Restoring Tom Lipton's Level Frame

hi guys welcome to my shop I'm Robin today's a special day received a item in the mail from Tom Lipton ox tools a nice ox tools mousepad and actual shirt but the real item of interest is the level bass from episode 49 in meatloaf episode 49 the Tom did showing this level that he got and his plans on restoring it uh so tom is the one who is actually inspired me to get off my Duff and start doing some videos I've been machining for 51 years been machine since I was 12 yeah 51 years and also loved to scrape my foundations of mechanical accuracy but buy more of that book inspired me way way way back to just take up scraping and it's been very helpful in my my machine career so I was thinking of something to share Tom some appreciation for his inspiration to me and thought hey I remember that level I just recently went through catching up on all the videos of Tom's dough and not every single one but lot of them and episode 49 meatloaf was this level so I thought hey um I'll send him some pictures of my scraping and so you know now I'm not some nutcase and see if you'd like to do a collaboration where I scraped the base of his level form as a appreciation item so Tom said sure and here it is and he also sent me electronic level that I'm going to try to repair it obvious another No episode so the problem with this which we both agree on the fix of is that this thing like Tom said had rusted fast to the felt or whatever was in the bottom of the box and you can see Tom did a nice job of basically starting to scrape this and hit pretty nice bearing but you've got this actual relatively deep rust and pock marks and things so we're just going to Wow throw this thing on the surface grinder and grind to grind this down until we get rid of this rusted layer within reason and then we'll flake this thing not flake but scrape this to get it perfectly flat I'm going to be grinding the sides of this because they're also pockmark so I'm going to first fill the engraving on this is actually engraving and has some depth so technique I like to use there is - all I will grip blast just in those valleys to get a good bite I'll mix up some carbon black and epoxy put it in there and then when I surface around the sides these will be filled with black and they'll stand out real nice and they'll be real per minute so let's dive in and start on service crying this to mask off the Henry here that I want to just probably gonna throw in the last beater and hit just the engraving so we're going to put this on like this and we will cut this officer that we're just exposing the area where the where the engraving is and I don't want to cut into the I'm going to put scratches in there so I'm going to lift this up and basically come around and slip this off sideways so I don't leave any scratches in the be real tempting to just dive down into the I think I got deep enough there here we go I don't want to blast off any of the big dawn wrinkle wrinkle paint that's on this on the casting part there we go so that'll you can throw that in the last bead cabinet now without fear blasting off the wrinkle finish on there there we are with the glass speed nice job of cleaning out those engravings so going to take them some jb weld quick we don't need much just enough to mix up with the carbon black to fill in these graduations or bread engravings first I'll mix these two real well now we'll throw in some carbon black get this nice and jet black color well this gets pretty tight excuse me Emmie k can be used to thin epoxies temporarily it's not good to use a ton of it you can you can ruin the properties of an epoxy by using too much heavy K but a pretty well-known reducer for when you need to thin epoxies like for floor coatings and things like that where they're little runny ER consistency would help okay that's pretty nice consistency clean off my spatula before that turns to a rock now we'll just squeegee this in I really need to work this stuff in real hard it's easy to get air pockets in engravings where you just really want to work this multiple directions and then it does have a tendency to shrink back so it's always good to put like a just a glaze layer over top that's that's high the thin consistency also helps the epoxy wet to the material better if it's real doughy and dry sometimes it doesn't actually get a good wet to the surface I'm just making sure that I got you know it looks like that line there is not from the spatula that is was on that on that paint beforehand I noticed it when I taped the two masks go off further just makes sense to do this now since I'm going to surface screen these the top and bottom are the same width so when I go to service grind this thing just for my convenience it's going to pay to make this thing the same the same width on here I'm not going to be taking much off the sides I'm not worried about getting that Christine but it's not just enough to work with so that will add a cure and I can work on the other rest of it while that's curing and cleaning off for our slide here and of course Amy K will definitely make this easy here's pretty handy mixing tool glass glass surface and I just keep that around for their mixing epoxies non-absorbent which is important warm this up a little bit I just thought after I put that on there another thing that that can well speed the cure and also make the epoxies more vist more fluid is to warm the part or the epoxy so I'll just warm this up enough to two possibly get the epoxy did cure a little quicker because JB quick is still like a 4-hour cure so like it's too hot you can ruin epoxies by overheating them but a gentle warming is is not not a big deal stones bottom of my or deep level and I in the Chuck I put this on I've just got my magnet turned on just enough to have a little residual because this free has a little pivot little Hina Center so I don't want to influence this side so I'm just getting it up there that I'm tweaking my my Chuck so I'm not holding it too tight yeah basically sitting on there with residual magnetism oK we've kissed those tops parallel to the bottom so when