How to: Revolution 2x72 Belt Grinder Build - VERY THOROUGH

oh hey what's happened there YouTube it's Brian house here for house work and today we are building the revolution 2 by 72 belt grinder and this one is particularly close to my heart because I didn't actually have to cut out all the plate steel by hand using an angle grinder in a cut-off wheel we are now selling laser-cut parts and I decided well you know what I want to build one I want to film and I want to do this whole thing so I I took an entire week and I assembled this thing cut all the parts out and everything else and put it together over the course of last week and this is actually going to a friend of mine he's a knife maker he's a prolific knife maker and I really truly believe in his work so I decided you know what I'm gonna build one and send it to him basically how this works is every single thing in this in this build is put down into this video so that you can follow it along I'm breaking it down into sections so that you can fully understand what it takes to put something like this together when you buy the laser-cut parts and plans and if you buy the ultimate bundle I'll create links down below so that you can find all those parts and pieces and plans you can actually assemble something just like this but relatively inexpensive we have done a bunch of product testing on it to try to kind of figure out okay like if you build one you buy it from us buy all the parts and pieces what does it cost you know wheels all the way down to the motor and the VFD there's a lot of options out there on how you can actually get this thing built in my opinion for what you pay to build this thing yes you got to put a little work into it and you got a you know obviously build it yourself but you can save thousands of dollars by building the revolution and you get all the features and functionality of a really good high quality manufactured grinder which that was my ultimate goal when I started I I wanted to become bladesmith and start with metalworking and doing all these things and I just simply could not afford to pay three four thousand dollars for a decent grinders so I actually went and designed one built one and prototyped it this video is really put together so if you have bought it or you're thinking about buying it you can follow along and see how it's done and built so without further ado screw it let's do it okay so let's go over what you're going to need to get this bill done what you're seeing right here is the contents of the ultimate bundle pack this is the laser cut steel laser cut in Dallas Texas and it is precision and it works really well 3/8 inch thick steel all of it and then 62 pieces of hardware that are high-quality it's every nut bolt washer spacer that you need to assemble this thing so this is what you're going to need to acquire on your own this is the tube steel for the frame it's 2 inch by 2 inch quarter inch wall these are the tooling arms and the tracking arm and these are one and a half inch by one and a half inch quarter inch wall this is a four inch piece of one inch round you're going to need some angle iron and a piece of high carbon steel for the the platon face you need a wheel set a motor a VFD now there's two different methodologies for these VFDs you don't need two of them you just need one and this particular one is a lot cheaper than this one of course that comes with some caveats you can go for a more budget build by using this this is under $100 and it does exactly what this device does which is about 350 to 400 dollars the difference is of course in quality you get what you pay for and this one you would have to keep dust free and very cool so that's just something to consider the motor is going to run you about a hundred and sixty-five dollars this is a three phase motor and I know a lot of people say I don't have three phase in my home workshop or my my building and how can I get around that well that's what the VFD is for the VFD takes single-phase electricity and converts it to three-phase that's what gives this the ability for this to become a variable speed motor it's a very simple process and we'll get into it later in the build to give you an idea of what you're looking at as far as cost goes on the steel I have about fifty dollars in on all the tube steel and the one-inch angle iron the wheel set is going to run you about a hundred and twenty bucks for these three wheels and whatever size drive wheel you go my recommendation is a 7-inch drive wheel those can be had for about $80 I know it seems like a lot to remember but don't worry when you buy the ultimate pack you will get a plan set that will have a link to a resources page to help you locate all of this equipment now the first step to starting this grinder is to cut down all of your steel to length and in the plan set there are detailed lengths that each one of these pieces represents and needs to be cut down to and you'll notice the surface of the steel doesn't have a lot of mill scale on it and that's because we do a soaked in vinegar just standard household vinegar and these pieces sit in overnight sometimes 48 hours and what that does is it removes the mill scale from the surface of the steel that is an important step for a couple of reasons one is this piece of steel needs to slide into this cavity and in order to do that it is quite precise and in with the mill scale left on both of these pieces on the inside and the outside of this piece they will not a telescope that is a super important step so people that skip that often become confused and wonder why doesn't work well if you've ever tried to grind mill scale off of a surface like this you will know that that is a lesson in futility and that soaking in vinegar is quite simple easy non-toxic and very effective so the next step is we're going to take our two 9-inch pieces of 2x2 tube steel take them over to the drill press or a mill and we are going to drill our holes for the axles and round over the corners so the grinder head can turn 90 degrees we're gonna grab one of our laser-cut hinges I like to use the one with the CE channels for this so we can mark out where we need to drill our hole and how this is gonna sit is just like this on this pillar actually me turn this around so it's sitting properly like this it's gonna sit so when the grinder is finished you want this piece to line up with the outside edge of this pillar so that it's agrees here in the 90 degrees here so once once this is sitting straight you know that you've got a good tight fit quickest and easiest way to figure out where to drill this hole is to basically lay this C channel right on the pipe and mark your hole line up the top just like this nice and flat and then when you know that when this is this way take another one here line it up this way you've got a 90 degree angle and that's sitting flat up against the outside of that of that pipe nice and lined up like our whole double check it's on this side push this up against it it's closed I had to move it over just a little bit and if it's not perfect that's not a big deal you can always adjust this after it's built I like to drill a quarter inch pilot hole before I drill my actual 3/4 inch so that keeps my my alignment quite right [Music] all right got our pilot hole drilled quarter-inch we're gonna drill our 3/4 and again we're gonna go all the way through the tap magic all right whole process took about five minutes the first ones the hardest one because you can use this one as your guide for the next one so now I'm going to use this guy's my guide I might use a couple of the hinges to line everything up in the vise again you can do this however you want this how I choose to do it the the hinges actually act as a way to keep these in lined up here so once you start clamping everything together it becomes a little bit easier and then you can line everything up on the side and lock it all down again you're just doing this to sort of make sure that these line these are lined up so it acts as a guide