I Built This From A 1972 Popular Mechanics Magazine Plan. Does It Work?

before the internet one platform was king and that was the magazine they have pages filled to catch your eye like tools inventions and things to buy they would always educate entertain and inspire all you needed to do was submit your subscription flyer [Music] i have stacks and stacks of all this history so let's open one up and uncover the mystery let's take a look at popular mechanics september 1972 electric rent-a-car that's kind of interesting i always get a kick it the advertisements stick them up with mako liquid nails i like that one i can smell what that house looks like i think my grandma's house looks just like this still has not changed one bit oh vintage hi-fi now this is something i'm interested i love vintage stereo stuff i have quite the collection myself i've never listened to a quad setup before i think that'd be fascinating look at those cameras actually they're not much smaller now are they but look at the tvs the water screens this is kind of interesting because we do a lot of filming here in the shop so having the cameras strategically placed and where do you put them how that's all organized so i find some fascination in how they do this mini hawk a bird for the bargain hunter that's a tiny little airplane oh what's it got here a city under a dome so i always thought that was a new invention that puff up your car with a no huff push button jack this is nothing new they had this a long time ago they just had poor marketing this is something we'd see today a camper on a boat take your own camper trailer or tent to see with multi-purpose marine rv i love it the wheelchair you can fly like a plane oh chainsaw becomes a drill seen those before those are pretty handy what is this the longest bus in the world lets workers relax on the way to the oil fields i wonder if there's beds in there if you ridden in that thing let me know did it have beds inside your first electric car may be an avis can't drive electric car away from your dealers yet but maybe soon from your local rent-a-car office whatever happened to that car i remember the days where you could just walk up to the terminal greet somebody as they come off the plane only if they knew now at the airports what it's like those days are long gone this guy is way too organized i am definitely not this organized got a good collection of tools that's right i don't see any mega squares in there do they still make repair manuals for modern day cars or are they literally forcing you go to the dealer can you get a hanes manual for a 20 chevrolet pickup truck cars are getting a lot more reliable though i will give them that would i have the skill set to build a jet engine built from easy to follow plans length 15 inches diameter 8 and a half 15 pounds fuel gasoline or carrot 20 horsepower whoa price five dollars here's what i'd like to do i'm going to put some money in an envelope to this address and i want to see what comes back because these plans say it should only cost me five dollars we're doing it and then next time we'll see if i got my plans back oh this looks interesting a hand operated arbor press this is what i want to build today i think this will be really fun to build and i have all the materials already so i don't see any reason why we can't build this in a day and i think it'll be a pretty fun project so you're probably going to ask what is an arbor press and i would describe it as a hand operated press used for light pressing operations like setting rivets bending metal installing or removing bearings or ball joints it usually has a place to add tooling at the end of the ram for different jobs their small size makes them easy to store away or they could be permanently mounted to the bench top i think the popular mechanics version is unique it combines the hand operation along with a hydraulic jack to the frame popular mechanics claims that it can output 10 tons of force which i'd like to test i'd also like to identify any weak points to the fabricated metal frame design and look for improvements and fixes along the way here's the material the plants call out for some one and a half by one and a half square tubing some two by two by quarter wall square tube three inch channel iron 3 8 thick plate steel 2 inch flat bar 5 8 round rod and a one and a half ton hydraulic jack to cut all this material i want to use my 1950s 60s era marvel band saw the next step is to drill the holes and it's much easier to do it while the components are individualized instead of all welded together so that's what we're going to do next the plans call for a 5 8 hole to be drilled throughout this whole project now that may sound like it's no big deal which it really isn't but your standard drill index only goes up to half an inch and it looks something like this having the next drill index higher is pretty valuable so it's a half to one inch and every size in between by 60 fourths and so now i have the 5 8 i can go plus or minus a 64th depending on what kind of fit i want they're not the best equality but they do come in a pinch for times just like this and i think the set was like 150 200 bucks it's paid for itself over and over and over again get yourself a set so we're going to use the milling machine to drill the holes if you don't have a milling machine available to you well you can easily do this on a drill press just make sure you have the spindle speed turned down to its lowest speed a chamfer bit and a drill remove those nasty little burrs that happen on the back side of the hole we got all our holes drilled in the material and that's looking great and now it's time to start fitting all the pieces together and when i look at the picture i don't think i'm going to build it standing up like it's going to actually be used in i want to fabricate all the components laying on their side i think this is going to be able to use the fixture