we flip this we can sit on those and now I want to hit the sides but first I'm going to lay this on my cast-iron surface plate that has a piece of 220 silicon carbide wet or dry paper glued on with 3m 77 spray and I'm going to use that to just gently basically shown this because when you sit we're not twisting the pushing the frame not just these sides actually matter but you can see the bearing here here and here so this actually has a as a twisted that says has warped some from from its original condition so I'm just going to rub this some more tell you a little more bearing here so I'm not working this racking this thing what up this papers pretty warm this is a very handy piece of apparatus to have the shop let's get you a lot okay let's go that's more than I'm going to sand down but we know we've got good uniform bags so I'll do the same thing I'll use real light magnet pressure or magnatraction head start to come across a little bit and see what this looks like there just a gentle up side race you can see what's going on I'm hitting here here here so I'm just going to grind the rest instead of the Chuck here these are precision ground flat stones it's Ben diamond ground to be dead flat and matched pairs professional instrument cells these are like four hundred and some dollars but obviously I didn't pay 400 dollars I've made my own I'll probably do a video on that on stony in general see a lot of guys using stones that just make me cringe I learned this technique and the process from professional instruments makes probably the finest air bearings spindles in the world they taught me a lot so I'll cover these in another video this is only a 12 inch grinder but I can sweep 15 inches out of it which is what I'm going to check now for my actual travels okay and turn this on partially that's got more than enough grip it's one thing to keep in mind guys do you don't always have to turn your magnetic Chuck just because it's a magnetic tip does not mean you can't use controlled amounts of of gripping a lot of times just turning to check on and turning it off and just let the residual that's in the piece sometimes is enough but sometimes using the adjust a little bit on and so just a tip so what I'm seeing here is that just as we saw when we were stoning it it looks like the edge of the base is not parallel to the upper section and the problem is going to be there is if I keep going where I am their ideas that just cleaned up the the epoxy off there I'm going to end up all having a situation where as I go down I'm liable to lose the depth of Engraving on this side so I'm going to back up and regroup I'm going to grab this thing and advise and level the that section so it's flat and then grind the base edge because the width is irrelevant base edge parallel to it first so I'm going to set up for that right now here I have set up in the in my grinding vise of a parallel under the other side that's sitting on the the mate to this on the opposite side so I have enough room over the top to be able to grind have a pin in the back so that I'm actually squaring on the surface there something this aspect ratio of height the width of this gripping has tendency to grip and not actually rest perfectly so it's always good to use a roller pin whatever in the back to allow that to roll up and actually meet to that reference space and we're going to zoom in here we're going to take a look at what I'm doing here with the indicator and right here I'm zeroed on the surface there that's clean there's no rust on it here I'm clean no rust now I notice here at the end there's a little patch where it's been where it's been glass beaded but watch what happens when I come up on the rust we're where it wasn't there that's almost three thousand some rust now I'm going to come over and look and see what the edge looks like here and I'm all pretty much fun but with one in I'll just read zero this and it will take a look here and say that that's got quite a bit that's what we were seeing so that could have been I don't know if that was scraped or whatever but we're going to square that up because that edge alignments are irrelevant red square that up clean that edge up then once we've got this done then we can flip it put it on the chuck whatever we're not really concerned about the stores from this this flatness in this direction isn't really a functional aspect of the level I thought I was going to be able to get away with using my regular aluminum oxide wheel that I used for general soft grunt soft material grinding but it does remove material but it does doesn't cut crisp and clean so I put my silicon carbide wheel one that I use for cast iron grinding if I'm used doing a lot of actual gray iron writing ductile iron works pretty well using the regular wheel but gray iron just likes silicon carbide wheel just cuts freer crisper and for this we need we want a decent cutting action especially when we do the flat that we're not pushing and we get a nice good grind one of the things I did when I did the grind with the silicon carbide wheel is I kissed here and then there's a significant significant amount to remove here about 12 and a half thousands so I made that an exact shim stock size so I went to 15 the step between here and here so that when I flipped this which we're doing next I'll be able to easily set that up nothing with Tom involved would be complete without some filing so break this raise your edge here that from our grind I get removed again let me do the the other and then this edge here not that it matters much for what we're doing right here but it's good opportunity to talk about Airy points and vessel points and minimum sag points vessel points and the minimum side points are very close to each other they're only like two you got to go to the third decimal place before they're different so point five five nine distance 0.55 nine times the length of the item spacing between the supports obviously symmetrical is the vessel points that gives you the deflection from gravity will be such that the deflection here and the deflection here and deflection here will be the same