and make sure everything's locked down I'm just gonna make a divot in that bottom one thought out you can see here we've now got our spot where we're gonna drill it screw it let's do it [Applause] [Applause] we can actually check and make sure everything lines up by taking the bolt that comes in the hardware kit and just sliding it through the axle and then sliding it through here in the direction it's gonna go and then we can see did it line up and in this case it's pretty dang near perfect there is very little play up there maybe just a little smidge of Steel showing no big deal there and then also on this side we'll be able to lay it flat and check for clearances here and we've got a little bit on this side too not a big deal it's it's close enough for my taste then we can align it all up once it's it's assembly so that's how that works the the other way of doing this too is we now need to shave off some of this this steel on this corner so I like to just take this and set it up just like this grab a sharpie marker and draw a series of lines as I'm turning this thing so I know what does it look like when I turn this thing and how far down do I have to go once that's done pull this out and I've got my radius which is surprisingly smaller than most people think you really just need to remove up to that black line all the way from there to there and we'll do that with a with a grinder you can do it with an angle grinder I have a two by 72 so I'm just going to go ahead and take that and grind that right off but yeah that's the easiest way of doing it and you can do it with an angle grinder I've done that before easy-cheesy one other thing you can do while you've got this all together like this is Mark where you're gonna drill and tap your hole for the locking mechanism for the entire grille grinder head and I like to just put a speck right there like that and then check it on this angle to make sure that spacing works out it might need to go over a little bit this way I do it like that should give me enough clearance maybe somewhere right in between those two anyhow like so now we've got our hole marked for where the locking nut needs to go the locking of socket head screws to go this is going to be a 3/8 inch 16 so we are going to drill it out 5/16 and tap it okay you can see we've got both pillars drilled through and I'm just gonna use again just use something flat to just double--triple-check that when this thing sits flat it is gonna line up with the plate and it does these look pretty good you know they're not again not a hundred percent perfect there's slight deviations and things but nothing that will affect the use of the grinder itself if you get it close you're you're on the money that this thing is pretty forgiving when it comes to that kind of thing so all right now we just got to grind the the turns here I'm going to mark the turns on this side as well like I did with the other one and we'll take that a little bit of metal off of that corner and we'll keep on trucking okay so we got the the pillars drilled out and round it over here and one of the things I like to do is to check to ensure that you have enough class you thread your bolt in and you turn it around and you work the hinge around and you should see a little bit of steel right there between the pillar and the hinge and you should see that all the way down on the rotation so it should give it enough clearance that's all we're looking for is just enough clearance trying it that way so that one looks good so now at this point we're gonna get prepared to put all this together and get it set and ready for welding so I've got my my four spacers here from my hardware kit we've got some nuts here and my all thread and we're going to just put this together in a way it gets us prepped for welding a nut on this end and then we're gonna start at the front so this is our our first hinge with the C channel go through all the way through right and then we're gonna put our spacer on and then our first pillar see that right put another spacer on and another hinge and then we're gonna thread up a nut and what that does is it keeps this all in place put it real tight we're just gonna get everything lined up we need another nut another hinge our spacer another pillar another spacer another hinge and the last nut now you'll have to adjust the width here to match up what your width is gonna be on the actual grinder so I like to go take a look at the plans and figure that whole thing out get this all nice and set and ready to go but for this training purpose I'm just gonna eyeball it all right looks good okay so now we need to take out this weld seam down inside of the receiver tubes these are the nine inch receiver tubes that we cut earlier and there's this pesky little weld seam in there easiest way to do that is to use a pneumatic file or a mechanical file can't do it by hand also fireball tools made a weld seam removal tool that works just fine or if you're really ambitious you can use a file and and file it out I typically use a combination of a pneumatic file or a mechanical file and a hand file to get rid of this all right let's do it [Music] [Music] and what I like to do is use some of the tooling arms and double check that'll slide all the way through and it does and then pull it out and turn it 90 degrees and do the same thing a lot of times these tubes aren't quite true so you want to just make sure because you will be turning the tooling arm sometimes and you want to make sure it goes in and now now if you don't soak these in vinegar you need to grind off the mill scale if you don't do that the even the inside of this tube here has mill scale on it and these will not fit together regardless of removing the weld seam okay so now let's take a look at the receiver tubes we've got the weld filed out from inside what I like to do before I go ahead and tack these together is just double check make sure everything is flush and then also grab my tooling arm and double--triple-check on each one of these that I can nest this inside in more than one direction so turn turning it 90 and pulling it out turning it 90 pulling it out just to make sure there's a slide all the way through and I do that on both receiver tubes just to make sure it's it's a little bit about pain in the butt to do this after the fact so everything is looking pretty good a little tight in this direction but it might be because there's just some dust in there I just like the fact that I can that can slide it all the way through and it feels pretty tight that's that's what I'm looking for so now that we know that we're going to take both of these pieces line them up how we want them and just kind of take gander at them make sure they look good and I'm gonna pop a small hole here this is going to be a 3/8 16th hole that's going to go there actually a 3/8 16th tapped hole so we're gonna drill it out to 5/16 of an inch and what this is going to do is it's going to create the locking hole the mechanism where the knob goes to lock the tooling arm in place so you can see how this is starting to come together this is the tooling arm for the platen it's gonna sit like this and you need a way for this to be locked in place and how we do that is an inch inch and a half back from the front we're gonna drill a 5/16 inch hole all the way through just the top side and then we're gonna thread it three-eighths 16 okay so now in preparation for welding we are going to clamp these all together of a couple of can't twist clamps here these are these are pretty amazing if you don't have any of these you can use C clamps I've got a big C clamp here we're gonna use that as well a couple of things you really want to keep in mind while doing this is that you want these to be you know flat as flat as they can get whatever you decide to do however you decide to clamp this make sure that you've got everything lined up the way you want it and you know everything is flush on both sides that way when you when you go to use the machine if these are not true