Building a Machinists Belt Grinder - The Trilogy [Part 1]

hey welcome back it seems like pretty much every maker on YouTube has built one of these belt winners at some point and I always loved watching these bills because I think it's really interesting to see all these different designs and now everybody canvassed their own take on this concept ever since I saw the first true a 72 inch grinder I've always kind of wanted one but I never got around to it so now I finally decided to join the club and design and build my own version I started planning this thing in fusion 360 last year that's the software I'm using here and right now using a quick rundown of that design process so the idea was to kind of give myself a challenge and go all out on this thing so the goal wasn't to make this fast or easy to build but to basically over build and maybe even over complicate things a bit because for me it's just more interesting to make that way and it also means I can potentially learn more things along the way I try to include pretty much every feature and adjustment that I thought might be useful to me in terms of functionality but I also made some design decisions just based on what I thought would be interesting to make or even just for looks this type of machine is most often used by people who make knives but that's actually not my focus here I'm not really into knives I mostly need this for general metalwork and that's why I chose to use a wider belt than the common two by 72 inch size so this is technically closer to a three by 72 inch grinder or to be accurate 75 by 2,000 millimeters because I'm not from the US so my belts or metric and also inches give me nightmares anyway and yes I made plans for this again and the cap model you're seeing here is also included so if you're interested in that just click up here or check the description this build was pretty complex and it took a long time to complete so in order to keep this videos somewhat reasonable in length I'm going to split this into three parts and I'm going to give you more info what all the stuff is seeing here as I'm building it so for now let's just jump into the actual build and start making the first part and that would be the main plate here which is the biggest part and also the one that took longs to make I started out with this big steel plate this is just basic hot rolled steel because it's cheap and I'm cheap I bought this large enough so I could make three big parts out of it so I had to cut this into three pieces and unfortunately it's way too big for my bandsaw and too thick for the plasma cutter so I had to use my angle grinder which took ages and wasn't very enjoyable now I can take this over to the mill and face that rough edge that I just cut to create my first clean reference surface and I drew on the rough shape with a marker there just so I can see what's what and keep myself from making any dumb mistakes now that I have one side that is flat and straight I can flip the part over and face the opposite edge and that way I got two edges that are straight and parallel which is a good start for measuring things this piece is now small enough to fit into the bandsaw which helps cutting out this chunk on top here [Music] right now I'm just kind of roughing out the outside shape but all of these edges are going to be machined eventually another part goes back into the mill and I can clean up the cuts I just made [Applause] the narrow section of the partner fits into the Vice which helps me to clean up some of the remaining edges and technically it's not necessary to mill down every edge but I do need some of them as a reference for measuring and I also just want everything to have a uniform flat machine surface in the end and not a mix of saw cut and machined edges I'm cutting a slot in there now which is going to help me to remove this piece on top there [Music] and while I'm at it and drawing a central role that will be the reference to create the large circle at the round edge in the back this cutter has a 45 degree angle or chips for me to clean up these diagonal edges doing some finishing with the file and now everything goes on the rotary table to create the round shapes and I'm getting a little creative here to mount this onto the chuck because I'm usually too lazy to take that off and attach things directly to the table but it also has the advantage that I don't need to remove my vise so I can now spin this around and now I'm site milling the outside edge I was kind of afraid to overshoot this cut on the bandsaw so there's a lot of material left to remove here which is why I'm using my power drill to help me out a bit to remove this circle I am cutting a slot again but if I cut this all the way through then at the very end the outside part will just drop down which is pretty risky you don't want to risk parts coming use on the mill so my solution is to leave just two little tabs all the way at the bottom that are strong enough to keep this in one piece but small enough to be easily removed now the part is much easier to hold because I can just grab it from the inside using the Chuck and now I'm drilling and countersinking the mounting holes for the motor [Music] it's time to drill all of those other holes now obviously these need to be perfectly positioned if I want everything to fit together and I'm doing all the positioning using the digital readout on my mill so that's why you're not seeing any scribe lines or Center punch marks I did however double-check everything with the caliper before drilling because the more time you put into a part like this the more paranoid you get and to make sure these holes are accurate you would also normally spot drill them first but this is a split point drill which means it has a self centering feature and that saves me a little bit of work here most of these are also countersunk to hide the screw heads and in this case there's a reason for that besides optics the side of the machine needs to be flat because the you never for the belt tension mechanism is going to sit there and it were otherwise collide with the screw heads if they were sticking out [Music] I'm now cleaning up the cutout for the motor using a boring yet I cut this radius a little smaller on purpose because I was kind of expecting that cut to come out looking as bad as it does but after a few passes with this thing