Metal Planer Restoration 66: Brazing the Broken Cast Iron Shifting Lever

[Music] hello keith rucker here at vintagemachinery.org guys today back to working on our metal planer restoration and today's task is going to be repair a broken casting we broke this piece while we were doing some testing on the machine a couple of weeks ago and i need to get it knocked out so that we can get this machine tested up and running like it should i'm going to zoom you in here i've showed this previously but i want to kind of show you guys what happened why it happened and uh let's talk about our game plan on how we're going to go out about fixing this so this is the piece in question that we got to work on and basically what this is it goes on the metal planer and it is a lever that moves a piece back and forth that when it rotates on the machine whenever a dog hits at a stop dog in two directions it's going to flip flop back and forth and it's connected to some linkage that moves a belt shifter side to side in the machine that makes it either going forward or reverse depending on which set of flat belts uh is uh engaged now here's what happened uh when when i first tried the machine out under power it cycled about twice and this thing just broke off but what i think is important to look at here if you look in here you can see this dark staining it's actually on both sides right here and what that indicates to me is this part had been cracked at some time a long time ago and this staining that we're seeing here is actually where some oil and grease and trash and whatever had gotten in there so the piece was already cracked it's already fractured and evidently whenever i started using it it just went ahead and it it gave up and that's where we got all the fresh crack in there fresh break is so while this was definitely disappointing to see at the same time it's probably saving me some time down the road by going ahead and breaking now i can go ahead and fix it now rather than this thing breaking in the middle of a job and causing potentially all kinds of problems so uh you know don't want to have to fool with it but thankful i guess it happened when it did so here's what my game plan i mean i could if i have to i could i could draw this part up make patterns get a new piece cast machine it all out but instead i think we're going to try to to salvage this piece this original piece and keep it together it's in fairly good condition other than the break we didn't like lose any chunks or anything like that and in my mind this is a good candidate for brazing back together now i talk about this a lot when i'm doing talking about repairing cast iron brazing is my preferred way of repairing cast iron i know there's a lot of opinions out there on this a lot of people will say oh you need to weld it with a nickel rod you need to do this you need to do that um there's a lot of people talk about tig brazing versus flame brazing so on and so on i'll just say that i have had a lot of good luck on braising cast iron in fact my success rate raising cast iron at least in recent years is almost 100 percent and i'm comfortable doing that i'm not going to say the other ways can't be done but this is what has worked well for me and you know i've got to process down i'm sticking with it guys i'm not going to try to change up so we're getting ready to start brazing this i went over to my wire wheel got everything cleaned up real good i don't know how well you can see it but i ground out a lot of this material that just gives a place for the braids to flow into to fill into and kind of grab a hold of that cast iron and hang on to it and i know that that doesn't look like a really something that would really hold really well but this bronze it'll it'll really grab a hold of that it'll really do a good job uh a raised repair and cast iron a lot of times if it's done right and you go try to break it you'll actually break the cast iron before you break the braze joint so it is a very strong repair if done properly so i've tried to do my prep here i've got it in a a clamp clamping everything together i've got some fire bricks up underneath this the whole idea there is is i don't want it on the table where it's sucking the heat out of these parts once i get some heat in these i wanted to stay in here so the fire brick is just some insulation between my table which is a giant heat sink and the part now to braise this with i'm going to be flame brazing so i'm using a brazing torch here and oxycelon type torch you know uh i always get asked about tig brazing and and i've done some tig brazing my personal preference is i prefer to take braids on smaller parts that don't take as much of a heat to keep keep the heat built up in them when i get to larger parts and yeah i would consider this a larger part i prefer the torch because i'm keeping the heat in the part itself and when you're brazing it's not like welding with welding you're actually melting the base material with brazing i'm using a dissimilar material that will adhere it'll chemically mechanically bond itself to the cast iron but i'm not actually melting the cast iron which i think is extremely important in doing any cast iron repair and one reason why i don't like welding cast iron is because when you get the cast iron to a temperature where it melts and then it cools back down and hardens you have the potential to create a very weak area right there in that area that has melted down it can become extremely hard and brittle and again that just gives another place for a fracture to occur cast iron can go through a lot of heat and cool back down it's not like steel where it loses its temper and hardness it's so much unless you've got a high carbon cast iron but most cast iron is really not going to be that big of a deal uh and it's going to it's going to cool down just fine so that's kind of my my choice here for going with the flame braising and brazing instead of welding so enough talk my plan here is we're going to get some heat in here uh get this kind of tacked together on both sides and then i'll start actually brazing it up and uh basically filling in all these areas where i've ground out so let's get it done all right we're