to each other you'll notice that with the tracking so that's kind of important so I've got it laid on a flat surface and I'm going to go ahead and clamp this here to ensure that it stays together this way right and I'm just I didn't tighten this real tight I'm just getting it kind of loosely fit together here okay I'm just ensuring that it's all nice and flat and tight and flush looks good that way and then I'm gonna hold it together this way yet again with a big old seat clamp kind of loose doesn't have to be super tight just yet and then ensuring that this stays together down here one more clamp here at this point I'm fairly certain that this is all flush and straight and true but I'm gonna just use like a straight edge you just double-check it and yeah yeah that's good looks nice also I mentioned this earlier but I like to make sure that my weld seams are aligned together so wherever I ground the weld seam out I want to put those aligned the same way and my preferences just on the bottom so this is where the weld seam is on this one and this is where the weld seam is on this one everything's locked down so I can pop a couple of welds on both sides I like to do three on each side and that's been strong enough alright now that I got three tacks on each side I'm going to go ahead and put about an inch well on each over each one of the three tacks on each side and we'll call it done now you can see we've got a really nice body for our well our rug grinder here it's these welds are done you don't need to run a whole bead I've seen people do that it's really not necessary you follow what I've done here inch inch and inch on both sides this is plenty plenty strong I am just a little bit off on my measurement here I've got a little bit overhang on this side so I'm going to go ahead and take that down with the grinder other than that the body of the of this is done now in the drawings there is a hole over here and a threaded tapped hole over here to hold the tool rest in and we don't put that hole in until the end you can you can do it now and line everything all up and try to line it up with the motor plate but for the most part I just do that after the fact so now we're going to mount the motor plate onto the receiver tubes in the past I actually did this later after mounting the receiver tubes to the hinges and somebody a very smart person said you know you could probably save yourself a whole bunch of headache if you did that step and it's sort of in Reverse where you know you've got your receiver tubes together then you take your motor plate put it on top clamp it down and actually weld it up there and he's he's very right so I'm gonna go ahead and do this from now on the the simple this is very simple when it's when it's not all together it doesn't and it's not all welded with the hinges and everything basically what you're trying to do is you just need to line everything all up it's it's literally that simple line it up there's this this plate should line up with the the lines that are on the receiver tubes and it should be flush in the front you're gonna want to make sure that you've got your hole in the right spot so because this is the the hole that holds the platen arm in it needs to be in this position and this can figuration once you have that all together it's essential that you just line everything up make sure it's flush and we're gonna pop a couple tacks in it and make sure it's straight but yeah a couple of can't twist clamps really help here to keep things tight yeah oh that looks pretty good and for cleanliness I've installed some of these plug weld holes and the reason why I like using these is is you get a lot of the pressure from the motor the vibration for the motor is distributed evenly amongst the receiver tubes and I've stopped adding the welds to the top because I think it's ugly so I just do the plug welds I do one back here and then I do a few welds along the bottom that you won't see my first act is just gonna be right here on the bottom it's gonna do a quick tack there hold it both there and then polar opposite I'm gonna fill in a little bit of this part on the backside here okay so now that's all welded together we're gonna set this aside to cool and we're going to take a another quick look at this setup here this is the the risers the pillars that go to the base plate and then these are the hinges and you can see I've got my spacers in between each pillar and each hinge and then I've got two nuts in the middle and two on the outside and what I've done is as essentially allowed myself to kind of line all this up so that I don't have to worry so much about trying to keep everything in place with magnets the quickest and easiest way to tell if you've got this aligned properly is to measure between the two hinges in the middle and it should be somewhere around two and a half inches once you've got that you now know that this setup is correct now for me I like to line it up the way it's gonna be built on the grinder with a CE channel in the front even put the locking mechanism inside of there so I know and I know that this is lined up I take this grab the base plate set it down on the table I'll measure it should be about 10 by 10 is and I'll grab my marker here and I'll measure five inches over so I can get a centerline okay that is divided in half and then we're going to do the exact same thing here line it up that's 5-inch Center [Music] now we can see okay we've got exact dead center of our plate we now know that and we're gonna take our our situation here and we know between these two is is is a is two and a half inches between these two pillars here is three and three eighths something like that so so two-and-a-half plus 3/4 is three and a quarter right so if we take three and a quarter and we divide it in half yep that's correct three point two five divided in half is one and a half one in five eighths right somewhere around there five eight I should give us three and a quarter and it does so we now know that when we set this on here all we gotta do is line it up those marks and again that's approximate because you've got those spacers in there so gonna have a little bit of juice in there a little bit of line wiggle in there again not super precise work here that we're doing we are just wanting to ensure that we're close to Center and you can also take your ruler and check it here so this is three and seven eighths on this side three and seven eighths on that side three and seven eighths on this side three and seven eighths on this side that is as about close to dead center as I can get it and I know that now I'm ready to mark where where this should go I'm just gonna take up my marker mark a couple of spots here guys we're not gonna weld this down just yet but we're gonna use that as our template when we get ready to weld that down to the base plate all right so this is cool enough to touch at this point so we're gonna get ready to line up everything to weld up these this hinge system here now I like to do this is weld it on its side first you tax anyhow everything turn it on ninety they can see they have a hard time keeping this all level as I like to grab a scrap piece of two by two and lay it underneath these just to hold it up and just so happens you have that scrap piece because this is the tensioning pillar so take that set it up underneath kind of support it the one downside to welding this all together is if you don't clean up your plug hole well if it's a little bit wobbly so that's just something to consider when you do this I like to make sure my nuts are somewhat finger tight here and I'm also going to use the base plate and a couple of magnets to create a situation where I can line up everything to the top take my base plate a couple of magnets that positioned properly and then I use a piece of aluminum a little shim put this down in here and what that does is it makes a perfect alignment for the top of all of my hinges and it takes all of the guesswork out of trying to figure out is my are my hinges