Machining Cast Steel Railroad Wheels

hello Keith rocky revenge machinery org got a little project today I'm working on that here at the museum that I thought you guys might be interested in seeing finally getting into a little bit more machine shop work after more or less having to take a little break to work on my shop at my home I'm working on and I'm looking forward to a little distraction here to get out here and actually run some machines and do some work so anyway what I've got here is we've got some castings these are for some railroad wheels for some cars to go on a little railway and a little backstory on this so this is actually not for the museum here but this is for a Veterans Memorial Park down in Bristol Florida and they have a little 24 inch gauge railroad setup down there that they give rides on to what have you never actually been down there I understand they've got a crown steam locomotive that was built back in the early 60s or sometime in the 60s I'm thinking that it's kind of an amusement park type steam locomotive is built like a real steam locomotive it's just a newer one that was built for amusement parks more so than being a real old one and then they have some DS electrics or diesel-powered of locomotives down there as well they pull some cars around and I like said I've never actually been there I've just talked to some of the guys down there one of the guys that actually volunteers here at our museum and helps with our running our steam locomotive also works with that group down there and that's how I got kind of got hooked up with them but they've got some cars they pull with these with their locomotives and the wheels on the cars are getting in really rough shape and they were needing to basically have some new wheels made so they made some patterns they had some blanks here that were cast which is what I have here this is one of the raw castings that they brought up here to me and I'm pretty sure that this is actually cast steel when I asked him about it the guys that brought him up were not a hundred percent certain but it should be still I wouldn't want a railroad wheel made out of cast iron and be afraid it would break it would make me shatter and I've already machined a couple of these just learning how to do it and the way the material is working is I'm pretty sure it's cast steel but what we're going to be doing today is basically facing off the sides of these so this is one I've already done and I've got the backside here this is all faced off flat we've got a hole punch of yours it's a one inch hole the axles go on I would have thought it would have been a little bit bigger than that but that's the way they're set up so I'm following their plans and then the turning this hub to two and a half inch thickness and so facing that off this part up here is left rough and turning the outside here so that I can chuck it on that and have it turn true when I flip it around but all in all you know that's pretty much what we're going to be doing today is just facing the two sides we will come in in a later date and actually cut the face of this wheel and it's a kind of a complicated cut it's at a taper it's got some radiuses in it and quite honestly I'm looking into doing that on a CNC lathe I'm looking at some options right now to do that so they brought eight castings to me that they want me to go ahead and get machine which is enough for them to do get one car done I think they have more castings I'm not sure how many that they had made and at a later date we may do some more for them but uh they asked me if I can get eight done for them so that they could get ready they only run their operation periodically throughout the year and I think they're really not planning on running again until the fall so pretty much got through the summer to get these done they said if I can have them finished by sometime in August they should be fine we're looking at early May now when I'm shooting this video so anyway we'll go ahead and try to get these knocked out I've already done the machining on two of these this would be the third one we'll go ahead and film this one now they've kinda got the process figured out and actually did one it's been quiet it's been several months ago now they actually came down and they were going to try to do the machining themselves but they didn't really know exactly how to do it and asked me if I would help them go through doing one so they came up spent a day with me I didn't put it on on film just simply because I had so many people around and so many questions being answered Nast and what-have-you that we basically spent a day and went through the whole process and I've worked with and the kind of show them what need to be done they had to have a lathe at the Museum as it turned out their lathes really was not adequate for the job so they asked came back and asked me if I'd be willing to help them out and do these and I agreed to do so so that's where we're at let's go ahead and get this thing chucked up and we'll start machining so I've got this chucked up just in a three jaw Chuck here on the lathe this is a rough casting so obviously you know there's a lot of run-out and wobbling in the rough casting as always you're never going to get a rough casting this real true so basically what I do when I'm dealing with this is I'll probably shuffle it around in my three jaw Chuck a couple places and just try to find the place that looks the best and I can tell you you know we've got some