going to start here by taking our torch and we're just going to slowly start introducing some heat to this and over a fairly wide area when i'm doing a preheat i try to get the don't just focus on one spot right there and get it up to temperature because basically the metal just gonna suck that that heat right out so i really wanna at least get a preheat on all of this so if you have an oven in the shop you know putting it in the oven and getting it up several hundred degrees really helps i don't have that so i'm just using the torch so it's gonna take a few minutes uh to kind of get this uh stuff to speed i'm already seeing a little bit of a color change in there which tells me that it's getting up a couple hundred degrees in some areas already but i'm not gonna bore you to death like i said we're just gonna kind of heat this up my goal is is that when we before we start brazing i want the area that i'm braising to be kind of a a red kind of a not a super bright red we don't want to melt the material but we want to get it up to temperature and then that brace will just kind of flow right down in there and when things are ideal and you're braising you're really not using the torch to melt the bronze the bronze is melting just by coming in contact with the metal we usually have to persuade it with the torch a little bit but in principle you really want the metal to be hot enough to melt the braise down into those holes so we'll bring you back here in a minute when we get up to temperature and we'll start our brace job all right we've been going after this for a while now and when you're heating this you can kind of see it starting to have a little dark cherry red to it it's not quite up to temperature yet and i'm still trying to focus the heat down in that larger area below it it's heating up top faster than it is down below because i got a center cross section uh we're almost the temperature here to start brazing and again right now i just want to kind of tack it get everything held in place i'm introducing my bronze and it's just flowing right down in there which is exactly what i wanted to do let me get down in those little trucks and crannies [Music] i'm not putting the flame right on the area that i'm braising it's really just kind of conducting up from the material around it i'm gonna come around here to the back side and try to get some heat down here again just kind of very lightly fine from uh braised material down in there i want it to flow down into that those cracks i'm going to turn my torch off and i'm just going to flip this whole thing over i got some material there to kind of hold it in place and we want to try to position this thing around the other side and do the same thing just going to leave it like that we'll kind of work on this side coming down right here and then go to the other side all right all right i got my part over here in the vise now and i'm just trying to position it where i can get into this area and have the gravity working in my favor so uh putting some heat back in here again and we'll continue brazing this one out all right reposition again just trying to get gravity working in my favor hi guys there it is uh for better or worse we're just gonna let that uh cool down real someone wrap it up in a welding blanket and uh we'll come back and clean it all up kind of after the fact right now you got a bunch of just junk in there that's uh probably making it look worse than it is we'll do some grinding we'll get these ends turned down to a uniform size so that we can put those rings on there but i think this is going to be just fine i think it's going to be just fine so let's uh wrap it up we'll let it cool down overnight and work on it tomorrow so we have got this thing brazed up it's cooled down overnight it's actually the next day now and i've got this over on the lathe and what i want to do is go ahead and turn this outside area right here and get it where it's just cleaned up whatever it turns out to be i may not get it cleaned up on this brave side all the way but i need to have a good surface that i can put a ring over this and shrink a ring on there to get it running uh or to kind of help hold it together so we're going to get in here and kind of chisel away with that on the lathe i have got this thing running as true as i can get it i know i think there's some run out in it but it's not going to matter i just need a surface to put a ring on so i'm not going to spend too much time trying to fiddle around with this thing with all this braze on here and get it running perfectly true it's running it's running pretty good right now i think and to do my turning i've just got a boring bar this is actually a left hand boring bar so i can work on the front side a regular boring bar i'd be working on this side over here i've got it set up i've got plenty of clearance here i am going to be a little bit careful with this knob swinging around make sure i don't get in the way of that because that can be dangerous but uh it is what it is everything clears i got to stick out on the boring bar that's the reason i'm using a boring bar so i can kind of reach in here and stay out of the way of this swinging death trap over here so let's uh start up the lathe i do have the lathe running at a little bit lower rpm it's a little nerve-racking coming in here with that uh part flying around kind of in your face but i do want to just kind of come in here and start kind of nibbling that bronze out in there in the back and then we'll start turning that whole piece down so that we can get a ring on it just going to take my time work through this interrupted cut right now but uh we'll get there right now i'm just kind of cleaning that surface up in the back this braises all the way down that arm and i'm trying to get that cleaned out first and then we'll worry about turning the diameter there i think we got it here that ring will fit right down on there now we got a little bit of area in there i'll probably just once i get that ring on there we'll probably braise that area up just to make sure it all captures it good but good job we're going to go ahead and get the other side set up and do it all right i got my part turned around