table and all the fixturing to its best of its abilities and i think that's going to give us the fastest most accurate components when i look at this project it looks like a whole bunch of lincoln logs but there is one component this mainframe and the bar that supports the jack i'm going to weld this first because these two are complaining with each other and they're going to be easiest to weld in this orientation so let's start with that all righty i'm going to use the mega square here it's going to allow me to get perfectly 90 and enough room and clearance to be able to get the stick in there to get tacked on at least three sides and that should hold it where i want to until i get it all welded up when it comes to welding i pretty much can choose whatever method i want stick mig or tig but for this project i'm going to use the stick welder stick welding has some advantages like it can reach into small areas it can weld through mill scale and gets great weld penetration and i'm going gonna need all of these advantages for this project i get asked a lot should i buy a stick welder a mig a tig machine my answer to you guys is if you can stick weld you can probably tig and wire feed it gives you the good fundamentals and foundation for learning future welding processes i'm starting to stack all the components together and getting them tacked in place because the corner of the tube still has a heavy radius on it it's kind of hard to get an accurate measurement i'm kind of cheating by spacing the tubes out with these magnetic shim blocks this is going to make sure all the dimensions are spaced perfectly and because the blocks have magnets i can place them anywhere i want and in this application they're floating above the table so these clamps are carver i traded my grandpa for some new clamps these have literally been hanging on his wall for as long as i can remember and i'm 40 years old so these have been there a long time they're getting a second life here in my shop so it's pretty cool to use old vintage tools so the handles up top where normally it's on the side much easier to turn the handle like that got the first layer done of my metal sandwich going on here the next step is to put the other two components on top i'm actually kind of glad i chose stick welding because it can be really tricky to get inside this to weld i have to make sure these holes line up i have to make sure this is coplanar with the bottom with a set of bolts any meanie mining mode so what i want to do to square this tube up over this one yeah i could use my eyeball to align the edges up or i could just thread this pin in like that now i can hook the edge it gives me the perfect reference surface once i got everything all tacked together i was now able to take it out of the fixture and weld all the hard to reach places yeah the stick is able to get down in there like that everything is turning out fantastic the next thing i want to do is weld the base plates on we have one to do on the top and one to do on the bottom and that's going to tie the whole base together so i'm going to be cutting the base plates out of this 3 8 hot roll plate and i'm going to be using my favorite tool is this cutting torch and i recommend every new beginning welder fabricator metal worker to purchase a cutting torch you can heat you can bend you can cut you can make weird shapes all you need is a little bit of practice and you can make some amazing stuff with it and i want nice straight lines so i'm going to be using this torch guide it has magnets which stick to the material if this is my line that i want to cut on all i have to do is roll this guide over kind of tip it on edge and set it up right at the line and then just let it rock back and you're pretty dang close to being the correct distance off the line because we have to offset for our cutting torch nozzle but this is a way to ensure you're going to get nice straight cuts i've had this torch guide for 20 years now it's made out of aluminum and it just works flawlessly i keep the edge nice and filed up free of burrs and it just lives right here on the torch cart so i just grab it when i need it the drawing calls out for some sort of radius cut something like this they don't give you a lot of dimensions but i'm going to wing it it looks like in a picture it's at the halfway point i suppose you could probably cut a circle with a hole saw and then skinny wheel the rest of it out but when you got a torch why not just do it all in one big swoop so i'm gonna just cut that out with a torch so it's a little bit wide so that i could put a weld right there the plans call for some mounting holes be able to bolt it to a table i'm gonna go with a pretty standard grid pattern something that can bolt to a fixture table so i'm gonna keep it on two inch centers so this will be six inches apart and in this direction 10 inches apart and i'm not going to drill it with the drill press i'm just going to torch a nice good hole in there the plans don't tell you what hole size to use i think you get to pick that for yourself so and the fixture table holes are 5 8. so i'm going to cut this hole a little bit bigger give myself a little bit of leeway it doesn't have to be accurate if you want to get better at torch cutting a great exercise is to just cut holes large holes small holes all different sizes this is really going to help your fundamentals of torch cutting let's check to see if all the bolts line up bam i think we're good to go to get this thing mounted to the table what i'm going to do is actually use the table to hold it because i don't want this thing to get warped when i go to weld it on the plans call out for a gusset that's going to support the tube that the jack is mounted to it's going to be built out of 2 inch wide by three eighths thick flat bar and i think we're going to need it if we're going to see that 20 000 pounds of pressure the design calls out for some 45 degree