Pouring Babbitt Bearings for a Goldens’ Three Roller Cane Mill

[Music] hello keith rocker here at vintage machinery.org guys today we got back to working on a cane mill restoration that we started on a while back i did a previous video on uh welding up and returning the journals on these these three rope rollers back here this is a cane mill there's three rollers that basically you take sugar cane run through it crushes the cane and lets the juice come out and from that you could boil it down to make syrup you can boil it down to make sugar whatever this is an old antique cane meal from probably the late 1800s uh that we are working on today and like i said we've already got our journals all turned and freshened back up they were in very bad shape but we've got those looking pretty good today's job is going to be pouring the babbitt bearings for this so i always mention when i talk about babbitt bearings because i know a lot of people may not be familiar with what babbitt is but in the days before ball bearings pretty much pre-1920s 30s somewhere along there yes ball bearings were around before then but they weren't very commonplace really until after the great depression and the u.s and the rest of the world was gearing up for a world war ii production was really when the kind of the big conversion to ball bearings took place yes they occurred beforehand but before the 1920s and 30s almost all your bearings were plain bearings or just friction bearings and one of the types of bearings that was used was a material called babbitt babbitt is a tin lead alloy that is fairly soft and what you would do is you would take a a block like this your journal would run in it this would come on there you'd have oil and you'd have that softer material between the cast iron or steel and the shaft and that way the wear would take place in that softer material rather than wearing down the shafts and so forth this cane mill had babbitt bearings in it when i got it they're in very poor shape we're going to totally replace all these and make them match and fit the new journals that we've got cut so first thing i want to do is we need to remove the old babbitt from these bearing blocks and to do that we're just going to melt it out baby belt melts at a fairly low temperature around 7 800 degrees compared to the iron or steel that is a low temperature and we're going to melt this stuff out and then get ready to put new babbitt liners in here and we'll cast those in place let's get in here and do it there's three rollers on this each roller has two bearings uh the bearing because of the way the pressure is it really only pushes on one side so it's not bare don't have the babbit material on both sides like you do in many applications it's only gonna be on one side uh to basically decide the pressure is going against these are the bearing caps and uh you can see the babbitt in here this one is actually completely worn out and into the cast iron this one here looks like it uh got hot and melted out partially i'm not sure what happened there maybe the whole bearing just kind of slipped down but we're going to melt all this stuff out these are little cups and they have the bearing liner on one half we will melt all this old babbitt out and get ready to pour news so to do that i've just got a ladle here i'm just going to put my block in there we're going to take the torch over here heat it up melt it out these are the journals that we're going to be uh pouring to i'm just going to move those out of the way for right now let's get our torch set up and we'll start melting some babbitt this babblet will melt to the fairly low temperature you can use a propane torch or map torch like this to melt it out but i'm going to use my oxy acetylene torch i've got got it we've got a rosebud set up here so we're just going to fire it up this will go a lot faster than using the propane move that out of the way and we'll just come in here this won't take very long get it warmed up and that babbitt will just start pouring out you see it kind of puddling out right now it doesn't take much at all and we'll just melt this out and we'll be ready to pour some new stuff back in there in a bit i'm just using a ladle to catch this uh this is my pouring label i'll melt my babbitt in this and use it to pour my babbitt later on generally speaking whenever i'm pouring babbitt i will use new material i won't have enough of this old material to do the whole job and i i prefer using babbitt of a known source because they're a bunch of different alloys slightly different alloys out there and i just i just don't like mixing it some people will i just don't like doing it that one's done get our next bearing piece put in here same thing there you go you see the process we're just going to get all this melted out and we'll be back in a little bit all right i think we have all of our babbitt melted out here and uh there's what's left in there the stuff floating on the top is just kind of trash and i can take a little wooden stick or something and kind of clean that out i'm just going to dump it here on the table all right like i said if i wanted to reuse that i could i'm probably just going to use new fresh material though that i know what it is we'll let that cool down and we'll be ready to go here in a little bit all right so i think we're ready to set up to pour the bearings and a lot of times when i'm pouring bad bearings i will actually use the shaft that we're going to pour that's going to be the uh the the bearing is going to run against we'll use that as our mold to actually cast it to so this bearing will go in there about like this right here but because of clearance behind this thing and so forth and plus for my next operation i was going to have to build a mandrel anyway what i decided to do is i'm going to do a pouring mandrel for this and basically all this is a piece of steel i've turned it down