Adam Savage's One Day Builds: Giant Nut and Bolt!

hey everybody adam savage here in my cave with another one day build uh and this one we're doing some skill expansion today we're trying something i have not done before very much at all okay uh so to give some context a little while ago i turned my portable bandsaw into a benchtop little bandsaw and during the the filming i was taking a bolt and machining it and threading its end to be a smaller type of bolt and i was saying on camera oh i could cut these threads with the lathe but that's a little more involved than i can do and the fact is i know how to thread on the lathe i've just not done it a ton and i'm not super comfortable with it well today we're going to be using the thread cutting ability of this beautiful tool because i'm going to take this chunk of brass and i'm going to make one of these but i'm gonna make it really really large this will be really fun there's actually a really good reason to do a project like this for your own portfolio and i will explain if you come to me with a a book full of things that you've made that you've also designed i know that you think you're showing me the interviewer what you can do but what you really want to do in an interview is you not only want to show what you can do you want to show what you can do for the person interviewing you and as someone who hires people when you show me a bunch of work that you've designed and built i don't know what you started with as a as a goal so i don't know how close you got to that goal these beautiful found object pieces you show me this random interview interviewee that they show me they might be gorgeous but i i don't know how hard or easy it was for them to make so if you put something in your portfolio that the person interviewing you knows exactly what it should look like well now you've actually you've made real progress so if you bring to me uh a giant brass nut and bolt then hell's bells margaret i know that you know how to replicate something exactly and i can see the fidelity that you brought to bear on this project so this actually a really good reason to explore things like this it's a big dumb nut and bolt sure but um yeah it's actually a really good explanation of the technical skill base of the person who made it here's what i want to do this is my biggest chunk of brass that i have in the shop it is two and three quarter inches in diameter and even though it has a hole in either end uh it is about let's see that's just about half an inch and that's about three quarters of an inch let's see here yeah i get about looks like i would be able to get about a five five inch bolt and a single nut out of this chunk but i want to follow this exactly uh i want to follow its proportions and its dimensions of the threads etc so i'm going to do a little bit of math right now so let's see here all right uh so we're gonna have a bolt that's a nut and then we're going to have okay so a b c a equals b equals c equals as 2.75 2.75 over i need three dimensions so 2.75 uh and the original is 0.85 okay we have our marching orders we have some marks on the brass that i think get me a reasonable size bolt let's get to machining i think the very first thing i need to do to this is actually cut the hexagon out of uh cut six flats off of this two and three quarter inch rod of brass in order to make the hexagonal top of the bolt and to do that i'm actually going to use a dividing head and a tail stock i have a tail stock for my dividing head but i've never used it that's got to be the the very first step i want i uh yeah yeah yeah this is tricky i haven't been working this large is uh non-trivial get started so this here is that's my dividing head it's got a four jaw self-centering chuck here uh this is the tail stock and the plan is to take this hunk of brass slip it in there brace it with the tail stock once i've clamped it in and then turn this every uh 60 degrees to mill the flats for the hex head on this however this is too wide for that so first i have to chuck this into the lathe and mill down its other side a little bit to be able to be held by these chuck jaws i think they go to just a shade i think they're two and a half and i have two and three quarters so i have to just take a quarter inch off of that um once i have that all balanced and everything i'll throw an indicator on it to make sure everything is perfectly horizontal and perpendicular and square and linear etcetera all right so i've i've hit a snag and that the tail stock of my lathe decided to crap the bed uh at the little bolt it uses to tighten up against the rails of my lathe so i got to fix that first might take me a few minutes so uh i've got my big piece of brass turned down this will be the threaded part that will be the top of the bolt that will be the nut i'm going to mill the hex on the big nut and bolt part all at once i've included some relief here for the other side of the threads as i cut them i may make that relief a little deeper later but we will see uh and right now i'm about to chuck it right into this guy yeah i know i said it was only going to take off a little bit and then i realized i could turn this down to its uh critical dimension and then i'm good yeah all right so now uh it's time to mill these flats now i have turned down the six hexagonal sides they are nice and smooth i got this really nice new facing head and i'm really happy with it i am going to take this out of here and chuck it into the lathe and start to work on the threads for this guy so a cursory view of my rotary head and steady rest make it clear what i've got going on the rotary head here can turn anywhere from horizontal to vertical in any angle in between i can read that angle here i would probably if it was mission critical confirm it with a sign plate i have my whole pattern here uh for doing gear divisions right now this sits on the three part of it one two three block so three inches off the ground and that allows my steady rest to be dead center now my steady rest isn't necessarily perfectly 100 dead center but that's okay because i just needed it to be the steadying force uh it's really like the amount of force on this cutter on these faces is quite large and so you bolt everything down to uh to eliminate all that chatter i love this dividing head i'm really pleased with its compact size and well the more i work with the lathe the more i really like using all the clamp down systems okay so i have my bolt flushed out here again this is going to be both the head of the bolt and the nut but i'm keeping them together for right now actually it may almost