now and uh basically we're gonna do the same thing on this side although i think i'm gonna choke my boring bar up a little bit closer i don't need all that stick out because the handle now is kind of swung back over behind the chuck which makes things a lot less nerve-wracking still got to watch out for that thing coming around but at least it's not like right there in your face so we're just going to kind of come in here a lot closer that will really help us from the standpoint of uh not having to worry about that not having as much flex in the in the boring bar [Music] particularly on that interrupted cut anytime you got a boring bar you got that stick out and that can really play havoc in certain circumstances so just make sure swing this thing around make sure i got clearance i don't see any problems we're not going to have any problems there so all right that looks good so what i'm going to do is we're going to kind of come into about right there and start by facing down the back and getting that cleaned up so i'm gonna bring it in until it just barely touches i'm starting to get a little tick right there so that tells me i'm coming close to being in contact and now i'm just gonna bring that cutter in and kind of clean that back face up i'm going to stop right there because there's a glob of braised kind of back right in here and i need to kind of knock that down a little bit before we go too much farther in so all right we're really close to getting into the cast iron i think i'm gonna yeah we're cutting into it now it looks like i got this side running a little bit truer than i did the other one which is good let's see where we're at yeah that's actually cleaned up all the way around i'm just going to take a really light pass and get a nice finish on it maybe just about four or five thousandths [Applause] um now i want to just kind of face this uh front i got a little glob of braise on it and i'm going to get it all cut out and i think that'll do it yeah that looks good all right that looks a lot better you can see there where the braze is it looks like we got good penetration i don't see anything kind of pulling out or flaking out we got a piece we can shrink a collar on there and i think all will be good uh once we get that done so all right let's make our callers all right we are ready to make our first uh retainer ring that we're gonna put around there it's gonna be the smaller one and i just picked up a piece of scrap metal here it already has a whole board through it so it's going to make a boring a little bit easier and i can get what i need out of that so the outside diameter on this needs to be 2.250 which is really nothing critical on that uh just needs to be close to that the inside diameter however is a different uh story it needs to be point or 1.876 and it needs to be right on the money because it's going to be a press fit up underneath that uh machine surface that we have on the other piece so i'm gonna go ahead and rough out the outside here like i said get a couple thou we're good on the diameter there come here and touch off we'll just do a little bit to clean it up and i get a good measurement to start working with all right we're getting down close i'm just going to dial in on the digital readout 2.2 0.250 right there and like i said on this one you just got to be in the ballpark i'm not even going to bother measuring it beforehand because it just doesn't matter all right [Music] and we look good they're about three four thousandths over i get a boring bar set up and we'll uh i actually want to face that front real quick before we take this cutter out okay all right let me get my boring bar set up all right boring bar set up we'll come in here and we'll just start by making a run through there get it cleaned up we get a good measurement all right i got down close i'm within about 15 20 thousandths of my final diameter and what i did was i just stopped i turned the machine off and walked away for a little while took a break and i let this part cool down uh because this is a critical measurement just the heat from turning this part can cause that measurement to grow and then whenever you it cools back down you'll be out of tolerance so i wanted to get my rough everything kind of roughed out to shape on that inside bore and then come in here and take a good measure but before i do what i'm going to do is i'm just going to turn the lathe on we're going to let it recut that last cut without moving anything it just should take just a really light cut through there and then get a good measurement on it so let's fire up our machine and roll down through there [Music] so that little bit of metal is pulling out is a combination of any flex in that bar from the previous cut but probably more so than that because it had a good bit of heat in there that inside diameter had grown and as it cooled down it shrunk back down to size and this is going to be a more accurate measurement to what it will be once the part is cooling it at the temperature that we're going for so anyway we'll get a good measurement here and hopefully finish this thing up and hit our number right on the on the on the mark and i'm gonna come in here with a four micrometer and we are really really close so um i'm shooting for what is it two inches or excuse me one inch one hundred eighty six thousand well actually eighty five thousand so i went back and re-measured over there and we are at one eighty five eighty six eight seven eighty eight so i've only got about two thousand i need to pull out of here so um what i'm gonna do is come back in here and just run my cutter back through there blank again i'm not going to move anything uh because there were i noticed when i pulled out i still had a little bit of a still a little bit of contact in there so this uh it's still cutting just a little bit out and let's take another measurement here and look at there we're right on the money where we want to be i think that's going to work just fine that should give us a nice shrink fit on there and it's going to give us about a half a thou of uh of uh clearance which is right where i want to be so i think we're good all right so i need to measure my depth here of my parting