arrey points are different in that they're designed to make the ends be vertical or the slope if you want to think of it as a beam slope would be zero at each end so if you're doing something where you're actually lapping an end standard where the ends are you're concerned about parallelism you would actually need them to be supported and a lot of n standards actually have their support rings or designed at those locations where they'd be at the early points none of it matters in what we're doing right now but interesting to bring up some people that might not be aware of those two metrological items so now I'm set up I got my 15,000 shims I thought ahead and said okay make them even instead of me having to fuss around try to get something exact I got the shin sir exactly there so I'm just going to kiss dress this and then grind this till we get rid of the rough I'm going to plunge grind this right just a full wheel wit and just drop down until I clean up move over wheel with drop down on the silk car bike wheel this is a relatively buy wheel and using the legend Rhine where you take a deep cut and let the edge break down and form a ramp doesn't work quite as well this particular wheel does I thought a sponge first get rid of the horse all right we've got a surface ground finish not beautiful but it's plenty good enough for scraping start and we got all our rust out and then we've got well our not well but casting porosity so I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put it in the microscope and pick them open a little bit and then I'm gonna take some Harris stay bright silver solder low temp silver solder and I'm going to flux that up and get that to wet in all those areas such that this is sealed up and isn't a place for dirt crud to get in and also a place for rust or whatever to work its way out so we do next there it is after I glass beaded it out now I'm going to put some stay bright flux in there and we'll warm this up with the hot air gun and then take the old Weller gun and flow some some solder in there he's a hot air gun here because the you don't want to overheat this at all and when it takes about about 500 degrees for the solder to melt the hard part here is to get the solder to actually wet down in those holes it's very easy to just bridge over and in your pocket the holes and go and machine it off and the holes are still there so probably took about 15 minutes of fooling around here to try to get that to wet down the holes that's why you see we're playing around with the soldering iron pushing things around probably flux to four or five times here's our mess after shave it off the the solder now I'm going to go over on the grinder and dust that again I'll just throw a couple chamfers on here with the chamfered Meister and good from there there's the patch once we actually scrape that that will won't be quite as noticeable because of the difference in patterns of the scraping but yeah so pretty generally happy with with the way it turned out we use my brownish sharp 10:21 electronic indicator here when you're doing this kind work electronic indicators are just very nice but there's some details about working with electronic indicators when you get down into the lower resolutions that might not be apparent so I'm just going to cover a few of those right now I'm on plus or minus three ten thousandths of an inch so zero to three is three tenths each small division is ten millionths that's just a kind of my favourite range for when you're typically working in tents with a regular indicator because electronic indicators are so sensitive you have to realize that there's things like just the cable drag will affect the reading you can see what I'm doing here I can almost pull this thing full-scale if I want to with the cable so you never leave your cable in this condition and many instruments that are meant to have electronic indicator will have little cable clamps so I have these velcro straps that I use these are off-the-shelf velcro straps and you need to cinch your cables down to a fixed condition so that you don't have any any play in the in where like what the cables can do so I'm putting one top and bottom here to get that cable to behave I do have a big stand indicator but it does have the cable clamps and everything but for this quick check the big the big comparators stand Type Indicator mounts are a little clunky for what I'm doing here so one advantage of the way that this this frame is configured and the fact that we have this parallel is that we can check our flatness straightness and everything with this method we don't have to rely purely on bluing and and what kind of actual blowing pattern we get on the scraping we can actually check with a scraper block and an indicator and check this thing for straightness to a much higher level than is is typically done with scraping so now you'll see that we've eliminated our our cable poll I can do it you can still see a little influence there if I get crazy with it but basically you're talking sub ten millionths there so obviously if I was working a lower scale I went to one millionth per division all of a sudden you see uh-oh that does matter another thing with any time you have indicators and you're measuring this lip range you have hysteresis in all the joints things just tension in where things are screwed so it's always good to tap out your fixture just gentle tapping to get rid of any of that so that when you are moving or you have any vibrations they don't do that and the beauty of electronic indicator is the ability to electronically is zero it without touching anything so that's really nice one of the things I love about this indicator is that these adjustment pots are a high-low pot so will you go certain distance in fine and then you hit course where you can go a long way and then you can come back with your fine this is a one indicator I just got off of ebay I actually paid like with shipping I think about sixty four bucks for this just the electronic head needed cleaned up a little bit and lean a little what they actually function but a need a little electronic