be time for me to to cut them apart at any rate very soon i'm going to cut these two things apart i'll hollow out the inside of the nut and then it is time to cut the threads on the bolt and when i did the math between a half inch bolt at 13 threads per inch to a 1.6 inch bolt i get four threads per inch now let me show you how a machine lathe cuts a specific number of threads per inch okay so these are all the knobs and levers for adjusting the speed of my lathe now up here i've got your main speeds x w zy and i have a chart here that shows me what those speeds are and i can change those speeds high or low depending on what material i'm working with and how much i'm cutting them but when i want to do thread cutting on there i am going to go for this chart now i said i want four threads per inch so i look up four threads per inch and it is right there and there's a code to the right and it says hb7p so there's h let's see okay we're set at h b oh we're already on seven great and p as for this guy i don't think this really matters what all of these do is they actually adjust how do i sit how do i put this okay um inside this carriage is a half a pair of half nuts that will grab this lead screw so if i'm spinning it and i oh yeah i don't wanna hold on thread cutting and having the settings wrong is absolutely the way you can crash your machine and you don't want to crash your machine so i'm going to run it really slow there we go okay so now i'm running it in turtle mode super slow and you'll see what happens this lead screw is turning and when i push this lever down it moves the carriage yeah and it moves the carriage exactly the distance for cutting four threads per inch i know that's abstract you'll understand it when i'm actually doing it in person i have the the what do you call it the base platform for the nut and i've got the bolt so uh now i'm going to face the back of the bolt make it the same size as the nut and then i will chuck it in and cut the threads on this once i have the threads cut for this then i can cut the internal threads for the nut okay uh here's the magic time i am about to set up to cut threads on this lathe uh that is me having set very carefully this 60 degree cutter so that it is perfectly square with my work uh i will now go through the process of oh ah that's not gonna work right i see so i won't get all the way there i have to come out a little bit nope so the whole thing about cutting threads is that you do it slowly and piecemeal pass by pass so there ah okay i think i have a thing i can do here oh no i can't wait a second okay so here's what i've got i've got a 60 degree cutter perfectly aligned perpendicularly with the work this is what's going to be the threaded bolt and i've got my half nut locked on the gear train so when i turn the machine on you should see this thing cut a little line all the way across and that line should be four threads per inch so here we go now you see it's cutting the same line it was cutting before yep and this is it you just keep on cutting yup that's how thread cutting works yup seems like 20 thousandths is about the sweet spot yeah okay i got greedy here's what happens when you get greedy on the lathe you try to take off too much material with each bass i'm gonna stop being greedy my big bolt was marred the sides of it were marred in that accident on the late the late is fine i'm fine i was going very slow i'm re-cutting it now i'm doing it like tenth hour to pass going very calm get back into it so this is day two of this one day build and the shop as you can see is a little bit of a mess and that describes the state of my head as well um i i'm pushing my skill limit and when you do that it's when you make the mistakes that are useful right like they're not pleasant but everyone makes them right so i'm trying to thread this big brass bolt and look this looks really good it didn't feel really good yesterday when i screwed it up repeatedly um and it feels like this this is complicated right i'm not happy with how this went yesterday um but i can see that i will end up with something beautiful i i will tell you one thing i have learned there's a there's a thing that people who work with metal often say about brass is that it's often they say brass is really grippy and the fact is i've never experienced that but i think that's because i've never worked with a chunk of brass this big before and now i really get what is being said about brass being grippy all that is by way of saying i've been looking for the silver linings of screwing this build up and of my limitations of my machining skills and i have to understand and admit that this is part of the process like every machinist every machine operator has these stories of stuff they built that didn't go the way they expected or stuff they thought would be easy that turned out to be way harder that's what i'm experiencing here all this is the longest possible way of saying while i am not going to achieve what i set out to achieve in terms of the original size and proportions of the bolt that i wanted to make i will achieve something by the end of today okay uh i have repaired the head for the fourth time and just to show you how much repair i've done here is the size of the head as it was originally supposed to be and you see i've lost like 20 percent right that was that was the size of the original head and each time i screwed up i have to peel a little bit off i also uh fix the neck here so my surfaces are back to being good the bolts relationship between the head size and the thread size is now way off but that is what it is that's just part of the process this piece of aluminum here is an old piece i had from the making of some spacesuit parts that i'm using as a holder uh so that i don't damage the threads i'm going to actually chuck this back into the lathe and add a chamfer around here on bolts like this you'll notice that there's a a chamfer on the top see that but not on the bottom yeah so we're going to do the same thing on ours we're going to add a chamfer across the whole top should i add the chamfer before i make sure that the threads are good it's a good question i think i make the threads good first i think i have to make the threads good first that that's the next thing uh specifically because then i don't waste if i screw it up a fifth time which certainly could happen then i haven't wasted the time to add that chamfer okay the way i'm gonna fix the front of this is i'm actually gonna cut off the damaged part and machine it down you'll see okay so this should give me some really positive grab let's just see how even