aligned once I I know this I have this setup I can very easily tell by just pushing everything up against this and now that I can see that it's all aligned and it's all set up right I'm gonna pop some tax in a couple of strategic spots just to hold it all together those two bottom tax are kind of holding it all together and in place I can now remove this situation I can make sure by turning these that I've got enough clearance on my pillars I do so now I'm just gonna place tax along the top of these four hinges okay at this point we can set our entire grinder up on the base plate and our work is easy because we've already marked everything all out line it up and I'm gonna pop for tax in each pillar one at each corner but I think I really love about this build is that when you get the pre-cut pieces from us how quickly it goes together it just really simply does and it's just even with the all thrown in there it's just balanced and it it just works I love that south so one of the things I like to do at this stage is double check that the whole head itself will turn and what the degree of the angle is so in this particular case this I'm using a digital level here it's it's pretty accurate so let's go ahead and turn it and find out where we're at eighty nine point five three I can totally live with that doesn't bother me at all I think it's it's perfect right out of the gate welds are still hot so now we've checked our angles everything looks good I'm going to go ahead and finish my welds I always weld on the outside of the hinges and not on the inside if you weld on the inside there's a possibility that your weld might interfere with the term so no need to weld inside just go ahead and pop your welds on the outside this is what it looks like so far it's coming together I just threw the tooling arm in there just to double-check everything still looks good even when it's warm still sliding in and out really nicely and the next thing we need to focus on is getting this tracking pillar the tracking pillar up on the top here we need to cut this out and fabricate it so let's get started this is pretty easy to fabricate there's a couple of things I like to do right off the bat and that's mark which side I'm gonna drill my hole number one because there's gonna be a hole that goes through this for for the for the fulcrum bolt and that's a 3/8 of an inch hole but there's also an angle here and there's a couple ways to figure it out and the easiest way that I can explain this is is that it's it's sixty degrees off the plate but it looks a little more like a thirty degree cut so it can be either or it just just depends on how you you're looking at it using your protractor so the kind of the simplest way to do this is to take your ruler go all the way the outside at to six and seven-eighths and make a mark and what that does is this mark right here so that's six and seven-eighths and the mark to the end over here and now if you take this and you angle it up to the corner the outside corner which is here all the way to your mark that is gonna give you approximately the right angle and again this doesn't have to be perfect this is just my preference if it's close to this it will work and then the other thing we need to do is mark our hole so for our fulcrum bolt and this is about 3/4 of an inch down on Center for right in the middle there so that's where we're gonna drill our hole the first thing we actually want to do is drill that hole so if if you wait to do this it will not work you have to do it first before you notch out for the the tracking arm that comes off the tensioning and tracking arm that comes out of there we're gonna put some notches in this to allow for clearance and travel on there but this hole needs to be perfect it needs to be all the way across at 90 degrees offset so that when that bolt goes through and it holds that tensioning pillar that everything is sitting straight if you cut these notches what's going to happen is is this is gonna bow out and you're not going to be able to drill that hole straight through so make sure you follow those steps the right way once we have this notch cut out the hole drilled then we'll go ahead and cut our notches for our trekking pillar our tracking tensioning arm whatever now your instinct here is gonna say to go ahead and pull this out of the vise flip it around drill the other side don't do that drill straight through that way you know you have a perfect 90-degree angle here okay so now that we've got our hole drilled all the way through we're gonna go ahead and set our mitre to thirty degrees and you'll see how simple this is angles don't have to be tough you know it once it starts to come to you you know you'll really understand so mitre at at 30 degrees also you'll see that it it says sixty degrees in there as well it just really depends where you've marked your where you found the line so it could be thirty could be sixty anyhow that's the easiest way to do it and make that cut if not you can do this by hand and then just make sure that you you know straighten your line out but for me I like doing it this way because it just makes a lot of sense also I clamp this down so I know that nothing is going to move remember what I said angles are hard apparently my math was just slightly off and that made for about an eighth of an inch and difference in my line but doesn't bother me cuz it's gonna work anyway okay so we got our tensioning pillar all notched out down here I'm happy with it even though the line was off a little bit this is the correct measurement six and seven eighths from here to here so about again this is a a lot of people are watching my videos or buying my plans and they're saying hey this you know this measurement I cut this wrong I did this wrong will it still work and saw and so on and a lot of these things that I've come up with that you know part of the prototyping process is just kind of throwing stuff out there and seeing if it works and did these grinders are very forgivable when you start to assemble them as long as your angles are pretty decent you can there's a lot of room for variance so don't worry about too much all right so now that we've got those two things done we're gonna make our notches for the the pillar the I mean I'm sorry the tracking tensioning arm and how I do this is I want to go right smack dab down the middle and I want to leave three quarters of an inch so if i market here one inch and I go 3/8 inch over and 3/8 of an inch over I know I'll have three quarters of an inch left over and then I'm just going to simply mark a line and remember this is the front and it needs a little bit more room on this side so we're gonna mark down our measurement per the plans which is about two and a half inches and again this is not set in stone so just remember that breathe easy on that and then this other side doesn't need to be quite as deep on this side we can go down about an inch and a half maybe a little more inch and five-eighths again nothing settings down here now you can see where we're headed with us right making our spots or our notches here what that does is it gives when our arm is sitting in there it gives room for this arm to play to have some play those notches weren't there or you just cut it straight across you wouldn't be able to get that tension correct so that's the reason why those are there all right let's cut it out on the bandsaw so I took another look at the plans and this is actually two and a quarter this is one and a half so just want to keep everybody in the know on this but yeah two and a quarter and one and a half so I removed a quarter of an inch we're gonna use this mark I got my miter set to zero I'm gonna clamp everything down like we did before we're gonna cut our these two lines first and then we're gonna dig down and cut those and again clamping everything down just really seems to help just to keep your line straight okay so we've got our horizontals here and those are cut out something to think about when you cut this you're gonna cut