tool what i'm going to do is i'm just going to take a block here and put on there and i'm just going to bump this up and i'm going to zero my digital readout in the z-axis right there and now i can just measure in however deep i want this needs to be 450 thousandths so 2-3 450 right there i just lock that in on my digital readout or on my carriage and that should give us the measurement we need to part it off i'm going to pull in my tail stock here it's got a little piece of metal in there that's just going to catch that ring and it comes off and we'll just cut her right out of there [Music] there it goes all right one ring down and i'm gonna turn the other one off camera same basic principle just a little bit different dimensions and uh we'll go press those on so i've got my two rings cut here and uh next step is we want to actually press these in place so this first one just it the top up here is kind of not the same diameter and it drops on there just a little bit but it won't quite go down which is good we want to shrink it in place so it's good and tight so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this ring and i've got a fire brick over here and i'm just going to take a little propane torch or a map torch here we're going to heat it up and when it does it's going to actually expand that metal just enough hopefully it'll just slip right up over there or press right on there with the arbor press it might press on there right now but i'm going to heat it up and shrink it in place and that way we don't worry about getting it halfway on and getting it stuck so let me get some gloves on here and we'll put some heat in that part and hopefully press it right in place my goal here is again i'm not trying to get it red hot i'm just trying to get it hot enough that it expands a little bit and uh it won't take a whole lot but it's amazing how much steel will move with just a little bit of heat even in normal weather conditions the amount of expansion and steel particularly in larger parts can be quite big numbers it can add up to fairly big numbers so um we're not looking for fairly big numbers if i can get a couple of thousandths out of this we will be golden so i'm gonna heat it up just a little bit more i'm starting to see a little bit of a color change there it's kind of turning a straw color which tells me that it's getting on up the heat a little bit and we've got a fairly uniform straw color on it right now i'm going to use a pair of pliers here to pick it up bring it over here look at their itches i didn't even have to press it it just dropped right in place and when that cools it's going to shrink and should just hold right in place that's exactly what we want so it would not go on before so this is a really good sign here so we'll let that cool down and shrink in place and we'll flip it over and we'll do the other side yeah it's already frozen on there so you saw that just dropped right on there and that is on there tight now it's still warm it's not even completely cooled down but it's uh already shrunk into place so let's uh get set up for our second one here and same drill we'll just uh this one again it's not going down on there we'll heat it up and see if it'll drop on if not we'll press it in place and just like the other side just dropped right in place i think we're good so we'll let that one shrink in and uh no press required well there we go we have a ring on both sides there both of those rings were shrunk into place and yeah i'm sitting here debating on whether i want to keep this part back up and fill that little area in there with braids just to make it look good or just leave well enough alone it's not going to be any stronger if i put any more metal in there i've got plenty of holding power in these rings i think i'm just going to leave them like they are and it'll be what it is one thing i do need to do is go ahead and get these repainted and ready to go back on there but i really feel good about this repair honestly the braised job was probably sufficient but because of the way it broke out right in that keyway i just wanted some added assurance but putting these shrinking these rings on here like this i mean that should give me all the strength and stability that i think that i'll need going down the road i think everything will be good here so anyway i'm gonna slap some paint on this let it dry overnight and we'll get it back on the machine uh and i got my other belts in now so i need to get the rest of my belts on there get everything adjusted and hopefully we can see this machine operating like it's supposed to be so that's the game plan just did a test fit over here looks like everything's going to work out fine it's fit up on there so that's good i had to do a little massaging on the inside of the shaft i had a little bit of braze get down in there but we were able to get it out no big deal um and a little bit of sanding and stuff at some of those places but it's a good tight fit i think it's going to work out fine like i said we're gonna go ahead and get this painted and i'll get this back on here and hopefully we'll be ready to give this thing another try so that's the game plan so guys that will be your wrap as always thanks for watching please do subscribe to the channel if you haven't already thumbs up and comments i appreciate it as always hit that bell icon up there to get notifications and hit the subscribe button if you haven't already and with that we'll catch you on the next video and hopefully the next installment on the planer episodes gonna see this table moving back and forth keep your fingers crossed we'll catch you on the next video thanks [Music] you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 51,354

Rating: 4.9593678 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Lathe, Restoration, Vintage Machinery, Metalworking, How to run a lathe, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, brazing, metal planer, cast iron repair, brazing cast iron, welding cast iron, machine shop work, new haven metal planer, metal planer restoration, metal planer machine, cast iron welding

Id: GeR1WnVvJ1I

Length: 32min 27sec (1947 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021