that is not bad not bad okay so let us chamfer first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna chamfer this see if we can't get past this part this is the worst part actually i'm gonna try facing the end first okay i have fixed my bolt it's a fixed bolt uh this is done in its shaping on the mill and the lathe and i must admit it's lovely i'm very pleased it's not what i set out to make it's different in a lot of ways but i'm taking what i can get now it's time to make the nut that screws onto this that may be the next hour or it may be the next six hours i'm not exactly sure so the first thing to know about threads is that there are two sizes in every thread there's the there's the internal size there's that size and then there's the external size of the threads and obviously if i'm going to be drilling a hole in this brass hexagon to fit this i need to start with the smallest size and so i'm just going to measure that with my calipers and i can get it looks like i can get within a few thousandths of this and now i'm going to say that's 1.125 look at that it's one point one three five uh ten thousands over one and an eight that's actually kind of awesome i believe yeah yeah okay so 1.135 that's the hole i need to put in here i'm using the aluminum to protect the brass so i can grab it nice and heartily with my lathe chuck and not actually damage the brass yes think we're not going to pull this out of here until we have threads in it the faces are good the size is good i may take the sides down later but first i got to drill that hole so let's do it one inch what i'm doing here is i'm slowly creeping up i'm increasing the bore size by an eighth of an inch every single time okay i have the hole it is set to the smallest depth of my threading which is 1.125 and i actually think it's about 10 000 over so now i'm going to start cutting the internal threads it looks like this there it is that's your 60 degree angle and i'm going to feed this over and into the hole so it'll look like this here we go however i'm going to adjust my uh my cross slide so i don't that's too close to the to the chuck here well that's too close to the chuck here for comfort so i'm going to adjust some of these parameters so i get this right okay i believe we are at a moment of truth and so i have paused i have cut threads into the interior of the brass nut by my calculations those internal threads should fit the external threads of my brass bolt can i tell you what i went through to get here i mean there's what you saw on camera but then there was even more for instance at one point i was a little greedy and i broke the tip off my 30 degree internal cutting tool and re-ground it and got it back into the threads and gingerly creeped up on yeah um look every new skill comes with let us think of a new skill as a new land one is visiting and in that land there are arid hills and verdant valleys and let's just say that the landscape of thread cutting is a rough a rough terrain man i went through some rough things here look every thread cutting expert who might have suffered through watching me screw up um is no i believe knows my pain i believe this is how we acquire knowledge it's not easy i don't necessarily enjoy the process but i enjoy the process does that make sense look uh i just i stopped because i think that this will really fit so let's um there we go ladies and gentlemen it's like the docking scene from 2001. and it's going it's going it's in yeah i am very excited i'm very pleased that was not easy but now when i clean my shop it will be with the knowledge that i have cut an internal and an external thread all right i have a little bit more work to do i gotta cut some chamfers on that nut and then i gotta polish this all up but uh let's wrap this one day build up man here we go all right i will be honest with you about this build uh the mistakes i made in the first day of this build i was upset with myself i was angry while i was upset while i was angry while i did not want what happened to have happened i wasn't taking it personally skill acquisition is all about always about making mistakes and learning how to look for those mistakes okay that's enough of a tease let's have a reveal three two one i didn't expect that to land on my head oh look look at this beautiful thing look at this um this polish it looks really shiny on camera man when you go to really polish something boy do you see the limitations of what is possible uh so i uh polished these up uh on a sandpaper on a 400 grit on my uh uh reference surface on my machining stone so it's perfectly flat uh and after 400 grit i went to a 600 grit stone and then a 1000 grit stone and then i hit it on the polishing wheel and uh let us there we go ladies and gentlemen the two the nut and the nut head are not the same size that is something i am willing to live with i am very pleased with this i did want to do a project that took my machining to the next level and boy did this project do exactly that it was a real ass kicker thank you guys for joining me for this one day build i kind of hope the next one goes a little soon see you guys next time hey thank you so much for watching that entire video you are amazing and i'm here to tell you that you can now show your tested solidarity with some tested merch like this beautiful beautiful drawing of the rickshaw that i built for spot this drawing was made in conjunction with the artists at teespring and you can buy the t-shirt in the link down below um yeah i didn't know that my life was incomplete without a funeral charnel black victorian rickshaw to be dragged by my robot dog and yet that was the case and now you can have your own piece of this lovely lovely carriage uh and wear it on your body thank you guys so much for watching i will see you next time

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 1,981,017

Rating: 4.9198232 out of 5

Keywords: tested, one day builds, adam savage, one day build, adam savage one day build, adam savage one day builds, adam savage tested, adam savages one day builds, inside adam savages cave, adams one day builds, lathe, machining, bolt, nut, making, one day build adam savage, adam savage builds, adam one day build, one day builds tested, one day builds adam savage, tested adam savage one day build, diy nuts and bolts, machining brass, machining brass lathe, machining brass tips

Id: 98MCz9gQaiE

Length: 32min 41sec (1961 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MasterFubar]

Here is the video explaining what he should have done.

[u/bnlynch9]

It’s interesting watching a video on what I’m going to school for