these lines down you're gonna cut all the way through both sides this is gonna warp out it's gonna want to flare out a little bit totally normal and correctable using a c-clamp some I have mentioned that the possibility of putting a through bolt here to try to keep these together while you cut it that's a good idea I just don't know how it would work because you can't really set it down on the table at that point so I just leave it like this and then at the end once it's all flared out and everything I take a c-clamp and I bend it back into shape you can see the flare they're a big deal let's take a c-clamp like to do this while it's still warm I'm being cut crank down on it push it a little past where it needs to be and then loosen it up yeah a little bit more clean up but there it is alright so there's a finished tracking pillar and ready to go up one thing also I want to mention is that notice the weld seam and where it is I prefer it on the back or the front not up one of these sides where you're gonna be drilling your hole I think that's pretty obvious but it's something I've done in the past where I actually didn't do it that way and then I had a weld seam here and then I had to grind the weld seam out to make the so that the tensioning arm can the tracking arm can fit in there just something to think about but yeah that's it and now we're ready to weld it up also you're gonna want to hang on to the piece that you cut off from the backside here another one and a half inch piece because we're gonna use that as our spring holder for the bottom of the the tensioning arm we're gonna grind this down and cut it down a little bit to make it match the angle but yeah that's what's gonna hold the spring so hang on to that alright so let's take a look at this piece since we all have it we're talking about anyway so if you can imagine you want this sitting a pretty level it doesn't have to be perfect but it needs to sit pretty level with the top plate so if you can imagine this is the very top of the the grinder there the receiver tube you want this to sit that way and the easiest way I can tell you how to do this is you essentially need to cut this exact same angle 30 degrees right here so we'll just clamp this into our our miter and we'll be able to go ahead and shave off about 30 degrees off of that and then it should sit nice and flush but do a little bit of grinding and whatnot just to kind of around over some of this but yeah should work out pretty good so the piece is so small it won't fit in here so I'm just gonna go ahead and use a piece of scrap tubing this is from the treadmill I chopped up initially when I made my first grinder so I'm just gonna line it all up and clamp it down alright now this needs a hole in it just need about a 8 inch hole right here in the center the spring is gonna go in there so we're gonna just put it right like that they can see what I did here a couple of magnets just to hold everything down even use a little tiny refrigerator magnet just to kind of keep that from twisting a little bit and now we'll tack it into place alright so now we're gonna set our tracking pillar tensioning pillar up on the ground itself is using a big magnet on this side to hold it in place for the most part it should keep it quite steady when you're tacking it in place you're really going to want to pay attention though you know where it sits on this arm because this is where you really need to pay attention is you want to make sure you've got it set perfect on this this angle here and the only way I know how to do that is with a digital level and we can take this turn it on and do a couple of things here we're going to check it this way we're gonna set it on here zero it out we're going to tap it up here and I can see that it's quite a bit off it's like a degree and a half off it's tilting this way so we really got some adjustments to make here so that can make this right whether or not you decide to shim this thing or or whatever it is you really got to get this that these angles the same so this this has got to be at zero in this together this is at zero this is going to be at zero so you really need to play around with it to get that right if you don't you're gonna have trouble getting this thing to track so the other option is is to tack it on one side and then kind of bang it into place but kind of playing Russian roulette when you do it that way it's just easier to get your magnets kind of all set up and working and functional that way when you go to tack it it's it's just in place and it's just kind of a done deal and you don't have to think about it afterwards right now we're at point four three so if I put this down here we're at point zero three which is pretty much at zero so the key is is that this should be closed as close to zero as possible now it's at point one five I'm gonna say that's pretty good I'm I've done this a few times and he doesn't get much better than that so if I pop a tack right here it's gonna pull this over just slightly so we'll do that and hope it comes to zero [Music] good Navigant work all right so this is the tracking arm here and it's a piece of one-and-a-half inch tube it's a quarter inch wall and we're going to use this to make our tracking pillar work so in the plan set there's there's a few holes that need to be drilled in this thing and let me zoom out here so you can see this thing a little bit better and there's a there's a weld seam in here so it's something you want to try to avoid I usually put the weld seam on the bottom so this right here would be considered the top okay and we're going to measure back an inch and a half right there and I'm gonna do it again on this side inch and a half and somewhere right in the middle we're gonna want to put a through hole and it's gonna be a threaded through hole okay and this is gonna be four so that's pretty close actually that's right dead-on this is gonna be for the knob that turns the tracking mechanism in and out so if you can imagine this is the front of the grinder there's gonna be a knob that goes through this side a hole threaded knob and it's going to turn the tracking mechanism up and down on this side there's also a hole or a set of holes that need to happen up here to mount your tracking mechanism so what happens is is if you if you line all this up and your holes are exact you got to make sure that the bolt is not too long that goes through otherwise it's gonna hit this threaded rod that goes through there's also a hole that's three inches from the back and about a half inch up from the bottom of the tube itself zoom in on that so you can see so 1/2 inch up from the bottom approximately about right there we're gonna drill a hole all the way through it's gonna be three-eighths of an inch and it's gonna go all the way through and it's non-threaded and what this is for is the fulcrum bolt that goes through the tracking pillar tensioning pillar so this is how it's gonna sit up in there and that through bolt I'm gonna go through there non-threaded 3/8 inch through bolt and then the tracking mechanism is gonna sit on top the knob is gonna go here to thread through pretty easy also there is one hole back here the very back and on the bottom it's aiming the same you know you can use a 3/8 or 3/16 or a 1/8 inch hole and that's gonna be where the other end of the spring is going to go we need to drill that hole as well not too complicated alright so let's drill that first hole in the bottom or the spring all right we're gonna turn it on its side and we're gonna drill the hole all the way through for the fulcrum bolt this is going to be 3/8 of an inch exactly 3/8 inch now we're gonna drill all the way through in one fluid motion [Applause] and then we need this hole here which is gonna be a 5/16 of an inch hole because it's gonna get threaded [Music] like to do this little trick with my my Center punch just a cheap Harbor Freight Center punch but it's got spring loaded in here so you can use it as a as a tap follower works pretty good keeps your tap