to the exact same diameter as my journals now on these uh these cane rollers uh i went and made sure that all of my shafts were exactly the same size so and the nice thing about ballot bearings is the measurements really don't matter it will conform to whatever it is um so basically all i did is i just i took my smallest diameter one after they cleaned up and i turned everything else to that diameter and then i turned a mandrel here that matches that diameter this is basically going to be what i use as a pattern basically to mold or to cast that bearing to and then when we take them off of here they'll they should fit right on this shaft here we could have used this but i'm gonna do it this way again mainly because of the next step because the next step had been really difficult to use the actual roller so i've got this shaft set up over here i just got sitting up on a couple of v blocks and what i'm going to do is come in here and we'll just kind of position our our rollers up underneath this now because one side is tapered i've got a piece of metal in here kind of picking it up this is there's nothing real precision about this these bearings can be as thick or thin as you want you got plenty of adjustment but one end needs to be picked up so again just put a little shim up underneath here i'm gonna use a little piece of wood and i've eyeballed it that's pretty level across there uh it's level enough and we'll position these so i'll basically have an equal amount on each side that is um you know for for spacing on each side now we're going to actually pour the metal in here but of course right now if we were just come over here and pour it the metal is just going to roll everywhere because there's there's open gaps so we got to fill all that in and to do that we're going to be using this product here called deacon mold our deacon pack deacon mold pack i guess is what it's called this is a a heat resistant material i used to use a product called babbitt right which i really really like but unfortunately you can't get it anymore it's a damming material for for pouring babbitt bearings but this is kind of a replacement honestly i've never used it this stuff is kind of the consistency of play-doh it does have some fiber in there no it is not asbestos i always get asked that question you know the the old original babbitt right did have asbestos in it from what i'm told the stuff that they made in in the last 20 30 years 40 years however long it did not but some of the real old babbitt right material could have had uh asbestos in it back in the day so what we're going to do here is uh i'm just going to get a little piece about like that and i'm just going to roll a little roll here and we will use this it's kind of a gasket between there and also to kind of fill in the space and what i'm going to do is i'm just going to kind of roll this in here like such i'm going to roll it all the way around the shaft just kind of help hold it in place and we'll just kind of press this into it and that should form a nice dam in there that the babbitt should not pour around and we get everything positioned back like we want it that looks good and we'll put some damning material on either side as well so we'll just come in here like such again i'm just going to kind of wrap it around the shaft it doesn't need to be on top but it just kind of helps it hang on there and we'll just kind of press that in there and it will just kind of conform to everything and hopefully we get a nice tight seal and no no babbitt's going to pour out when we uh over here and do this so all right i need another piece on the other end to damn it all right and my spacing looks good and you know what guys i'm just gonna i'm gonna kind of use some more of this to kind of position everything into place i got plenty of it and it'll just make sure that those pieces don't go rolling around on us kind of position these in place hold everything where it needs to be where it doesn't move around guys i'm just going to do both of these bearings at one time you know i could do them individually i got enough shaft there no big deal we're just gonna it'll be two separate pours they'll be divided between them but it's gonna be a lot easier just to do this one in one operation so that's kind of my game plan all right i think i like that this is a equal spacing on both sides we got fairly even around it so let's get our babbitt ready and we'll heat that up and do a pour so we've got our babbitt melting over here in the ladle up on the camp stove that's just what i use and again we put some fresh babbitt in there that was some stuff that i ordered from a master car it's fairly expensive but uh again i like using fresh babbitt when i do a pour so uh what i'm gonna do now is go ahead and put a preheat on all of this stuff down here we don't want to pour it cold we want to have some heat in it probably want to be about four or 500 degrees so i'm just going to use a torch to do that and we'll just uh put that heat in there all right make sure everything looks good i'm going to come over here and just skim any dross that comes to the top of this ladle any uh trash or impurities in there will float on top of the the molten metal so we'll just pull that stuff off and a good way to tell if your babbitt is at temperature is if you put that in there and it comes out charred we are at pouring temperature so we will just come over here with the ladle and i'm just gonna come right here and pour it in there until it fills up [Laughter] and that was a messy pour but we got it do the other side and we'll let that cool down this uh babbit that spilled on the table no problem it just pulls right back up and we'll remelt it and that is probably nice and hard so we'll go ahead and pull it out of the mold here didn't leak any that's good all right one looks good and i think these are both acceptable pours we'll have to clean this