it's now nice and smooth it's time to face the two flat sides now misappropriating the same boring head as a fly cutter now I first started doing this using a big face mill and I was getting some really bad cheddar and an awful finish I'm still getting some cheddar even with this setup but it's way better in comparison the problem with this part is that it's pretty thin relative to its overall size and that means it has a tendency to vibrate when you cut it which creates chatter and I don't really have a way of clamping it that completely eliminates that from happening so I still didn't get a perfect surface finish this way but at least I got one that I can live with you there's only one last feature that's missing which is this channel that the belt engine column will slide up and down in it's basically a linear guide way that eliminates any side-to-side movement off that part just doing the last finishing touches now yes I know my work Hill is shaking way too much okay that was a lot of work but it's finally done it's nice and shiny I didn't mess up and we can move on to the next part next part is this long column which slides up and down and that's a lot you just saw and it's the main part for the belt rigging and belt tension mechanism that's with most of these parts I'm starting with some raw hot rolled steel again the stuff is usually not really dimensionally accurate or even straight but since I'm facing all the sides anyway it doesn't really matter because most of the stock material I bought oversized so I have enough material to work with when I take it down to final dimensions as I was doing these cutouts I realized I must have smoked this cheap carbide end mill when I was building the last part so that's why it screeching and leaving a bad finish but it's nothing some scotch-brite won't fix in this case now here's that angled cutter again this is actually not really meant for cutting champ for us it's a 45-degree dovetail cutter so I'm actually using an upside-down here which means I also have to run the mill in Reverse but it's what I had and it came in really handy for these parts I'm also making two little axles here from some stainless that will connect to gasp rings actually slightly changed my design later to only use one gas spring so this won't be needed but for now we'll just go with these now this thing is finished as well came out pretty nice and next up is the hand lever that operates the tension mechanism that's actually two parts but we're going to treat it as one I'm just starting with some basic flat bar again and you might already notice these facing and drilling operations they repeat over and over for pretty much every part and it's always the same so I'm not going to go over that stuff in detail each time [Music] now this year is exactly the sort of thing I'm most likely going to be using the grinder for doing these round overs on the mill it's pretty overkill it takes pretty long and it's not really necessary I'm just doing it because it's the only way I have if I want a nice looking result here's the second piece which is just an extension for the lever they made this in two pieces because I wanted the handle to be adjustable since I wasn't sure which position would be comfortable to use a wise man once said if you can't make it perfect at least make it adjustable [Music] next we're gonna make the parts for this steel sandwich here the top and bottom part for the attachments leaf I didn't have the right sides flat bar so I just cut down on a wider piece for the sides I can mill these down together because it saves me some work and make sure they are identical these parts look deceivingly simple but they actually need to be pretty accurate if I want to get a good sliding fit for the attachment arms so I had to pay some extra attention here to keep things square and within dimensions [Music] so this time I actually am using a spot rule because these alts are so deep and they need to be exactly in the right place I'm gonna let you in on a little secret here yep I actually broke it hep in one of these holes but luckily I broke off so deep inside that I was still able to have enough thread left to install this part so I guess I got lucky and it just lives in there now next up is the side cover for the sleeve and this one's not very interesting so let's go over that quickly and might have skipped over some stuff there but it's just a rectangle with some holes in it next up are these little hinges and once those are done you're gonna see some of these parts actually come together all right now that these two are done we have enough finished parts to start the first round of assembly just in case you're wondering why I didn't countersink the screws on this side as you can see there's not really enough material towards the edge to do that in a clean way and I didn't want to make everything even bigger just to accommodate that not gonna lie putting this together and having everything fit perfectly was pretty damn satisfying and even though it's not really surprising with these machine parts seeing that everything comes out perfectly square is very nice even though this amount of precision is completely unnecessary for the kind of machine I'm making here okay now let's go over my overcomplicated bail tension solution so the column goes in the slot and then it gets secured by two bolts with lock nuts which allow me to adjust the place so it can slide up and down while allowing very little movement in any other direction I like using plastic washers because they reduced the friction between metal parts and they are replaceable I made these washers on the lathe and they're made of Teflon which further helps to keep stuff sliding smoothly and as for the column itself that's going to be lubricated by some way oil on the final assembly looks like that works so now I can attach the gas Springs these are two 90 Newton gas Springs and like I said earlier I eventually changed this set up a little bit just to use one spring on the drive side that has twice the amount of pressure which is a bit more elegant and it gave me a slightly better overall tension but this method here also worked okay okay here's one of my favorite features about this this entire mechanism actually locks into place automatically in the retracted position using this spring plunger here and that allows you to