bends so adding some heat in a specific location i'm able to concentrate the bend where i want it my vice has a really deep throat so bending this flat bar is pretty easy if you don't have a giant vise like mine you could easily bend this flat bar by clamping it to the edge of a heavy duty workbench or table yep if you didn't want to use flat bar i think you could easily use a piece of mitered tube steel to accomplish the same thing the next component i want to work on is the arbor press ram it's made out of one and a half by one and a half 3 16 wall square tubing so we're going to use the milling machine to drill the holes in this tube these are called parallels and they space the work up off the bottom of the vise so that we don't drill holes in the bottom of the vise but as you can see this is unsupported out there kind of flopping around so this is a parallel holder that i can drop the same parallel that i have in the vise jaws into this little holder instant jack so i'm using the next drill size larger than 5 8. the hole needs some clearance to be able to install the pin nice and easy the distance the holes are apart are not too critical but the holes do need to be concentric with each other from face to face oh that looks cool the next component we have to get welded into the frame is going to be the receiver tube for the ram and the plans call for this two by two by quarter inch wall tubing the first thing that we're gonna have to deal with is well there's a weld inside this tube that needs to come out you're probably saying jason just buy seamless tubing and i would agree with use if you have seamless tubing use it but even the weld seam removed and seamless tubing is not going to solve our problem and let me show you why when we take a measurement of the width of my tube is going to be an extremely tight fit not only that the corners of this tubing interfere with the corners of our ram so when you look at them together the corners interfere the next solution not follow the plans and go with a thinner wall tubing this is 3 16. this would solve our problem of clearance but what happens is well we have i think too much clearance i think we could solve this by drilling and tapping and putting in some adjustable studs or some bolts to take up the slop that way it's running up against the the heads of the bolts this would be my suggestion for anybody building this is to do that that's gonna be much faster i'm gonna try to stick traditional and use the quarter inch wall tubing so in order for me to use this tube i'm gonna have to take this to the milling machine and skim off ten fifteen thousandths on two sides i might as well take off a little bit more and just leave the weld seam inside the tube this is just something you're gonna have to work through and solve it as you go so we got the ram all machined up and i have to say i had to take quite a bit off this piece of tubing i had to take all four sides and narrow them up and basically put a nice heavy chamfer on the corner to actually get it to fit inside of this tubing i left the receiver tube or the guide tube out of the original frame fabrication on purpose because any distortion in this framework would potentially misalign the way the ram works so now that i have everything together i can make this ramp perfectly 90 to the table and then when i go to weld it it should be perfect and the frame can be whatever it wants to so you really don't need a fancy fixture table or any of these fancy stuff to get this perfect as long as this tube is perfect to this table you're golden all right time to weld i want to work on the pivot arm next and it's going to require two pieces of plate steel with some holes in them looks like two hoops for a handle and something that the jack can tie the ram into so let's go build that next i just got done laying out the supporting sandwich brackets for the pivot arm and they have some fancy radiuses some straight cuts but in all reality you don't even need any of that just a block of three inch wide by eight inch long piece of flat bar would do just fine with some holes cut in it this is just more for aesthetics than anything so just don't let some of these type of components scare you away by their shape just look at what's important and what's important are the holes so just keep that in mind after torch cutting my two pieces of plate i needed to get the holes drilled in them and in order to get them to match perfectly i'm going to drill the holes in them at the same time even though these pieces look identical there's actually a difference in size so i added this 2x4 to grip and smash the parts so that they don't slip out of the vise and with all three holes drilled deburred it was now time to get them welded to the arm the plans call out for an inch and a half by inch and a half square tube for the arm assembly the hardest part about welding this up is making sure the holes stay lined up so i just used a bolt to take place of a pin looks like the plants call out for two bent hoops that attach to the arm i'm going to be using this inch and a half wide 3 16 by 6 inch long piece of flat bar and i'm going to try to bend it in the hoop i'd like to try to do this without any heat so i'm going to get it started between these two pins on the table i just want to get it bend going start of a hoop and then i'm just going to take it to the vise i'm just going to try to pinch the two ends together once the hoops were bent and before i welded them in place i made sure to give myself a little bit of clearance so that the tube can slide in and out fairly easily now we need to build a pivoting amount for the hydraulic jack there is one issue that i can see being a potential problem with the jack in this overall design no offense to whoever built this but if i were to build the mounting bracket that holds the base of the jack straight just like they have it in the drawings i think there's going