straight and this one is gonna go all the way through in one motion this is just a standard tap there's nothing special about it but we are gonna go all the way through so that when the the knob gets threaded it will allow it the the threads will go all the way through to the other side so I'm just gonna tap it through like this and it's now going through the other side we go yeah you gotta pull it out of the vise cuz it's gonna get hung up underneath but you can see I'm going all the way through alright so in the hardware kit if you buy the hardware kit from me you get the proper bolt to put this together and it's a 3/8 inch 16 volt and it just goes all the way through and it should be a nice tight bin that's kind of what you want here you don't want any play really in this bolt this is what's controlling if it wobbles this way you're in trouble you don't want that and throw a lock washer on there there's another washer and the kit that you can use to throw that on and then you get a legit tracking mechanism knob and you can see how this all comes together and why that's important that it threads all the way through which again is the reason why you use quarter inch tube is because you're putting threads inside of this tube and if you use a thinner wall tube you're gonna have trouble getting well you won't be able to get threads in there so that's the point of that alright so now we've got seat goes all the way through [Music] and that would be able to touch your your tracking mechanism knob there and adjust it you you know using this right here so that's that's the point of that so since we're here we're gonna talk about the tracking mechanism you got a couple of choices you got this guy here which is a prefabbed tracking mechanism you can buy it on ebay from origin blade maker it's kind of my preferred I really like this in the plan set I did recommend to drill a hole right here through the middle just to make it a little bit more more of the floating portion of it it would it would allow for the turn a little bit better what I've discovered is is that's not necessary okay so you can use these two slots and in fact it's kind of preferred because the way they have this set up is that those two bolts will go down and around this this this tracking knob this adjuster knob and if you don't have if you have this bolt here you can you can do it it you just need a shorter bolt and that that works fine too and that allows for the the travel but what I've noticed is you need such little adjustment this way to make this function to actually allow it to track and forward and reverse because that's the whole point of this being able to do this and this is you really it's such a minut adjustment you don't need to bother with this center bolt if you put too quarter-twenty bolts in those slots and thread them into the top of this tracking pillar you've got exactly what you need it's perfect you can go that route this is I think 60 or 70 bucks shipped to your house or you can go the route of the homemade job like I did here I have another video on that I'll put a card up there so you can watch how this is built a rudimentary drawing of this is included in the plan set now and this works great too it's the same concept you can literally mount it right here above the tracking mechanism use the same size bolt it goes down through the top and it allows for it does the exact same thing it's just uglier in my opinion but you do get the bolt that fits in here and all the spacers and everything in the hardware pack so it's kind of a toss-up you know you can pick and choose how you want to do that you're tracking both ways are adequate this is a little bit more of an elegant solution what OBM makes and I think for that 60 or 70 bucks you do get the wheel so it does kind of work out but if you make your own you can buy the wheel set from Chas over at knife-grinder parts that comp and he includes a four inch tracking wheel which works really well as also so for this build I'm gonna go ahead and use my homemade tracking because it's just something I made and I like it and it works but you can pick and choose how you want to do your own tracking alright so just to go over this again you've got a 3/8 inch hole 3/8 three inches from the back it's about a half inch the center of this hole is for about a half inch from the bottom of this this piece of steel you've got a through-hole here this is three-eighths inch inch 16 and it's threaded all the way through centered on the middle of this piece of steel about an inch and a half back and then just on top of that you've got a hole and my hole works out to be a little off-center a lot off center because the tracking mechanism is going to get mounted on this so we're going to go ahead and thread this up I gotta tighten it too much because we will not be right on but you can see if you if you use the wrong size bolt it would hit the the tracking knob here go ahead thread this up you see it's going all the way through and it's pushing up against this and as you turn it in it pushes it further out turn it back this way it allows it to to travel closer to the steel alright get all that and then we just got to mount the fulcrum ball [Music] you want this to be a little bit snug nothing you want it to be able to travel basically so you just want a little bit a little bit of snugness there not too bad that's good then we'll grab a spring and we'll mount the spring since we're right here spring also comes in the hardware kit and I find a pair of pliers just will help you get it mount it in [Music] all right since we're here we might as well put the tracking wheel on I've got the the bolt and the spacers are included in the hardware kit slide that on spacer over it like this and it threads right up this doesn't have to be real tight I want the wheel to be able to spend not too much pressure all right so let's move on to the platen arm and setting that whole thing up it's actually a lot easier than you might think some people have you know thought it would be quite difficult to line everything up but the easiest way to do this is to literally set the platen the D plate right on the tube itself and then just make your marks so that you can drill your holes and and this is as simple as it gets the one thing you really want to pay attention to is that you do mark these correctly and drill these correctly because if you don't these are cut really quite perfectly here and there's not a lot of room for play if it's a 3/8 bolt it's it's really tight in there so if this hole over here is off just a little bit it will it will bind up on you so you really want to make sure that you get that as centered as possible on there and and just double--triple-check it you know go through it and and when you drill the hole and you put your maybe do one at a time kind of thing you know this is fabrication so you don't have a lot of room for error in this but again it's it can be as simple or as complicated as you want so lay the D plate on the arm mark your holes drill your first one and then double check that you got your mark proper on this other side before you drill this one and these are again 3/8 16 tapped all the way through so you're gonna drill both of these all the way through that's all you really have to do to the tooling arm [Applause] I'm gonna grab a shorty bolt put it in there just to make sure everything's lined up by doing it this way what we've now done is we've created a situation where it would be really hard to sort of screw up this this drill and tap it's important that we get this dead center on that hole and I'm able to check it by just turning the drill bit in the hole and checking from my clearances I look good I'm gonna go ahead and drill it just like this beautiful just the way we wanted it nothing's binding up everything's good to go you know you can see that does so the next step is we got to make our spacers for between here we need about 3/4 of an inch between the D plate and the platen arm so this DXF file is included and the