variation in the thickness of this rim I mean this probably I'm just looking at this it's probably a good eight of an inch thinner here than it is up here if not even you know 3/16 or something there's there's a pretty good difference between these thicknesses so we just got to start somewhere and our removing material so we'll go ahead I said this Center hub this is where they poured the cast steel down the center so then they cut these off so most of this little part gets machined off and basically this just gets machined flat so the outside rim and the inside hub should be the same on the same plane when we get through this on this particular one we may have a little bit of a void in here it doesn't quite clean up and that's fine we're going to be doing some more machining of this rim later on so I'm not worried if it's up particularly on the rim of this completely if it's completely cleaned up we just want to get the hub cleaned up and like I said we're going to be doing more machining to that later on so I can tell you that this stuff is hard it is it's it's a very hard material I have tried to use two different high speed steel tools on this when I was playing around one of them when I was actually trying to cut this faith I had a tool with I think it was a half inch radius or something like that did that with our maybe was a quarter inch radius I can't remember whatever it was that matched what that inside radius is going to be and it just burned it up just taking a light cut and I also had a little chamfer tool that I was trying to deburr these edges here and it just ate that piece it has to be it's still up to so this is some pretty hard material my carbide tools they seem to be cutting it pretty well so you know this is that's what we're going to use we pretty much going to have to use carbide to cut this particular project let's get in here and touch off and start cutting this make about a 50,000 step the cut we seem to be working pretty good on the last one we've got this uh the center hub whittled down to the point where now the outside is starting to come into place so you a will start making path all the way across the entire face we'll stop it in the middle and move up to the inner of this favor but we haven't fit all the cost I'm making about a fifteen thousand depth of cut and I've got a little dial indicator set up down here that I can just reach in there violin 50,000 Simo let her go I was noticing while I was machined that I was getting some pretty weird sparks coming out and when I get through I see what's going on we got some inclusions in this casting some pockets in there didn't really show up on the outside but this one appears pretty dang big I don't know if that casting is going to be usable or not I'm probably going to go ahead and just finish doing what I'm doing to it but I'm going to take some pictures of that send it down to the guys down in Florida let them look at it and I suspect they'll probably bring me another casting or two up here guess we run across some more of these next step that I want to do is I want to actually just true up the outside of this rim it's not really important for the actual wheel because this is going to actually have a radius all around it we'll do that later but what is important is that I have a good true surface that I can turn this around and Chuck to when I flip this around and if I leave it like this I really don't have anything to I don't have a machined surface to work off of to grip it on so we're just going to skim off enough to clean it up even if it's not a hundred percent as long as we got a place where we can grip it in the three jaw Chuck we'll be good I think that's good being quite clean up here we've got a surface or we can chuck on that's good enough for now next step is we need to drill a hole through there we want to be exactly one inch somewhere Center drill it will drill a half inch we're really close to one inch and then board out the size I measured my hole about 30,000 thunder sighs I'm just going to use a boring hard board a sound I'm actually got a one-inch creamer order that I can just run through these and clean em all and get them exactly the size but I don't have it yet so for right now I'm just going to use the boring bar will come in here probably think about 20,000 measure it and clean it up another pass or two depending on what it takes so let's do it speed that up most of this I'm using a telescoping gauge so I can put that up in here I'll put it in here crooked expand it out tighten it up and then kind of get a measurement on that measure my promise it looks like I've got about 8,000 to go got into caliper just so you can see it you want to measure that in micrometer but I'm about a thousandth over so we're good to go perfect last step here I want to just touch these corners in here in the Burum love angle to Lamar we'll just come in here and put a slight chamfer on these edges just to break the edge nobody gets cut or anything in her handler that would be good God has flipped around now is running true on the backside here in the face are the rim of course again the rough cast then we got a little bit of wobbling on this end but no big deal this is going to be machined out again on this face here later right now what I want to do is I want to face this inside hub and the thickness of this hub needs to be two and a half inches no need to be pretty close so we're going to face that off we'll be making some measurements to get that down to where