to be an interference with the handle so when you put the handle in as you can see when you start to jack it's really close to the ram it wants to hit this piece of channel iron that's not even the worst of it getting to the valve release one solution is we can build it just as the plans say or we turn it probably 20 degrees or so so that we have access to that valve and then the handle is a little bit further out which is a little more comfortable you don't have to bust your knuckles ah gosh i'm torn i want to stay true to the design but i also want this goofy thing to work i think i'm going to go with my gut and turn it to the side for functionality's sake so let's get started building that twisted base for the jack the jack that i'm using doesn't have any mounting locations so i'm going to drill some holes and make my own i just picked the largest surface area in the casting and drilled some 3 8 holes once those holes are located i transfer punched into my mild steel base plate then tapped for an appropriate size fastener then i used the frame of the machine as my fixture then i positioned the jack in the orientation that looked the best once i got everything tacked together i pulled it off and fully welded it okay we got our funky bracket it looks weird but it works good and that's what my wife says about me but this is the same instance so there's a little inch and a half dom tubing eighth inch wall and that's just to keep the ram where i want it it just gets welded so the ram is perpendicular when everything's 90 degrees it's now time to start on the accessories and build the lower bending die the die construction is pretty simple it uses a piece of 3 8 plate then some three inch wide 3 8 thick flat bar trussed up with the same exact piece but weld it in at a 45 degree angle once that was all welded the plans called out for this material stop and holder the material stop is a 3 8 piece of hot rolled bar bent into a u-shape to be able to bump the material up against once you're bending something this will help if you have multiple bends that are exactly the same [Applause] [Music] the last part of this whole assembly is to replace these bolts with some pins i know you could use some trailer hitch pins and i guess you could use bolts if you want to but i think it's just going to look cleaner if we make our own so let's make some pins these are super easy to make drill a hole on the end for our cotter pin and then at the end it needs a bend that way you can grip onto it and pull the pin out i'm using a piece of cold roll solid bar it's a little bit stronger than your hot rolled stuff the next component we need to build is this punch die and it's going to go underneath and inside of that ram now we could easily build this with a lathe pull off some stock machine some stuff down harden it throw it in the heat treat oven but i think i want to come up with a simpler solution for you guys if you want to try something like this at home and here's my idea the plans call for something that has a shank with a diameter of an inch and an eighth i'm thinking myself let's start with a bolt if you look at the way the punch is constructed it flares out nice and wide and big so my mind is thinking ahead of a bolt but the problem is the head of the bolt's much too short and shallow which i don't think is a problem because i think we can build that up with some welding rod pad it out and then grind it down into any shape you want i'm going to be using 7018 which is going to be a little bit harder than a base material like mild steel you could easily replace the 7018 with some hard facing rod that's a good solution so let's try it and see if it works this is one of the reasons why i like welding is you can stack weld bead on top of each other without any real consequences this might look ugly at first but actually it works pretty good i think this method is actually faster than building something from scratch on the lathe and then going to the milling machine i don't think most people would know that this die started off as a bolt at one time i think this is a pretty cool trick the goal of these popular mechanics builds are to give you guys ideas of alternate solutions to solve problems and i think this was a good one drum roll please in order to keep the die in place i drilled and tapped for a set screw this is going to allow me to rotate it in any direction i want and then secure it so it doesn't fall out i added another fastener at the top of the ram that way if you were to accidentally let go of it when you're installing a pin it doesn't fall all the way to the ground i think i've completed all the components now i need to do is sand the frame give it a nice coat of paint and then do the final installation of all the components there's no greater feeling than installing all the components for the very last time and having everything fit perfect click together just like it was made that way and actually seeing the frame jump to life off the pages of that magazine but i still want to test it to see how this thing performs this thing's looking pretty awesome but we're not done yet what i'd like to do is put a probe underneath this ram and see if this thing outputs what popular mechanics claims we'll actually see how much power with the hydraulic cylinder and then by hand so i would like to show you guys how this thing operates before we go into the testing the configuration that the press is in now it's using the hydraulic ram to do its force output the cool feature about this is that if you want to use your hand all you have to do is pull the pins and we can flip it around to use arm power so i suppose you could just use this arm if you wanted to and then depending on what you have underneath of the press you can just move to another hole something large you go higher something low you go lower if you want some serious power you add the pipe that's a long handle what i do like about