up get all the excess off but i think it'll be fine all right first pour down now to clean this thing up i just uh put it over in a vise and i just use a horse shoers rasp this babbitt is fairly soft it'll file away really quickly but you can even use really coarse side to rough it down pretty quick get that little bit tighter all right that's got the top cleaned up turned up on this end and just not a whole lot sticking out there but we'll knock it back make it flush with the casting same thing on this side you know these bearings don't have to be super pretty they just have to work you know if i really wanted to be fancy i could have made a piece of metal that sandwiched up there on the corner that damn so we had a nice smooth uh piece there on the on that edge but again it's just not going to matter these things need to be functional and not necessarily pretty you're not going to see them anyway so that bearing is cleaned up and ready to go these two bearings uh we'll go right here and uh they fit just right they're gonna work just perfect so up next we got the cups that go down in the bottom so we're gonna go on the bottom of this roller which is this side it's still hot yeah um and the way this one works is that the roller sits down in this piece here it presses on one side uh and it needs to conform to that radius the other side of the bearing doesn't have any babies only half of it gets babited but because of the way that we can't really come in from the top and pour these we're gonna have to pour them straight up and down so i need to modify my mandrel and uh we're gonna put a liner in here to keep the babbitt from going around the backside so let me get that ready and we'll be back in a minute get these poured so the next bearing again is this cup this goes in the bottom and what i did was i took my mandrel and i cut it off and i just welded a little piece onto it and this is going to allow me to drop this over in here and put this in a vise to kind of hold it in place and i can pour the babbitt around it down here that's the game plan uh but like i mentioned before if you look in here this half down here that's kind of wider this is the only half that baby gets poured in this half back here is empty again we were only pouring half of a shell because there's only pressure on one side of this roller so what we're going to do is we're just going to kind of line this whole back side with the deacon mold pack and that will keep the babbitt from pouring back in there we'll let it kind of fill in in the bottom i want a little bit in the bottom because we're going to have some weight going down and i want a little bit of bearing pressure pressure in the bottom bottom so here's the stuff we just used this stuff is reusable for a while anyway it will eventually get to where uh you well in typical fashion my battery went dead in my microphone right here so i'm gonna do a quick little voice over and kind of tell you what's going on but i was just saying that you can reuse this uh material here this deacon mold over and over and over again you just just keep on reusing it until it gets too hard you can use taking a little piece of metal here like a rolling pin and kind of rolling that out flat getting it to a uniform thickness taking a piece of wood there kind of cutting a flat bottom on one side also making a square cut which become the side and from there i'm going to take it over and put it into the piece and right now i'm just kind of measuring where that other side is and we'll go ahead and cut that square as well once that's done uh we'll take that whole piece a little flat piece there and kind of place it in there where it needs to be this will become the spacer between my metal piece and the back side there and keep that babbitt from pouring over in there i'm just taking a stick there and cutting that off um you know once we get this thing just like we want it we're going to take our piece of metal and stick it down in there i know my little tack weld broke off but i found out real quickly that it was going to hold it up just fine without having that piece of metal on there which worked out really well for me here we're just kind of heating everything up getting it up to temperature getting it ready for a pour again just putting that preheat in there my baby's melting over on the stove and we will bring this over and do another pour so we'll just pour it in there into that open area note the babbitt does not go back here in the back and this turned out to be a really really nice pour it uh turned out just perfect all right we're down to one last bearing uh the actually i've already done one off camera but these two bearings fit the larger shaft for the larger roller and i made a mandrel again just turned it down to that diameter uh note here they didn't clean up on one side of this but the other side of this is cleaned up fine so i got a good good area there to do it like i said i've already done one of the bearings this is the top bearing and we'll just kind of fish it up underneath here and it's going to be just about right sitting on the flange in the front and we'll get some of our molding putty here damn material and i'm just gonna a little bit and kind of jack that front end up this putty is really good for positioning your parts and kind of getting them where they need to be and they'll just kind of stay right there so it needs to be up a little bit higher that's pretty good right there i'm gonna just kind of put a little bit on the sides here that kind of stick down to my table and kind of help hold it in place now we will see it needs to come this way just a little bit there we go and now we'll dam the front and the back where no material can come out this is the first time like i said while ago first time i've used this deacon mold pack and i like it it uh it's doing a really good job i've always used babbitt right in the past can't