cleanup inside and a new battery pack these things used to come with rechargeable NiCad batteries and I just put a standard pack of double-a cells in there standard clip pack and and put them in there and they work wonderful so we ground a 15 inch long piece on a 12 inch grinder which basically is is bad practice you know expect the end of travels past the specified length of the grinder to give you good results but we'll see what the with this hair does ivory scraped this Heric any about a year ago add a little lubrication issue and had a very light cease on the way so I basically just Reece creped the whole thing so I've never actually done any real good straightness checks to see what it's like I knew from my screaming that was halfway decent but this would be a good test to see what it what it looks like I have a reference rail in the back here whenever you have something like this to indicate sometimes if it has a good stance like this where you're not getting any influence I have these stones such that I know my high points are out here I've basically stoned heavy here and and light at the inside I don't have any Teeter on the on this so I can slide this against that rail and that gives you a nice straight line so that we're not seeing changes in reading there from the indicator being in different elevations that's because it it does have some shape this direction so by using this I can slide along it's just stay against the rail and we'll see what we're doing here we're on the top scale zero to one is one tenth each small division is ten millionths we're sliding along there and I'm just using my Delrin stick here to not warm up my part and hold myself against the rail I would call that pretty good I'm happy with that that's definitely sub fifty millionth straightness on the part that's fifteen inches long trying to just keep this against three on slide back you never trust a single pass to tell you what's going on you always do multiples we'll come back here and see what this does I'd call it good now in theory scraping this is a total waste of time because that's this has more than flat for this level it's only a 5/10 per per 10 inch level so that's way overkill but whole purpose of this was to have the base scraped so we'll still scrape it but because it's I know now that geometrically I don't really have to do anything to this thing as far as scraping for flatness which is a good thing scrape scraping just for the sake of scraping isn't my cup of tea when it's the only way you have we're going to eat you know you get bearing or oil pockets or whatever a good deal but if you've got a grinder and you can grind it to what you need great so I will be able to just basically flake this and with a very fine flake just to get some very points and we'll look at it with blowing but yeah basically this is just going to get flaked because the geometry of it is is really good we can check sideways here and see what we get and if we go across here or we look and we see that that's probably got a 30 Millions 30 or 40 millions high in the center okay so that can come out with me when we scrape so I'm real happy with that and we'll carry on and go start scraping one last thing on the little electronic indicator fun here is at 1 millionth per division this basically is sitting on these two two pads or pads actually but as looking at 2d version this is two feet here and this is unsupported out here so if I worn this section here this beam is going to curve this way from the expansion of the upper upper layer and it's going to droop so this is going to droop down pivoting around this point so just to show you how sensitive this I'm just going to breathe on this center section and watch the indicator droop as I as it read on this five millionths right there now watch it creep back down to three Millions it's coming back because remember we're only that that very very mild warming it's just just warming the skin of that that iron there's not a lot of mass they are compared to the thermal capacity of my breath so yep it's creeping right back then we can do the opposite put a little alcohol on here get a little evaporative cooling going and we'll go the opposite way and you can see that's pretty substantial - that's that's cooling that down shrinking the top curling this thing back up this direction and if I wake my alcohol off I'll come back down the other direction so just to show you how sensitive things are we need down to that level that's why you see a plastic heat shields and things on gauge block comparator stations and things just the radiant heat of your body is going to affect things at these levels not to mention the plate I'm using it's a steroid master pink laboratory plate projector thick for the for the laboratory rating to keep the deflection accuracy with the deflection under weight within the spec for a laboratory grade there's a scrape where I'm going to use on this this is a little detail scraper that I made this is ground out of a file this has a carbide blade and the carbide has been as a bevel on it very shallow angle here these look where the edges on this face compared to this face you can see there's a very shallow angle it basically gives a larger bond area for the silver solder and then the face the faces are lapped with one micron on the ceramic lap and then I also lap the the cutting edge so it holds up real well and has a nice crisp cut and is nice and narrow for the basically mini scraping that I'm doing on this piece always pays to warm up on a on a scrap piece and kind of get your your rhythm back this is kind of a muscle memory kind of thing and I use the more mega moon quarter moon style of scrape regardless of whether I'm flaking or scraping so just because it's quarter moon here don't think that it's just flaking in essence I am flaking this because it's so the geometry is so good that all we're doing is breaking up the surface on the level and doing any minor tweaks in typography that we need to do but this is this is just a sample piece here it's very difficult to photo or video scrape and get a good picture of what's going