plan set as of right now the filming of this the the plate is not included with the the actual grinder kit so you have to make your own I'm just gonna do two of them out of 3/8 inch steel so you can make this out of scrap if you don't have a plasma table I'm assuming you don't have one but in my case I do so I'm not gonna cut them out but by hand but they're easy enough to cut out by hand so okay so we've got our spacers here and these are just cleaned up a little bit with a grinder just to kind of straighten them out and all it's really important they sit flat and they sit flat up against here you don't want any variance on the surfaces you want them to sit nice and flat we're gonna take our D plate here our spacers and in the hardware kit you actually get some really nice nuts and bolts and knobs so we're gonna go ahead and thread that through our spacers through well it's still loose we're gonna thread in our knob and take a washer and a lock washer slide it over this side finish it off the nut alright let's take a minute and talk about the platen bracket so this is your D plate here and you need something to hold up the face of the platen and that you got a couple of options you can get a piece of 2 by 2 angle and you can cut this basically creating a notch like like here and here and you cut that out and then you leave a piece and then you cut all this out right here and what that does is that gives you a good backer for the the platen or you can use my design which is I've cut out of quarter-inch plate here and you get the DXF files for this this is a platen bracket that I designed it everything lines up real nice if you use this guy you got use a couple of spacers between the D plate and it to kind of lift it up off the off the face of the platen just slightly so it'll line with your belt if you go this route you get a chance to get it all lined up right off the gate so let's take a second here and then show you how it works these pieces nest in here you pop a weld on both of those in here and hold it up and then you drill it and tap a couple of quarter-twenty holes and well this up like this and then you've got a really nice solid surface in fact you don't necessarily have to cover this in a high carbon steel treated high carbon steel it's not even necessary at that point because this is you know good quarter-inch thick steel I prefer the two carbon steel because it won't bend or it won't sort of round over on the corners like mild steel will you'll get these corners right here that'll be rounded over so I prefer high carbon steel in this application I at the moment I'm not selling these pieces I just don't have the facility to manufacture them I have a plasma table but I can't I can't keep up with the demand for them so at some point I'll probably offer them otherwise you can take the CAD files that are included in the plan set and you can cut out your own they're pretty easy to cut out on a bandsaw alright so we've got our brackets welded up here we've got our holes drilled and tapped quarter twenty and take these quarter twenty half-inch and thread them in these are included in the hardware kit what this is gonna do is it's gonna give us a spot for our bracket to line up to so we can pop a weld all right so we are at the stage where got the platen bracket all mounted to the the D plate here and we can start assembling the platen itself it's exciting because we're getting so close to completion on this thing at least to to do a test run where we can dial things in a little bit so in order to mount this all together we need the spacer the the three and a quarter inch long bolt a a few pieces of hardware that all comes in the hardware pack and we'll get started here it's it's a pretty straightforward process everything's been kind of dry fitted anyway so now this is just the fun stuff so I'm gonna take our our bolt and slide it through here and our spacer as well and get it preliminary lead read it up on here like that that started grab our knob and the knob I like to do a wah lock washer and then another straight washer again that's all included and hardware pack actually got drive this in a little bit tighter here take our 2 inch platen wheels here and get them mounted I also don't want to forget the washer lock washer and the nut for this side and if you buy the hardware kit you get all the pieces and parts to mount these wheels and if you decide not to go with with our kit you know you just want to make sure that you get the right sizes and then the plan set the sizing is in there so you'll you'll know what what works the best because if you get too long the bolts you know you're threading and stuff it won't quite thread up and it might not lock into place properly you want to make sure when you tighten these down that you're doing it in such a way that there's no play in the bolt whatsoever but yet the wheel still spins freely otherwise if you tighten it too much you'll get some binding in there and the wheel itself won't spin and it'll get hot what you really don't want so that's why we use lock nuts on this side on the novice the bolt because that will keep it from loosening up with any vibration all right all that looks pretty good so we have to add a threaded hole here in the side for the the work rest arm and some people have been using this this hole here in the motor plate I have done that in the past it just you don't get threading all the way through the actual piece of plate so for extra rigidity I like to just add it to the side here and it's really just it's really just kind of an eyeball situation I like to Center it on the tube here and then drill my 5/16 inch hole and thread and tap it so I can add my knob alright so let's talk about the work rest real quick this is the work rest tooling arm and then you've got a couple of pieces of tube that are going to fit onto this this is for the articulating work rest base and this is going to slide in and out of there so this particular piece is going to get welded up to here but before we can do that we actually need to tap drill and tap a hole in this to allow for another knob because there's a locking knob that goes on the outside of that so before you weld this up drill that hole and and then we'll get set up to weld it together alright so the hole for the threaded hole for the the knob not super important where it is I mean you you you want to put a little bit of thought into this you can obviously go read the plans and figure out exactly where you want to put it I like to just go ahead and eyeball it for me that that works out just fine so in this case where I've decided to put it is about an inch and 3/4 down from the top and what that does is it gives me a a nice comfortable way to turn this knob to lock down the work rest so again this is a 3/8 16 threaded hole so we're gonna drill it at 5/16 and tap it out 3/8 16 [Applause] okay so we've got our hole drilled with our fur knob and we need to position this on the tool rest in such a way that where it's going to sit so we can weld it up the reason I like to do it in in this on the grinder itself is because I like to double check for level on everything because ultimately where this sits level is how the table is going to sit level and if you don't if you don't level it to the platen it'll you know it's not a huge deal but my preference is to have everything lined up as much as possible and you wouldn't believe it but you know when you when you use your digital level and you check everything it can be off quite a bit so we're gonna go ahead and just check it here and I like to just start up here 1:04 and then we're just gonna check this now we're at point zero four point zero 5 that's pretty good and we're gonna check it this way and we're off by a tenth of a degree I'm totally ok with that I think that's good I'm gonna just slightly move this over just to make sure it's centered on the pipe itself so that everything is lined up make sure that looks good and then we'll pop a couple tacks in it that way we can just make sure that everything is lined up even after the tacks are in it and this this piece doesn't need a ton of welds in it just a couple you don't want to get it super hot because you don't want to war [Applause] okay so this is all the stuff that we need to build the work rest and this comes in the laser-cut part pack you get the work brass get the hinges and the hardware comes with it you do have to find a piece of one-inch Dom or something similar and you'll see the reason why in a minute the first thing we need to do with this guy is we need to drill and tap 3/8 16 about 3/4 of an inch in on either side and the reason why we're going to do that is we're gonna use this to mount these plates here are going to go up underneath and we need to be able to pull these up to it so that's step one so I've had a few people ask me about you know finding the center of something and they want to get all very precise and again I'm gonna reiterate that this really is it just needs to be close doesn't have to be precise you can do this with a drill press I'm just having having to do it with my mill but you really just need something to so that you can thread those bolts down into it and it's got a rounded surface on one side so when you go to tilt it you've got clearance Dom was just the most simple thing I could come up with to to actually or this is just 1 inch stock not Dom but one inch round stock was the easiest thing I could come up with to make this happen and yeah you got a drill in and tap a little bit but it just is a simple way of doing it so don't over think it again this is an easy build it's not you know you're learning fabrication techniques while you're doing this and I I built this grinder my first prototype having zero welding skills zero metal fabrication skills and every one I built thereafter it just get a little bit better at it but don't overthink it you know just line everything up as best as you can drill it and tap it [Applause] ok so now we've got the whole drill and tap we're just going to take that our bolt and our plate and we just want to make sure we've got enough threading in there to lock this down there's gonna be a washer on this as well so we're pretty close to Mike going just a little bit deeper with it you can see it's just about halfway down the tap so I don't even need to tap it all the way and just enough to get those threads in there [Music] so you've mopped this whole thing up and that's that's essential yet I mean other than that we need to put in our threaded rod but we can do that in a little bit line that all up okay so I got all this laid out and pop some tacks into it the the configuration is laid out in the plans you just want to pay a really good attention to that and you I also like to take a little piece of leather or something and put it up underneath this pillar just to give it a little bit of rise off of the plate itself if I if I do that what I found is that it's easier for me to dial in the the zero degree in the 45 degree angle and that'll kind of make more sense when you get at the the threaded rod installed and you know you'll see exactly what I'm talking about because the the point of this articulating work rest is that it sits at zero and it sits at 45 and if you have this piece laying flat right up against this this the bottom of this plate what it does is it restricts that fine tuning and you can you can do that fine-tuning while you've got the these pieces all in place so I know it sounds complicated it'll make a lot more sense when you're actually seeing it also when I when I've got it laid out like this I can I can just really quickly kind of see how I'm going to mock this up and at zero which is where we're at right now I need to cut this piece of threaded rod in half so I have one for either side and then we're just going to use some nuts and we're going to fabricate we're gonna lock this into place but let's go cut this in half so that we can use it on either side all right we have our threaded rod cut in half and the the spot where you cut them in half you'll probably want to weld that to the the bar itself that way you're leaving the factory threaded end on the outside so for this fairly simple I like to thread on some nuts here slide it up through what these nuts are gonna do is they're gonna help us position everything kind of where it needs to go one on the inside one on the outside if you've already if you already have this set at zero you can basically just set it there in the spot where it's all the way to the very top of the plate and that way you now know where you're sitting is right at zero the so every once you weld this threaded rod into place every time you move and articulate this thing you'll know you're right at zero that's that's kind of the whole point of this thing is that if you've got this setup right and you've got it welded and tacked together correctly you shouldn't have to adjust it much once it's on the table you'll know you're at zero in 45 it takes a little finagling to make this happen right so if you've never done something like this before don't get discouraged you know just take your time and really you know really work at it to to get it straight and get it right and in this case I feel confident that I'm in the right place and I'm just gonna pop a quick tack right here and then we'll test it out [Music] lock it in place all right [Music] and the other thing I want to mention is you should pop some additional welds on this thing but it doesn't require a ton big long bead of a weld and I will reiterate that if you run a big long bead of a weld on both sides of this you're gonna warp this plate so just a couple of tacks is fine in this you know structural tacks I should say that way you don't work the plate lastly we're going to throw a belt on it tune it up yeah a little bit of an adjustment on the tracking [Applause] well there you have a guy's a fully built revolution to buy seventy-two poker honor and by the way it did not take me a full week would not take me a full week to build this thing if if I wasn't filming it so I wanted to kind of put that down and out there but yeah filming things takes about ten times as long I think you could probably assemble one of these and about through two three days maybe first one or whatever it's not going to take you that long to actually assemble it but anyway guys if you got something out of today's video make sure you hit that thumbs up button and if you're not already subscribed hit that subscribe button and if you click that little bell you'll get a notification every time I upload something to YouTube there are many ways to support my channel there's patreon buy me a coffee you can go to my website house-made dot US you can buy the pieces parts and plans if you're not in Europe and the United States and you want to build a revolution you can buy the parts or you can buy the plans but not the parts and I am currently looking for distributors in all other countries Australia China India and pretty much everywhere if you're wanting to set up a small business reach out to me Brian and housework taught us and we can discuss setting up a distributorship for the revolution to buy seventy two belt grinder as always guys it's been great hanging out with you in my workshop at studio I hope to see you on the next video my name is Brian house and this has been housework [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: HouseMade

Views: 991,549

Keywords: 2x72 belt grinder, 2 x 72 belt grinder, 2x72 belt grinder build, 2x72 belt grinder plans, 2x72 belt grinder kit, knife grinder, belt grinder, Homemade tools, how to build a belt grinder, home made, diy belt grinder, heavy duty, 2x72 belt sander, metal working, belt grinder diy, diy, belt grinder homemade, belt grinder build, knife making, belt sander, how to, variable speed, metalworking, frequency drive, workshop, 2x72, welding, build, homemade, vfd, knifemaking, grinder

Id: 5M5KmmJ_BHE

Length: 100min 14sec (6014 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020