get it anymore like we talked about before and uh this deacon mold pack really does a good job it's a good substitute for that uh dab it right so and i can't remember where i ordered it from i found it online deaconindustries.com is uh the company that makes it i can't remember if i ordered it from them or i may got it off amazon i don't remember but it's kind of expensive you have to get a 10 pound container which is a lot more than you need but over time i'll go through it it comes in that nice plastic tub which will seal up should help keep it fresh keep it from drying out between times when i put this in there you know i just kind of make sure i got a good seal i don't want any of that babbitt to leak out i have poured bearings before where i didn't have a good seal and babbitt just kind of goes all over the the table and uh gotta reset everything up and do it all over again never fun but uh i think we're good i'm gonna kind of concentrate my flame on that shaft here because that's where the biggest heat sink is i'm getting heat down on that shell below it to that bearing shell but i want to make sure we get a good nice pour here go ahead and hit down there on either side of that while i'm at it we'll just soak in some good heat here probably got enough heat in our part let me skim this babbitt real quick i hope i got enough fabric here left to do this getting down to the very end it uh froze a little bit normally what you like to do is see it pop up on the other side it didn't quite come around it it froze in there but i think we'll be fine i'm gonna turn my stove off it doesn't take very long for this babbitt to set up either i can go ahead and pull my damn material out and go ahead and grab a hammer here and we'll just knock that one off there we go nice pour that's going to be just fine we'll let that cool down and i'll clean it up i'm gonna put my deacon mold back up in my pot over there we'll save this uh reuse it on the next job now basically this is what i pulled out to begin with and i've been using the same one on all six of these bearings so far and i've still got plenty of life left in it we'll um put it back up and there we go babbitt bearings are poured let's see these on the small rollers i mean these things are just they're perfect um they they're not even gonna require any scraping the two up here are just a little bit on the tight side this one's not too bad on the bottom one but i'm gonna have to do a little scraping on this one to get it to fit the shaft just right no big deal at all we'll get it where it spins nice and free but these are all ready to to go back in and i'm very happy with how all these turned out they're going to be just fine you know one thing with poor babbitt is you get sometimes you're going to get [Music] some little pockets in there little wrinkles and whatever it's not a big deal it's basically just an oil groove it's a place a lot a lot of bat bearings actually will cut oil grooves out in them these did not have oil grooves cut in them so i'm not going to do it but it just gives a place for the oil to go it's not a big deal at all these worked out just fine we got babbitt on half the shell the other half is not just like the originals and anyway i think that these are pretty much ready to go back together i'm gonna probably do another video be putting that camel back together and uh you know so you see how it all goes back together we'll do that another video though i've got another little thing i gotta do is it's a little bit unique to this meal it's actually a modification that was done previously we're going to keep that modification i got to do some stuff along those lines and that's going to be in an upcoming video as well but there you go pouring some babbitt bearings and with that i think we got our babbitt bearing pouring done for today i get asked a lot by a lot of people got a lot of questions on bad bearings and a lot of people are intimidated by it and scared to go out and try it guys i would just say this is pretty low tech i mean let's face it these are not precision bearings these are they work great don't get me wrong in the right application in some ways they can even be better than ball bearings in some some ways not in all ways but as far as doing this you see that you've seen how i do it it it it's not hard if you got a job to do go do it and uh the nice thing about babbitt barons is that if you screw up and you you just melt it out and you start over again my first bearings i poured i probably screwed up the first two or three i did not have the benefit of youtube to go watch and see how to do it i just figured it out as i went back and this is 20 30 years ago but it's it's really not that difficult just go out there and try it if if you fail just again melt it out start over keep doing until you get it right that's how i learned how to do it and that's how most people learn how to do it through trial and error so give it a try if you got some bearing support with that guys that will be a wrap as always thanks for watching please do subscribe to the channel if you haven't already thumbs up and comments are appreciated uh and hit that bell icon up there and subscribe if you haven't already so that you can find out when new videos are posted and with that guys again we'll catch you on next video and thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Keith Rucker - VintageMachinery.org

Views: 124,638

Rating: 4.9631615 out of 5

Keywords: Machine Shop, Machinist, Restoration, Vintage Machinery, Georgia Museum of Agriculture, Keith Rucker, VintageMachinery.org, babbitt bearings, pouring babbitt bearings, cane mill, babbitt pouring, babbitt bearings repair, babbitt bearing pouring, goldens foundry, model t babbitt bearings, making babbitt bearings, pouring babbitt bearings video, cane mill restoratoin

Id: FxkDXg-6HJg

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021