Minneapolis Steam Engine Crankshaft Troubleshooting - Horizontal Boring Mill Setup and Indicating

hello welcome to topper machine I'm Josh topper and today's job is again on the Lucas horizontal boring Mill so what we have here is the crank shaft out of a Minneapolis steam traction engine and this had been repaired by somebody else a while back and the repair they did was just absolutely horrible um and it actually caused some other damage to the engine we're in fact going to have to pour new bab bearings for it but I'm going to go ahead and get this thing set up on the mill and then I'll explain in detail what had actually happened [Music] all right so just walking you through the rough setup here I've got this piece of bar stock that I'm going to use to indicate everything in fine-tune it um because you can't really indicate over the the disc on the crankshaft it's just too much to reach over but I set up my V blocks these are ground matched pair so I set them up dropped my little bar in the groove here lined it up up to that got it got it close and just clamped it down just a little bit to hold it in place and I did that on both of them now I'm going to grab my indicator and indicate this bar and get it true adjust as needed and then we'll be able to lock them down we'll be in good shape there [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right I got myself set up here and I've roughly found center of the bar we're going to check it this way make sure it's it's flat and then we'll come off the side and check for straightness well that's not perfect there's about 10,000 it's about half the bar so I'm going to try a 5000 shim under there and just see what it does all right let's see what that did for us right we're a lot closer um and that could be as simple as a misalignment also of the angle blocks let me or the V blocks let's just tap them see if we get some movement [Music] we're looking a lot better all right before I get too far ahead of myself I'm going to check the side and I'm going to find the center here I'm lined up up close but I'm just going to crank it right about there that's pretty close to Center and indicating this why I'm almost I'm pretty close to lined up there looks pretty almost pretty good let's just see where I'm at yeah we're off a little bit four over so I need to adjust that other end just a little bit well one end or the other okay I did a little more tweaking on it and I am very close now we're just going to go a little bit more yeah we're getting real close so I'm going to keep tweaking on it I'm going to get this alignment done and then I'll come back to the top and get the top alignment done then we should be ready to throw the crank shaft up there [Applause] is I think that's pretty good it's it's definitely way better than we had for run out before um what I wound up doing was I wound up throwing another thin shim up here in my angle block and that got me there I'm indicated this way perfectly um I could probably throw just a little bit thicker shim in here all right so that made it a little worse so I think we'll just go back to that thinner shim that I got here and I think we'll be okay yeah that's only giv me a couple th so over over a foot foot and a half so I think we can live with that [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so I got around the V blocks that are clamped down with some of this hard cardboard here's our shim um I'm probably going to add some angle plates here just to stiffen this up with a little bit of rubber between it or something but what had happened to this engine is it was at another show a very large show here in the Midwest and somebody was running it and what I was told this is this is not firsthand account this is what I've been told by like four different people somebody didn't lubricate the crank pin they didn't put grease in it um and they took out the crank pin just destroyed it so they took the crank shaft out took it to another shop had a new PIN put in well whoever the shop was I would not suggest taking it there I don't even know who it is but they don't know what they're doing because they put the pin in true to the disc they indicated to the disc you need to indicate to the crankshaft now I've heard this said aund times we're not building a Swiss watch well it doesn't matter if the pin is not straight to the crankshaft you're going to get some wobble and that's what's going on here this pin is crooked and with the bearing tight it's doing this with each stroke and that's what we found as soon as we took the connecting rod off this thing turned over so nice and smooth but with the connecting rod on it was binding up we put the connecting rod away from the cylinder and set a like an oak BL across the the boiler just to let it ride on and you can watch physically watch that connecting rod back and forth so what I'm going to do is take the boring head and just turn as little off of the OD of this pin as I can I'm hoping we can do it with about 10,000 maybe 15 just to straighten it out and that should cure it cuz that little bit 10 th off or whatever once you get out 3 ft that equates to a large amount of of misalignment so that's what we're going to do here so I'm going to go grab the coaxial indicator we're going to come off the center of the pin here get our zero and then that should get us even if it's crooked if it's crooked this way we're going to take more off one side than the other but we're going to take more off the opposite side on the inside so we'll TRW it right up that way all right I got to clean this thing up a little bit guys remember when you bring stuff to a machine shop I'm charging the same price for Machining as I am for cleaning this is stuff you could save a ton of money on cuz you know if we're not Machining we're we're losing money so we have to charge a flat rate across the board for cleaning Machining everything it's just the way the business works so you can save yourself a ton of money on these jobs just by cleaning them up a bit before you bring them in and a simple simple pressure washer would have took care of this thing pretty well so just remember that never never bring your stuff in dirty save yourself a lot of money all right before I get too carried away here I'm going to I got my dial indicator here and I already got my spindle close to Center I want to check this Outer Rim just see how much run out there is on this disc and that'll kindy to give me an idea of what we're dealing with so I'm going to start at top Center roughly all right so I'm at zero right now 91 so there's 9,000 under what the top is oh of course I can't see it down there I'll grab a mirror and take a look at that right here we're at 85 so we got a little bit there I'll reset my indicator so I can actually get to it there's a zero 86 so we're 14 thou difference here to here so that's going to that pin's going to be off quite a bit 13,000 and we come right back up to zero all right so that's what I'm starting with is a crooked disc now we'll grab the coaxial and we'll find Center on here and just check it Center outside and inside just see how much taper we really have [Music] [Applause] [Music] not bad for the first try we'll get that dialed in for all right I don't know how this is possible with just minimal adjustment so I am going to double check my indicator here she's traveling that's just impossible well we'll run it out to the end here and just see if that changes things or if I have a problem with my indicator oh I'm getting a little run out out here that's about as far as I dare go in h all right this is really weird because I'm getting good readings here I had good readings on the the V blocks when I set them up so now I'm going to try something different I grabbed a piece of 38 Rod I'm going to put that in the drill chuck and that's going to get me out over the over the disc here to get an indicator out here we're going to check this crankshaft one more time and then we'll come back check this again and if that's not it then we're going to check the connecting rod bearing and see if maybe that was where the Machining problem was I'm still not going to you know I apologize to the guy who did the job here if it's true and good but I've seen a lot of people do this the wrong way and get them so crooked that they've caused so many problems but let's let's verify that the shaft is true and the best way to do that is either on the boring Mill or a big surface plate we just could not check that properly on the the steam engine so we're still ahead of the game by having to take the crankshaft out all right as you can see it's wiggling right now and this is not very rigid we're going to try this again what I did was I took my tg-150 collet Chuck and an inch and Quarter Bar stock and put that right in the tg-150 and that is a lot more rigid um I mean it's significantly more rigid I can still manipulate it by hand but it's looking good all right now I'm just going to check it for the vertical alignment here and we'll see what we got just just in this section this will tell us everything we need to know and then we'll move off to the side and check it there just double check everything so I moved about a foot there and we're still on zero even with a little bit of bouncing from the paint and the rust here on the crank we're good this way we're good true height-wise so I'm guessing my setup is all good but we're going to check like I said we'll check one of the sides here all right we're set up on the side of the crank I got her zeroed let's just run her out and see what we got so over the course of a foot down the side of the crank here one thou I think we can rule out that this crank is not straight to the table straight to my spindle so and I didn't unclamp didn't change anything so I think we're actually good here on the crank pin so we'll get the crank connecting rod up next and start indicating on that all right I put the coaxial indicator back on there and I'm really close about a th off which isn't a problem but now when I move the indicator in and out on the shaft I should see some kind of difference you know some movement of the needle and I'm seeing nothing which has got me really confused because we saw that movement for sure on the crankshaft or on the connecting rod and I'm seeing Zero deflection whatsoever oh I hit the bar there but I mean nothing zero so now I got to figure out what's going on here so here's our connecting rod and here's the bearing that rides there and I do see some wear right here from the bearing cap on this side but nothing on this side let me flip it over and we'll take a look at the other side I don't know how well this is going to show up on camera but I see significantly more wear on this half of the bearing than this half so it's definitely not running true now I'm wondering if the problem is is something else not the connecting rod cuz that shouldn't change when it's stroking even if it's a little off it should still travel the same way it would be the pin that would throw it off but the disc is this surface true and as it comes around it's pushing it or pulling it and then this surface cuz the there's a cap that goes here that contains the whole bearing so let's let's measure this surface and see what this looks like cuz in fact looking at it right now I can see a little wear and more wear so maybe we need to just face this surface a little bit to clean this up and fix that problem all right so I got the indicator up here and at this point I'm on a zero and when I rot rotate around the opposite side is where I'm seeing a difference but it's only 4,000 and over the course of 33 in which is the length of the connecting rod Center to Center that's only 35 to 40,000 of deflection so this isn't the problem now I'm starting to think the engine bed is is screwed up um somehow like the engine is crooked on the to the crankshaft itself so maybe we need to pour new bearings so I got a call into a friend that knows more has dealt with this before um but we all thought the crankshaft was the problem like totally thought it was but it's obviously not I mean it's checking good everything's measuring good straight so now I'll wait until he calls me back and we'll see what's going on well guys I'm going to apologize right now because there is not going to be any Machining in this video um I did not see this coming I really really thought that our problem was this crank pin and so did everybody else cuz we've seen it so many times all of my friends um what has actually happened the guy who did this this job did a very good job and I'm I'm actually impressed by that because I've seen so many of them crooked but the problem is they did the crank pin then they put the crankshaft in the engine and poured new bearings and they got the crankshaft crooked that's what we've determined is going on here that's cuz I finally got word from back from a couple different people now saying oh yeah they poured a new new main bearings okay there's our problem that's what's going on nobody has real given real information on this thing and it's been kind of a crapshoot trying to figure out what's going on so we've verified the crankshaft I showed you guys all how I indicated how we verified proved everything um pretty straightforward setup and this was the best way to do it you can't really do it on the engine so doing it on the boring Mill or a big surface plate is about the best way to do it so now we'll end the video here but we're going to go ahead and this is bringing in we got a build of fixture for supporting the crankshaft on the boiler in in the bearing blocks we have to melt out the old um babit we have to build a a whole bunch of tooling and stuff and guides to line this whole thing up and it'll all be engine specific cuz there aren't many 25 Hors out there get it all true pour new bearings and then put it back together so I'm probably going to wind up doing a couple more videos just with this but they'll be Machining in those so with that I apologize again and until next time get out in your shop and get it done right the first time

Channel: Topper Machine LLC

Views: 46,897

Keywords: manual machinist, machine shop, topper machine, metal planer, metal shaper, DIY, homemade, monarch lathe, Bridgeport milling machine, lathe work, boring mill, HBM, drill press, metal lathe, milling machine, welding, press brake, Steam engine, traction engine, Minneapolis, MTM, threshing machine, horizontal boring mill, indicating in a part, difficult setups, abom79, CEE, Vintage machinery, diresta, steam, farming, antique power, inheritance machining

Id: yWhHa5tiqJk

Length: 25min 55sec (1555 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 27 2024