easily change the belt without having to hold anything and when you're done you simply pull out the pin and it unlocks I know you can also see what the last hole and the baseplate is for but enough of that for now there's still a lot of parts waiting to be made and the next one is this attachment arm and for this design it holds both the platen attachment and the worktable so this is pretty beefy and made from 40 by 40 millimeter square stock in this case I didn't buy this stock oversized because it would have been too much work to amend everything down so after facing all these sights it's going to end up slightly smaller than 40 mil 40 but I did account for that when I was making the parts for the sleeve that this goes into [Laughter] you can actually tell here by the lines and the syrup is finished that this end mill is sharp in some spots and dull and others depending on how I mistreated it now I'm doing a little test-fit just to see if it actually goes in the sleeve and if it's pretty good it's not super tight so it slides easily but there's not a lot of side-to-side play so I'm happy with that [Music] these big holes don't make much sense right now but you'll see what that's about in the next video [Music] and this one is where the flat platen frame is going to attach last step is this channel which is there to provide a lowered surface that the locking lever will clamp down on so that when the surface gets a little uneven that doesn't interfere with this part of sliding in and out next part is just a little handle for that lever it's not very important but it was kind of bugging me to just hold on shoe screw there [Applause] it's gonna end up looking a little bit different than in the cad model because i just grabbed a random piece of stock that looked about right and then i just kind of freestyle out the shape every once in a while it's nice to make a part where the dimensions don't really matter and you can sort of eyeball everything [Applause] at first I was gonna give this an old surface but I kind of got lazy and just started cutting a bunch of grooves in it but I actually ended up really liking how that looks kinda looks like something you'd find on a lightsaber okay next part is pretty small but pretty important is this little hinge for the Bell trekking now it would have been smart to make this out of an l-shaped profile but for some reason that didn't occur to me so I used two solid block and somehow it also didn't occur to me I could have removed the majority of this material on the bandsaw so I just brewed for stood by turning half this block into chips [Music] [Music] I'm gonna install this part in a minute but first we're going to switch it up because the next part I'm going to make is the base and that's the only part that's going to be TIG welded you when I was designing this I put in as many wit angles as I could so that means there's a lot of minors to cut now [Music] pain again I'm doing some round offers on the mill which is super inconvenient especially with these hollow parts but it somehow worked out I often don't bother doing this but this time I actually did some actual prep work and took off all the mill scale and tempered all the edges on the tubing in order to get some decent water penetration if the parts aren't too big I like to tack well this kind of stuff in a vise because it keeps down the distortion and makes sure everything is straight in parallel the fact that I'm using a machine vise for this is probably gonna ruffle some feathers but at least they're not mig welding in this and here you can see it actually comes out nice and flat I'm checking up all the smaller parts into bigger segments now making sure those are straight which is much easier than trying to get a whole bunch of stuff lined up all at once again adding some plastic washers here because I don't want steel rubbing on steel now I'm using the grinder itself as a jig to vote these things where they need to be and that saves me a whole bunch of measuring and aligning stuff clamping straightedge on there to keep these things in one plane and then I can take this little Ridge in between them that seems to work nicely so I can remove this part again and then join it with the rest I was kind of expecting this but the top ended up not being level so I used a little trick I cut open the tech waltz on the inside and then started bending the top back and put some filler rod into the gap to keep that bent into a good position and then I just cut off the filler rod and the rest is just gonna melt into the world puddle I know it's time to finish up all these worlds and after a lot of welding used the Finnish base I didn't bother checking again if it's square but it looks good enough now I can attach the finished base to the rest which is nice because it allows me to finally mount the motor on there this is a brand new 1.5 kilowatt or 2 horsepower three-phase motor and it's going to be controlled by a VFD and take out I didn't mess up any of those holes because they would have really stuck at this point now let's install that little interesting for the tracking feature so the trekking wheel tilts up and down by adjusting this bolt and of course that's gonna be replaced by a nice handle we are now nearing the end of the first video but before that I want to show you the tilting feature it uses two separate locking mechanisms there's another locking pin which automatically holds it in place when you flip it up into a horizontal mode and then you can use the big lever to lock it down tightly so the same principle I used on the tension lever you just flip this up and it stays there and you don't have to hold anything in place now when everything is done the machine will be balanced so that it stays in the vertical position by default due to its own weight so it's always either locked vertically by gravity or horizontally by that pin but of course for actually using it you would lock it down using the big lever and with that we have reached the end of the first part of this build next time I'm going to be making all of these components and if you don't want to miss that you might want consider subscribing as always thanks for watching and see you in part 2 you

Channel: Phil Vandelay

Views: 1,220,760

Keywords:

Id: gaIVzdJ2V5w

Length: 37min 57sec (2277 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020