaged drill chuck, and a mangled part with some of the drill bit still stuck in it. All that accompanied by a sound like a large firecracker going off. Overall, not a pleasant experience and I’ve had my share.

The hole is rough, and it’s still slightly undersized by design. The next step it to use a reamer to make the hole a precise size and make it smooth through the entire bore. I have a chucking reamer for this purpose and it goes in the tailstock chuck where the drill bit was. By doing all of these steps without taking the material out of the machine I have the best chance of keeping all the separate tools traveling down the same path to make the hole, and keeping the hole kinda precise.

Dang, lunch break is over. This will have to be continued in another post…..

More antiques

Well, I bought some more orphans. I have a bunch of orphans actually. Due to the ‘gold for cash’ craze lately, people are selling off every heirloom they can find for scrap and that includes old mechanical watches. I really (honestly) don’t understand selling a 100 year old mechanical device simply for a few dollars of gold, but since people do, the people who buy the scrap strip the gold (usually the case) and throw away the insides (usually damaging them in the process). Every so often a group of movements (what the mechanical inside of the watch is called) comes up for sale and I just can let them go in the trash or be destroyed by some Steampunk fool who has only a passing visual appreciation for the engineering and skill that went into these marvels. My latest collections of orphans…

The majority of these movements were made before 1924, running a basic serial number shows that one of them was produced in 1887 according to factory records. That one watch is 128 years old and has been around long enough to pass through the turning of two century marks (1900 and 2000). That one watch was created in a world powered by steam power, 16 years before man’s flight at Kittyhawk in 1903, before Henry Ford invented the Model T, and only a handful of years after Edison patented the lightbulb. And someone sold it for scrap to be melted down.

That is a pic of the back plate of the movement, with the Elgin name and the serial number in case you wanted to look up the year for yourself. As far as decoration goes, this isn’t a very pretty or detailed backplate, not like the later Elgin watches, but it is beautiful in its simple way. All of the gears and engineering were made on a factory floor that looks primitive to today’s standards and each watch was fitted and assembled by hand. Here’s a pic of the Hampden watch factory floor from around 1867 or so.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, I put a few winds on the mainspring and it runs very nicely for 128 years old. The later watches had more detail to the plates, with fancy engraved fonts for the lettering and engine turned embellishments. Some examples….

Elgin SN: 10398880 – Year 1903

Elgin SN:27650937 – Year 1924

Waltham SN:13844616 – Year 1890

I don’t just save pocket watches either, I have several early women’s wrist watches, some of which I managed to save before the cases were scrapped. Overall, I have WAY more uncased movements than cased, but over time I plan on finding or making replacement cases. One of my favorite ‘saves’ from the women’s collection is this.

It’s an early Benrus watch from the late 1920’s in the original case with the original crystal. I can’t tell if the crystal has aged to yellow over time, or if it came with a ‘fancy’ yellow crystal that has faded. I can’t see why anyone would put a yellow crystal over the face though, since the silver and enamel work is rich in color when seen without the yellow tint.

All in all, this is probably enough for one post. In a follow up post I’ll go into more detail about preserving and fixing the watches and movements I have collected. Heck, if your lucky I might post a pic of my workbench and let you see whats in my drawers…..

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: