More Improvements to the Harbor Freight 20 Ton Hydraulic Press Part 2

[Music] hi and welcome so we're back with the 20-ton hydraulic press from Harbor Freight and I've got some other ideas I was trying to pursue when I first got this press one of the things that annoyed me most about it was the cheesy pressing shaft I don't know exactly what the proper name for it is but it's not really adjustable at all height wise it's soft steel and from reading what other viewers have told me since it's pretty easily deformed and gets beaten up pretty quickly if you ever push something that the whole surface isn't pushing on evenly so I was thinking that since I have a spare 20 tonne jack that I don't need it has an assembly built in it that allows adjustable height so I was gonna see if I disassemble this Jack if I could pull the piston out and use the Acme threaded Center shaft to press on because it should be good for the full 20 tons of capacity of the jack because obviously it's gonna be lifting it so I am going to disassemble this hydraulic bottle jack and see if it's salvageable so that I can use this and replace this whole arm here with a new arm that will not only fit this jack but then allow me to mount this piece upside down so I can adjust it to get close to the workpiece so you don't have to fidget with the hydraulics to try and get the positioning just close you can use the threaded portion to get close and snug and then when you apply pressure it'll be immediate and I think that'd be a really handy feature I've seen that on much higher end Jack's that cost a whole lot more so that's where I'm gonna head it so next stop we're gonna disassemble the 20 ton jack to replace it you can find it on sale at Harbor Freight for 30 bucks so it's not a huge risk plus I'm not an immediate need for this jack anyways first step in disassembly would be to as AV e says release the shmoo and empty all the hydraulic fluid out of here now the jack has a filler point here but there's no air hole to go with that so if I try and turn outside and drain it it's gonna sit there and suck you know just drip slowly as it especially since hydraulic oils somewhat viscous so instead what I think I'm gonna try and do is use my giant channel locks see if I can get them across top and unthread this piece out of here I'm not so sure I'm gonna be successful but we're gonna give it a shot so this nut is tighter than a mother and I seem to have no chance I want to heat it up but there's hydraulic fluid in it so first I figured and got a drain that hydraulic fluid out and I remembered oh of course there's a couple of there places where we can get it from besides opening up the the filling hole I can remove the pump assembly and I can also remove the valve and see if I can drain out the hydraulic fluid that way so I'm going to do that next as a gasket inside here they use this zinc plated steel looks like steel that's good yep it's magnetic so zinc plated steel washer as a compression washer boy they must really tighten the daylights out of that you can see the deformation on its surface there if you catch it right there and inside is a ball bearing that's your valve same with this side the pin valve it just pushes against the ball bearing so I originally considered you could just remake this whole piece you just need a seat for the ball bearing which would've been too hard so that's definitely another alternative when you're making a knob is just replace the whole piece it has a bigger knob on it interestingly enough I don't know if you can see it but this is the hydraulic fluid and there's all kinds of particulates in it including some that are shiny that look like metal bits probably not good and it smells like kerosene I think it could be got the consistency and it definitely smells like it didn't know kerosene could be as the hydraulic fluid I guess it can so I went and looked up kerosene online and sure enough kerosene can be used as an additive to hydraulic fluid to make it less viscous for cold weather and make it less immune to you know the thickening that would happen in a really cold environment so my guess is that rather than guess where they're sending these bottle jacks are where they're going to end up the manufacturer chose to add some kerosene to thin up the hydraulic fluid I know the top part looks like it threads into the can up here it's incredibly tight the bottom part also threads in there is a gasket I can see here so I am going to try and get that undone I don't know that I'm gonna be successful with that but I'll give it my best shot and I might try heating it but you got to be really careful because you fill this empty container with fumes of kerosene and or hydraulic fluid and heat them up in a low oxygen environment past their flashpoint and then suddenly break it loose and open it up and expose it to oxygen you could end up with a very ugly situation so you got to be really careful so if I do heat it up I'm gonna do it slowly and I won't open it up all the way I'll have a fire extinguisher handy and wear safety glasses and some other safety equipment believe normally this would unscrew or the bottom one unscrew neither is willing to give I got a socket to fit the top of the one inch bar couldn't make it budge same at the bottom even heating it up wasn't enough so we're gonna go to the cut-off saw because we were never intending to save it anyway so we're gonna head there next cut all the way around the top and apparently they got glue under there when they were making this because now it unscrews easily I just had to cut all the way through all the way around anyway so I was successful not that this thing will be usable when I'm done that way but we didn't want to anyways and I was not planning on keeping it so let me just get this guy off and move on so I got this guy unscrewed interestingly enough it's threaded to the inner column which is different than some of the other ones but boy it was they got a lot of paint in there which is why I was glued down it doesn't look like these things lock tight or anything like that on the threads and I can pull and that was the magic bit we were looking for because oh it's even got a flat spot on top which is really gonna help me out all right so the top section was just press fit with a gasket to the bottom section and the center part of the piston goes in is just threaded into the base I'm gonna see if I can get it off I don't know if I'll be able to but we'll give it a shot so this guy looks like it's made out of cast iron I'll find out when I start to turn it but what I need to do is I need to remove the back end of this all of this material here because I don't want this to be too thick hopefully it's not Hollow because if it is I'm toast but the threaded end piece only goes in about that far so I'm hoping the rest of its solid but I don't how far they board it through this rear part looks like it was turned it doesn't look like it was pressed on so let's hope that that's what it is all right so I went to huge amount of trouble trying to save a cylinder for this guy this piston but if I thought about it I wouldn't have bothered because what I originally was thinking is maybe they used the cylinder to support this piece under full pressure and that the metal would be in really close contact with the inside cylinder wall but that's simply not the case the way this thing sealed is they had this teflon like sort of cupped bushing on the end that slight about this diameter just a tiny bit more and inside was a really heavy-duty o-ring so when the pressure pushed from the bottom it would spread this o-ring and push that teflon against the outside so the inside of this guy is honed but there was no point because this part rattles around like a BB in a box car this is fairly close within a thousandth or two in diameter so this really wasn't necessary saving it was impossible to get I tried to unscrew it that was simply not having I had to cut the casting off of it and I'll tell you even when I got the casting close it wasn't enough I had to literally cut it off to get it off I don't know how they did I I tried heating I tried everything it was not coming so it was a one-way operation but I'll probably saved anyways because it's been honed beautifully and it's it's a beautiful piece so maybe I can find a use for that in the future now as for this guy the threaded portion what I'm figuring is it's just under two and a half inches and I'm figuring that they probably have at least as much inside the the piston still because otherwise that would be kind of dangerous if you didn't have some supporting back here because it would just try and break the end off if there was any lateral forces at all which almost certainly would be some so when I'm figuring is if I go conservative and I say they've got an equal amount still inside the piston or the whatever you would call this thing I assume it's the piston because that was the the piston end but in any case I'm gonna go down about five inches here which is a little over twice that and I'm going to part off the bottom of this because when I mount this in the new tube I don't want this part sticking out any more than absolutely necessary that would give me a little bit of material to work with because my tube is 2 inches that'll leave three inches sticking out which is you know about from here down which seems like good amount and then with the threaded portion I've bought myself another two and a half inches so I think that'll be more than adequate I can always make extensions that fit over this just in case I really don't want more of this material sticking out that I have to so I'm going to take this over to the lathe and part this and I guess we'll see if it's cast iron just a quick hint while I am putting the Chuck back on because I had it off for another operation whenever I change the Chuck I was taught to put a piece of wood over the ways in case you drop it which you know I've I've leg Cove this especially this big heavy one once and it would damage the cast iron so it's a real simple thing to do and it can protect you against that one oops so simple easy to do and a good idea so I'm going to get ready to part this guy now and we'll find out if it's a cast iron in pretty quick order I think based on the chip so I've got protection down just in case it is pretty much just use a cloth with couple magnets well let's just see we'll take this slow with a 110 rpm and see how it is boys the other that is wobbly they did not do a very careful job machining this maybe this is not cast-iron interesting you gotta see it cuts real easily it's not Hardy whatever it is now one of my thought is this might be hollow so I guess we're gonna find that out to do [Music] yes I see Howard that explains it there's a cast-iron plug in the end interesting design so that would be handy to keep it in place but I have a suspicion will be hard to pop out I'm going to clean up some edges real quick definitely they want to take off too much because we don't want to affect the strength this will seep in in the top plate so it will be supported but all right that's why I've wondered how they kept this crew captive because I thought this thing was assembled as one piece and I was thinking all kinds of creative solutions like pinning through the bottom with a spring in the middle so you screw it in and once it's inside the pin pops and you can't get it back out but because there's a cap on the end of this and this is probably just do em pipe they pinned the end so that's how it can't come out which is interesting also when it's when it's all the way down there's still a decent amount I mean there's not much inside the end is about an inch thick so maybe it's not do you um pipe I guess they board it out but yeah it's about an inch thick it looks like next up I want to take a facing cut off of this guy and this should self tighten as I do this and the reason I want to do that is because this will be pushing against any attachments I make and I'm also going to go on the outside just to clean it up so that I have a nice surface to clamp on to for any tools I make that'll fit on the end of this guy but I don't want to have too much material because I want to weaken it so we're gonna continue with a really slow rpm and see if that works for us [Music] yes - Lola bite and I think we can go a little bit faster than this so we're gonna shoot for doesn't look like it's terribly hard I thought it would be harder but there might be going for toughness rather than hardness so I'm gonna take off 25 thousandths and we'll go for 40 rpm [Music] all right probably too dangerous is also brittle quite the interrupts because this month [Applause] that looks pretty good now you got a nice flat surface to push on although the threads are not particularly tight so you know I'm not going to count on on that always being perfectly radicular to the path it's taking next I'm going to try and take a skim pass off the outside here so that I can make adapters that would it'll fit all right okay so we have our surface here which I'm going to take a file to just to clean up looks like there was some welding on there flat face on the front round on the outside and yeah I could get in there possibly the dremel tool to remove the peening on the other side but it's kind of handy feature to have it so this won't fall out and that you can't get it and you know farther than the last inch of material because that could be really risky so it's probably wise and some degree to keep it locked in place alright so this material is not hardened at all neither is this this stuff's really soft and my guess is that this whole thing was designed that in failure it would just crush and deform slowly rather than hardening which would cause catastrophic failure probably saves them a lot of liability so it probably makes sense and I don't know a ton about the hydraulic industry so maybe they only case hardened things I didn't even find this to be case hardened at all this is not case hardened at all it scratches really easily so I'm not sure because I'm not an expert Adam Weber I'm 79 probably would be the right guy to ask for any of these questions but I think we're good to go now we have we have our adjustable part and now we can just build the holder for it so I've got my piece of stock here it's some thick wall not quite quarter inch probably 3/16 and next up we're just going to drill the two 3/8 inch holes for is going to drill this side we flip this 180 drill the other side then we are going to bore out the big center hole and we have drilled two core [Applause] rinse and repeat drilled the other four holes now we're drilling the center drill the center hole again or not again for the first time and we started small with the bits we had on hand and now we're going to walk up in sizes so that when I get to the boring bar I won't have to remove as much material so I'm going to go all the way up to as large as I can mmm it with drill bits and then we'll go to the boring boy [Music] so using a hole saw to remove the majority of the material going with the boring wire soup so we're getting close to the end we're boring both sides I'm using the other cutoff section as a gauge block stuff up part I parted and I can just begin to get this thing in there is really tight I think I'm gonna go for another thousand and see how that works so interesting this is not a particularly precision part this guy's off by its oval by almost two thousandths which is interesting so they weren't particularly careful when they made it so I can get this to guy to go we knew there's a really tight fit but it's in there so so here's what the actual actual shaft and it fits it's a bit challenging to get in with the perfect fit which is what I wanted because I'm not actually gonna weld this to this cross piece like the other one is I want to make this easily replaceable so I'm going to drill and tap the edge here just to push on the side of the next step we've got to weld some of these fingers on the ends of the cross piece because that'll prevent it from going side to side here like the old one hands down here and I'll prevent this thing from twisting and moving out of space so I don't have a camera set up to shoot the TIG but I am NOT a great welder so you probably don't want to see it anyways I I could probably take lessons from any of you out there so I'll bring you back after I'm done so here's the piece with welding complete and as you can tell I am NOT - anything like a decent welder but I think this will be strong enough and that's what's important here especially since I've over built this incredibly the thickness of this material I chose because the shaft that is going to be doing all the pressing is going to be riding through here and if there's any lateral forces at all it's gonna push against these walls than if they were thin they might crumple and then things would get worse progressively worse and you could have some sort of catastrophic failure so I chose thicker wall the other solution be used inner walls everywhere and then just reinforce the center section which probably would have been more than adequate and I considered that but I found this tubing in the scrap Bennett my metal places I cut off being at my metal place so I just went for it so next up let's fit this guy up on the on the hydraulic press and see where the positioning is of the metal plate that's going to be used to distribute the force on the piston so we've got this guy in place now and I left these loose on purpose they can actually come up I've actually pushed the jack piston out a little bit just to lock it in place and I'm just using this to measure so it's an inch and a half back and this plate that's 5/8 here 5/8 inch steel its job is going to be to disperse the pressure that this guy applies because the bottom of this guy is a casting and it's brittle so if this isn't perfectly flat it could cause a problem so this guy will spread the force and that was really besides stopping this from twisting that's really the job of of this piece in general so the other piece this was welded in this one will be removable I'll be able to put it in place just with a little bit of pressure holding it in place I'll show you that when we get closer I think that's it for now I've got to take this guy over this piece and I'm going to mill a slot so that this sits down in the slot so I can't rotate side to side I've also got a screw and thread this guy because in addition this guy is going to be attached to this cross piece and it's not to take up the force because I'm only doing quarter-twenty bolts it's job is so that this doesn't move around so I've got the plate mounted and I found my x0 right here at this edge which is gonna be the front and so the four inch bar starts back one and a half so if I want my holes dead center then I go one and a half plus another two which would be three and a half and I need to put two quarter-twenty holes tooth out two inches either side of the center line so what I did was I found the halfway point between here and here and that'll be the center that way the absolute width doesn't matter because everything will be based on the center line and that's more useful since I did not machine these sides perfectly flat because it really wasn't important so anyways so we're gonna start with drilling a hole the drilling and tapping to quarter-twenty holes by the way this is 3/4 plate not 5/8 I thought I bought 5/8 but so when I do my cutout I'm going to go down about 1/8 so that'll really sit and sit in there and not move I'll bring you back it says I'm setup the drill so we're going plus or minus 2 inches off center and we're gonna spot drill and tap for quarter 20 [Music] so next up we use a roughing pen mill and we're gonna cut right down the center in order to go to point two five inches plus or minus that center point and that will be our edges and actually what I'm probably going to do is I'm going to start that once extreme a little bit off one extreme and come back that way I can get my my edges and I can just do it by site so let's go over to point C we're going to point two two five so we'll go to two point one and we'll come back and get the last bit later with a finishing cut since we're going to be taking a full bite here that'll probably make it a little bit easier just in case it moves on us and I think we're gonna shoot for something like 400 rpm flash yield and how well it's going to help so we're going to go slower rpm [Applause] [Applause] going swimmingly in the chips are pretty nice easy step to type [Applause] now after this pass our fights [Applause] [Applause] 10 mils doing a really nice job [Applause] you're nosey gonna back you off the ship so the roughing cutter did a really nice job do you wear these edges a little bit now I need to cut the cross piece in here where the the pump handle goes you know the handle to manually pump it sticks out this way a few inches so I need to make a relief in here the same depth for that so what I've done is I've come over three point eight five zero from the front and now I'm going to go plus or minus point seven seven five so our first pass will be much slower and then I'm going to go to the two extremes and in fact see points I use I reset my X zero for the center 0.775 so we'll do point seven and then we're just going to come over and cut slowly let me set you up there so I'll skip the vacuum cleaner on this one so you can actually hear it [Music] [Music] [Music] this will work from there so I've got to go plus or minus two point seven seven five so people working my way over like they did before I'll bring you back because only the vacuum cleaner so here's the bottle jack in and the casting of course was not even close to square and I thought about machining the casting but then I decided this can move just a little bit it won't be any problem at all because it's not going anywhere had to relieve the corners had to leave some extra slop because in couple spots that sticks proud I could have filed down but again this isn't critical because it won't go anywhere it's gonna be pressing from the top down this is just to keep it in place so we are good so now let's just go back and assemble the whole thing so next up we put the plate on the crosspiece align properly and it just gets bolted in with two quarter 20s from the bottle this guy is mounted with the two quarter 20s here and here next up is just to put the bottle jack in and get it in place then I can tighten these guys I was thinking about making custom hand screws but I don't think I'm gonna change the adjustment very often so I think we're just going to adjust them and leave it so next I put the jack in tighten these guys and then finally this is the tightening knob that holds the the pressing shaft in place so I need to I need to do something about that so that's gonna be made at least out of brass maybe steel with a brass insert but I don't want to pushing on the shaft and damaging and I just want to hold it in place because once you're pressing everything's gonna be forced together automatically all it is is to hold it in place when the tensions release that's it so it doesn't need to be particularly strong next up I'm just gonna create a brass piece that will fit on the end of this it's just gonna thread it on a little bit it actually doesn't have to thread on at all I can just physically sit on just fit over the threads and all it's going to do is be a bushing between the threads and the shaft this guy because I don't want to damage the sidewall this guy it's a very close fit so yeah we're just actually gonna drill it out so there's a really simple process so we're just gonna face this guy [Music] take the tiniest amount off the outside just to clean it up [Music] so there's the part that I take a little nibble off so this is piece of stainless steel 304 unfortunately it's all I add in 2-inch diameter I decided to make some knobs anyways so I'm gonna drill and tap this for three eight sixteen and mill it for the little finger grooves on it hopefully they'll turn out all right the problem is 18:8 stainless is hard stuff so next up I'm just going to shape this piece roughly to match the profile of the final parts [Music] except us of 9,000 to revolution I still not [Music] so we're gonna do is we're gonna have this little profile sticking out then we're gonna have another quarter inch section that'll be the three-eighths section that'll be the knob and then I'm gonna do make another knob right behind it there will be two on the same shaft that I'll part apart so we're just making the quarter inch section here for the second part once you far leaving a little Ridge [Music] I'm just gonna clean up or leave some edges then we're heading over the middle there's stuff to get centering on this I put this in a collet lowered it and visually centered it and that got me about that close 6000 someone Direction 3000 the other got my coaxial indicator on here got it within half a thousand so I will come up here and zero both of these we've got our Center so now what I'm gonna do is I have a pop in 1/2 inch end mill in here and I'm gonna pick a bolts or circle that's an eighth of an inch larger diameter than this diameter here and just take a half inch milling cutter straight down and that's gonna put some scalloping in it so let's set it up bring you back so we're gonna go fairly slow speed I got to see this up to then its slowest now with using the coaxial indicator but we're just gonna plunge we're not gonna so it doesn't matter if that bit is so long because most of the force of the axial instead of Radio which would be a big problem for the long bit like this in hardened material so let's turn it on and speed it up to say sorry 400 rpm [Applause] sounds like that's too fast so I switch bits to a for flute fit because it's an interrupted cut I also switch to carbide it's not great I cranked on the place significantly harder rotary table so show you one more this is a locked-off I've walked all my ways and the for flute cutter definitely did better than to clue so next we're going to part off the two knobs and then we're parting them off after we parted them off I'm going to remount them with the section I've got right here the small little relief and then I'm going to face the other side just to clean them up if they need it so we will need to face it a little bit there's one and they shoot for - so here's the two knobs their job is to replace the nuts holding the crossbar up so I can easily pull it off I loosen this one but it's gonna take both hands so let me get them on there and I'll bring you back so here's the project complete the old cross piece I'm just storing down here between the bars right now with the welded in soft steel piece here is the new set up so I made a new cross piece out of some two by four by two hundred thousandths thick steel tubing and I welded on some pieces on the end to keep it centered and prevent it from twisting 3/4 inch piece of soft steel I inset I doubt a 1/8 inch deep pocket to fit the jack so that it doesn't rotate there is a screw hole through here with a brass bushing I made an inside to press against this old piston shaft which new-old so this bottle Jack I bought because it has an air motor on it to move the hydraulic fluid very quickly the manual jack that came with this I sacrificed take the piston out so this brass bushing is pushing on the piston the advantage now is is that the piston I have from the old 20-ton jack has an adjustable end on it I turned that round so that I can make some tooling for it the bar used to be just held by symmetric I bolt and I have made some hand screws for this so that I can pull it out really quickly if I want to made out a 304 stainless and that is about all I have to say I found this this pretty much was the main addition I wanted for this from day one and I've been thinking about it so I finally decided to do it the one thing that's important is that this piston shaft goes through both two hundred thousandths thick sides of this guy to support it to prevent this kind of motion or this kind of motion so this was necessary just to hold it in place so that it doesn't slide out of the top piece because then if you had force at an angle this piston could Bend and any case my made mine are much heavier steel than they did but still I think the piston needs to be supported in two points pretty strongly they support in two points as well they welded in two spots but this is thinner gauge material so hope you found it useful hope to see you next time thanks for watching [Music] you [Music] you

Channel: Dudley Toolwright

Views: 194,969

Rating: 4.8119121 out of 5

Keywords: Harbor Freight, Hydraulic Press, 20 Ton, 20T, Milling, Lather, Machining, Boring, Adjustable Piston, Adjustable Ram

Id: KLo19mDKvls

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 03 2018