we want to be so I did a quick measurement we got about a hundred thousandths of material that needs to be removed to start with or to get it down to that diet that thickness so I'll probably just start with about a 50 thousands cut and we'll get a good measurement after we clean it up and take it down the size I'm touching off there goes zero my indicator that I've got down here you can't see it but I got that indicator on here and we'll take a picture thousands next step here is I need to get a good measurement on the thickness of this hub and to do that I'm using a special micrometer and ironically it's called a hub micrometer because it's just for this is for measuring a hub so regular micrometer wouldn't fit up in this hole this one will fit up in the hole will come up in here and we'll measure got a little chip in here hang a second I can see it and I'm always been give me a bad measurement all right so again I'm wanting to be on 500 thousands and right now I'm on I'm about on about 100,000 right there that wasn't a hundred thousands that was six hundred thousands I meant to say I have a hundred thousand to go so again I'm on dialling another fifty thousand so my dial indicator measuring the travel as I come in here and I will make another pass and we'll make another measurement looks like I've got about 50 mm fifty-one thousand fifty one thousand two to go so I'm just going to dial in fifty-thousand Seguin see where we're at we're right on the money so we'll go without so I wanted to zoom you in here on this hub micrometer and let me get in the measurement here and I'm right on the money I get asked a lot from people about using micrometer about how do you know how tight to put it on there and if you got a your better quality micrometers we'll have a little ratchet on the end here and you see I'm turning that and it's slipping and that's calibrated to the pressure that you want to do so this one here it's just directly going in and out but when you get down to the tight you use the ratchet and that will automatically put the right amount of pressure on there if you don't have one with the ratchet it's hard to tell someone how tight to turn a micrometer and really probably the best thing to do is for you to get a micron err that has a ratchet use it and you kind of get a feel for how much pressure you would use on one that doesn't have the ratchet but I always look for one that has a friction thimble on it here that will slip and give you that little ratcheting action when possible because you're gonna get better measurements with that they'll be repeatable I got this last one off and looking at these uh inclusions in here I mean some of these you know these aren't terrible that one there's not it was kind of bad that one there I wouldn't be worried about that right they'll actually machine out but this one here will take a little thing and just kind of stick that in here that's going that deep down inside the casting I think this one here is a candidate for the scrap pile I'll talk to them at the museum down there the railroad uh and see what they want to do but I imagine they'll send up another casting for me to do a major squid happen send me a couple of extras in case I run across that again hopefully I won't that'll be a wrap for this video guys I've got three of the eight machined out again one of these probably be a scrap so I really probably need six more to get there eight order in so I'll be working on those off-camera over the next few days it's not that bad of a job I can probably do all the machining that I just did here in I don't know 30 45 minutes if I can sit there and work on it without shooting video and whatever so we'll knock those out pretty quick the next step again is going to be to put this a profile on here for the wheel and there's a taper it comes up there's a radius in the bottom and then another radius out here at the top and then it actually radius is over in the back too and I've got all the the drawings and stuff for this profile and again I think I'm going to do that on CNC lathe that's my plan I've got a friend Forbes Matthews that has a CNC lathe and he's told me I could use it so we will probably attempt to do that on his machine the only caveat to that is as for but really doesn't know how to use that machine very well and I'm not much of a CNC guy either but another buddy of mine Mike Wiggins who's the backyard machine shop YouTube channel he does some CNC work they do mostly seen see mill work where he works and he's a / manager over that shop so he said he can give me a hand with the programming and he's probably going to come over when we do that and help us get the the CNC lathe running it's not a big deal I have done a little bit of CNC work but I'm by no means an expert we get the machines set up to do it it won't be a big deal to cut these profiles so that'll be coming at some point down the road probably a bit later this summer but we will get back on this and get these finished and get these wheels down to Florida so they will be ready to go with their stuff in the fall at least have one new car ready so thanks for watching some good cast steel machining going on here today and I got a little more work to do off-camera we'll talk to you guys later you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 210,268

Rating: 4.9044247 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Vintage Machinery

Id: r9ZW8PaEs8s

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Fri May 20 2016