Automation and a Dodgy Left Shoulder

When I was a younger man I did not own industrial quality machines and I was prone to wearing out parts on the machines I used in my work. These days I'm older, yet I have industrial quality machines and now I'm wearing out parts on myself.

When I first began this blog I posted about the acquisition of a 1959 Covel #10 surface grinder. The old grinder has been a great machine. The cost associated with purchasing, moving the machine, and upgrading this machine are to a point where I really have more invested in the machine than it's relative market value. However as a result of this investment I know what I have,  a machine that grinds accurately and flat over the length of it's capacity which is always a question mark with any used surface grinder.

However the Covel came as a manual grinder which means all the moving parts have to be activated and run with physical action on the part of a human operator and the worst of these activities is traversing the table left to right constantly. This requires many repetitions just to grind the surfaces of one part. This finally took a toll on my left shoulder. One Friday morning  several weeks ago I began experiencing a stabbing pain under my left shoulder blade. I figured a bit of rest and some over the counter pain medications would fix this.....no such luck. In fact things got worse and it became evident that I would not be doing any grinding for while. I needed to give my shoulder time to heal.

Being persistent I starting teaching myself how to grind with my right arm only. I could do this but it was a slow process, futile really. I decided that while my shoulder was recuperating that maybe it was time to shop for an automatic surface grinder. A quick bit of research revealed that an automatic surface grinder with any chance of reliability was going to cost something close to automobile purchase type money.

Given the time commitment required to move one machine out and another machine in, and considering the investment I had in the Covel grinder I decided it might be worth an attempt at automating the Covel.

I read on many of the online metal working forums a lot of speculation about how one would go about automating the long axis of a surface grinder, however there was no documentation from anyone that had actually pursued and accomplish this to any degree of reasonable use so I contacted an automation company and proposed my plan for accomplishing this task and ask them if they thought it was a feasible idea.

They agreed that it was feasible, recommended a few changes to my plan and also informed me of other information I needed to gather in order to make reasonably informed decisions as to what components would need to specified and purchased. It seemed my gamble was going to cost somewhere around $1000.00 and there was no guarantee of success. Considering the price of an automatic grinder or worse yet, a new shoulder, I decided I would take the gamble and began the research required to fill in the blanks of how to undertake this transformation. The picture below shows all the major components required.

A 1/2hp  3 phase inverter rated induction motor, a 40 to 1 gear box (speed reducer), GS2 Variable Frequency Drive, not shown are the miscellaneous wiring devices, various pulleys and belt required.

The motor control configuration was sorted out after a study of the VFD manual....actually an extensive study. I have two other 3 phase motors in my shop powered by VFDs, however I would be asking this one to perform more complex motor control than anything required on the other machines. The picture below shows all the components mounted to the machine and also a belt/pulley guard fabricated for safety sake.

Basically everything operated as expected even though some parts of the system did in fact require considerable tweaking along with some tweaks to the vfd programming. Check out the video below of the newly automated grinder actually working.

Much to the relief of my left shoulder the automation of the surface grinder tables works great and operates very reliably. My gamble paid off. Now to get busy and make up for lost time.

Ron

Julie's Porch Part 5, Phase 1 Complete

Roofing the porch was a pretty typical shingle roofing job. I was lucky when all the shingles were in place and it was time to bridge the gap from the house roof to the porch roof. A piece of standard z flashing went under the house shingles on top of the drip edge and popped right into place with the wide flange tightly against the top of the last course of porch shingles. All that was required was a bead of roofing cement under the flashing and some evenly spaced nails to hold it in place.

Now that all the roofing components were in place it was time to protect everything from the elements. Two coats of an oil based primer and 2 coats of a quality exterior latex paint tied everything together visually.

We started this project in the fall and by the time we were at this point in the process the holiday season was approaching. We took a hiatus from the porch project so that I could concentrate solely on plane making.

 After the first of the year we turned our attention to the porch floor. Unfortunately I suffered a shoulder injury before we could install the flooring. No dramatic event caused the injury. It was due to overuse of that part of my body cause by the repetitive traversing of the table on my surface grinder. There was no way I could install the flooring until my shoulder had healed, however we needed to get this project completed so that when spring rolled around we could turn our attention to Phase 2 of this project, installing the screening.

Enter my good friend Jon Fiant. (pictured below)

 Some of you know Jon Fiant as a woodworker that has lately made the making of workbenches a large part of his focus.  The picture below is one of Jon's workbench creations utilizing BenchCrafted vises and Shaker Bench design.