this handle though is that you're able to get a lot of movement rather quickly just in case you don't have enough arm strength they gave us the hydraulic cylinder so let's pull the handle out and switch it over now we're ready for the hydraulic ram and with a couple pumps this end moves a long ways this end moves a little bit giving you lots of power moving the jack handle over to the side works amazing that's a great modification this is the bending die and you can put a piece of flat bar across here and it just basically folds it in between this valley this is the adjustment stop you need repeatable bends doing one or more just loosen that little clip up there and you can slide it back and forth if you did want to push something through the bottom of something they've given you a hole where you can push right through the bottom of the arbor press you can put this piece of flat bar across that opening and bend right there too because the bottom of the tube is hollow you could theoretically make yourself any dye that you want and this allen has basically being a set screw holding it in place so this ball joint is bad on this chevelle control arm so i think we should push it out and see if this thing has enough power to do it so this ball joint has to come out look at that it's moving yay one bad ball joint oh the ram will compress 10 tons and used with a hydraulic jack press it will bend up to 3 8 by inch and a half wide rectangular bar stock so let's see if it'll bend that it's doing it yay go little press go that's pretty easy actually look at that that's a better bend than i could do on the vise and hitting with a hammer it's much tighter i say we see what kind of power this thing actually puts out and if it can do the 10 tons that popular mechanics claims it could do okie dokie let's see what this thing can output so we're looking for 10 tons that's 20 000 pounds oh that's a lot so this is what we got 14 333 and i can start to see the arm bending right here so maybe i need to jump over to this next hole and see if i can get that extra little bit that popular mechanics claims so i'm going to move this closer gain a little bit more mechanical advantage test number two with hole position two come on popular mechanics don't lie to me now oh five ton well we passed where we did before we did it i can't believe it 10 tons furthest toll away is gonna give you the six to seven tons the closest to the rams is going to give you that 10 tons now i'm really curious to see what's going to happen when i add the handle and we switch it from hydraulic to well whatever i had for breakfast let's just try that okay without the extension handle what are we going to get i'm 180 pounds on the end of the arm 2 000 pounds wow let's put the cheater bar in 3500 pounds with the extension bar i want to compare that to the arbor press that i use here in this shop it uses a rack and pinion system but i'd like to compare it to see if this one's better or the other one here we go this has a much shorter arm i'm gonna try to hang on it 2200 pounds that's pretty interesting these two arbor presses are very similar in force this one has a much shorter handle that one has a little bit longer one other than that this is the game changer is the hydraulic cylinder that gives you that little extra force that this thing doesn't have when i was fabricating this one of the biggest problems that i had was this ram guide tube plans call out for a quarter inch wall tubing if you guys are going to build your own i would go to a 3 16 wall and build some sort of shims with a nut and a bolt take up the slop and the ram that's going to save a lot of work the next thing that's a little bit weird is that you're always having to jump these pins i think i would ditch the c-clip and go for a spring type detent where you don't have to put the retaining clip on every time there's not a lot of movement in the ram with the bottle jack so be prepared to jump the pin a lot i'm noticing that the ram has a little bit more power than what this arm can take it's already starting to bend a little bit so that's something to take into consideration it seems like the c frame is holding up fine but this seems to be the weak link the pins i'm pretty sure these things are going to get lost so maybe a way to chain them or keep them attached to the rig that's a potential problem tilting the jack over to the side is absolutely necessary if it's straight it's going to interfere so that was a great change i don't know how the popular mechanics plans operate without interference unless they have some sort of different style jack that i just can't see in the pictures popular mechanics claimed that it was 10 tons and it did so there was some discrepancy in some of the build plans with some of the measurements some of these holes layouts were a little bit off and wonky some of the material thicknesses and lengths didn't really quite add up but i was able to decipher those and just use my brain to figure it out i'm going to be donating this arbor press to a freyda high school in central washington hopefully it'll live a life of inspiration education and entertainment i grew up being inspired by popular mechanics and i want to share it with the next generation so thank you guys for watching i'll catch you on the next one

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 2,168,951

Keywords: fireball, tool, Fireball tool, Welding, Popular Mechanics, Arbor Press, Vintage Build, Mantis Pliers, Milling Machine, Lathe, Shims, Stick Welding, mega square, monster square, cutting torch, how to stick weld, drill bit set, alligator pliers, how to build, 1972 magazine, longest bus, electric avis car, build jet engine, city under dome, push button jack, quad hi-fi, haynes manual, film golf, 10 tons, build your own arbor press, belt grinder, giant vise

Id: c_UuVV7fhMc

Length: 29min 24sec (1764 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021