on but yeah this is this is the pattern at a style that I'm going to be putting on there basically flaking in one direction quarter moon pattern one way and flaking the the other way which would be no different than my actual scraping but like I said I don't have to change the topography of this of any significance since it's so stinkin flat already here you see the quarter moon pattern the object is to have the wide point of the each successive scrape cover up the tails of the previous row the other aspect of this is since the the the start and stop points are basically very small lines and with the technique I'm using here I'm actually almost lifting off right at the tail there's almost no burn when you go to stone this you're not actually stoning burst like the kind of birds you get from a by axe or even any kind of straight line scraping when you just plow and stop dead and leave a big big furrow um that that's that's the real beauty of that style of screaming here you see we're just marching our way along in the this is a two time speed here and that just trying to keep an even pattern and be very uniform this is the first direction we're going to roughly 45 degrees to the angle the piece then will flip and we'll go 90 degrees to this and the direction exact same thing and obviously with the quarter moon you always are working from left to right assuming you do your Moon's in its direction set such that the fat part of the moon covers the the other here you see we're getting to the end and here you'll see where the we're not just going through the motions here we're actually looking for where the the fattest part of the screen hits and we're trying to get that to be where we want it right now I'm just doing a general pattern and you'll see as I come up to the corners here I'm going to come back and here we're getting to those nasty little edges where it's really tough to hit but you got it you got to hit them or they'll or they'll just be a too big of a pad now I'm going to come back and I'm looking for the places where I didn't get an even bearing let's see the darker bigger blotches of blue I'm coming back and I'm hitting them and cutting them in half and if you don't have reasonable accuracy and where you're hitting you'll just end up making holes so your accuracy of where that where that hits is is pretty pretty important not implying I'm hitting them dead nuts but you got to be in the ballpark otherwise if you're in another gully you're just making the gully deeper you can see here I'm hitting all these spots to get the overall a density of blue relatively even everywhere I see it being too thick I come back you just hit it and get it more uniform Network on the other direction 90 degrees today to the first pattern same thing we're moving from left to right the lighting isn't perfect for you being able to see what what's going on here in the video but basically the same thing quarter quarter moon pattern and I'm just trying to also in this particular case hit the hit the blue spots cut them cut them in half again and have the fat part of this of the moon go right through those those darker spots so in this case I'm not even though I'm in sort of doing a general pattern I'm actually hitting I'm actually trying to split those spots to get the pattern to be more even here's after the second pass at 90 degrees just trying to get an even bearing bearing in this case meaning a the amount of Peaks that are still left from the original grind now I was done with our ground flat stones but since this stone is precisely ground flat on the diamond wheel this doesn't disturb geometry doesn't dig holes it just furnishes the tops very nicely and leaves a basically a mirror finish on the on your plateaus the quarter moon style of scraping leaves very very little burr so this what you can see on and now you can see here that this leaves a really really shiny finish here you can see the scrape marks in there like I said apologize it's really really difficult to get a good picture of scraping so I'm gonna go check this on the plate see what it looks like so now we're back on the service plate give our guide rail back here and we're zeroed here we're running down the center remember we're on ten millions per division on the top scale zero one is one tenth I like it using the Delrin pusher here so my body heat doesn't mess with this thing that's pretty darn nice I'm going to go back to the back edge here I'm sure it's not I'm sure there's some loot to do somewhere in this thing that's lovely I think on this edge we've got some roll-off here on this yeah I was like 50 nights low there on the corner of course you're seeing undulation from the scraping height which is very shallow on purpose I call out a winner so my apologies that this wasn't more of a scraping demonstration in the sense of actually adjusting geometry and everything it's just because the grinder did such a nice job of making the thing geometrically really really nice and all we do is flake to break up the surface into pockets I'm not even going to bother blowing it if I'll give you some views of this in the light you'll see that there's just polish plateaus Tom's happy with it the patch there's somewhat unfortunate but I guess unavoidable that would have been lurking right under the surface we wouldn't have got all the rust out if we hadn't have gone that far but at least it's it's sealed now so that nothing is going to come out of there and cause issues as far as cleaning in whatever so here it is Tom ready to come back at you well everything's ready for you and I am happy to have been able to do something useful for you as an appreciation project and hope it goes up to your expectations

Channel: ROBRENZ

Views: 76,417

Rating: 4.9657702 out of 5

Keywords: precision level, surface grinding, hand scraping, hand flaking, checking flatness, electronic indicator, precision machine scraping, flatness, engraving, epoxy, carbon black, scraping, level, moore, quarter moon, surface plate, guide rail

Id: UG6LV8v8W-0

Length: 47min 10sec (2830 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2016