I asked Jon to help me out with the flooring installation and to my delight Jon spent 2 days making an excellent job of laying the tongue and groove flooring, attaching it to the subfloor with stainless steel screws and leaving a precise spacing between each of the boards. Two coats of exterior stain later and Phase one of Julie's Porch was complete.

Looks inviting doesn't it? My son in law has begun calling this our sipping porch. Paul knows a good sipping porch when he sees one. We also do some rocking, some gliding and.....just sitting on this porch as well.

What do we sip? Well I'll leave that to your imagination.

Ron

Julie's Porch, Part 4

In construction the right sequence of events is important and now that the post and rim joist were attached to the house structure it was time to in stall the rafter tails.

These were installed by fastening from the inside of the rim joist and also marked the location where the exposed rafters would be on the inside of the rim.

The doubled rafters were not the easiest to install. Once in place side by side they were spiked together with square cut nails. Nothing short of a threaded fastener will pull two pieces of wood together better than a square cut nail.

When all the rafters were in place it was time to attached the roof sheathing. This involved a layer of 3/4" AC plywood pre primed on the underside and then another layer of water proof luan. Building up this thickness would keep the roofing nails from penetrating through to the interior of the ceiling under the porch.

Roofing and flooring next time, and below a reminder about the HandWorks event coming up this spring in Amana, Iowa.

Ron

Julie Wants a Porch, Part 3

As we continued to make progress on the porch it was time to work toward adding the feature that the old porch never had.....a roof. We wrapped the floor frame with some fiber cement siding and added a base of 5/4 x 6 vinyl as  a platen for the screen walls that would come much later. This location required a material that was rot proof and even though I did not like the idea of using plastic in this case it was the practical solution.

The design being what it was required some tricky cuts on the top portions of the post. The top of the post had to receive the rim joist, which in our case was more of a component made in the shape of an angle, and the end joist had to rest on the outer edge approaching at a 10 degree angle. I resolved very quickly to the idea that these cuts would be made much easier with a good hand saw filed crosscut. I just happen to have a saw set up just this way. In fact it was a #9 back saw made for me by Ed Paik of Medallion tools. A beautiful tool featuring a thumb slot handle made from Ebony. I know that sounds like quite a refined saw for a construction project but it was the best tool for the job.

Once the tops of the post were cut it was time to stand them up into position and brace them in place.

The next step (below) was to place and fasten the rim joist into place and then fasten the two end joist into place. At this point we were secured to the house.

The post we used are laminated from select grade SYP and this material was also more of the KDAT (kiln dried after treatment) material that I mentioned in earlier post on the porch project.

Rafter tails and more roof joist go into place in the next posting about Julie's porch.

Ron

An old saying from India,

Everything will be okay in the end, if it’s not okay then it’s not the end”

Julie Wants a Porch, Part 2

A Dance Floor and Rafter Tails

The flooring we decided to use on the porch is a KDAT 3 1/2" tongue and groove material that is very similar in looks to what you may have observed being used on the porches of older Victorian styled homes. The KDAT designation means the material is kiln dried after pressure treating. Being able to use material that is dry, yet treated for rot resistance will be a real advantage given that even though Julie's porch will have a generous overhang it will not be anywhere nearly the size overhang used on the older Victorian houses.

The flooring was available in 12 foot lengths so if we installed it with the length running from the house to the outside edge of the porch there would be no butt joints along the length. However the way the porch was framed would not work with this configuration so we had to install a layer of 3/4" pressure treated plywood in order to install the floor in this manner later in the process.

At this point we had a dance floor at the very least. We also added some Azek trim to further restrict access to the under side of the porch.

The following weekend the weather was not cooperative with working in the out of doors so we utilized this time to create one of the millwork features that would adorn and provide support for the overhang of the porch. This porch would feature exposed rafter tails that would support the overhang and create a nice visual feature and we needed 21 of them.

Luckily I had stored some left over pressure treated 2 x 12s and 2 x 10s under my shop for the last 6 years. (left over from house construction)This material had time to thoroughly air dry and was the perfect material for the rafter tails. The design required that we rip pieces to width and then joint and laminate them face to face. You can see a stack of the glued up and somewhat processed blanks in the picture below.

We made a template of the shape we wanted and used it to layout the blanks and rough the shape out on the bandsaw. We then used the template to guide a large flush trim router bit that would refine the shape.

Even though we still have a few more to make, the picture below shows the fruits of our labor for that weekend.

When we completed all 21 rafter tails we sanded the fuzzy areas and applied 2 good coats of an oil based primer, sanding between coats. There is a lot of end grain exposed on these rafter tails that would require extra protection in the elements and it was easy to apply paint when we could hold them in our hand.

In the next post we go vertical,

Ron

Quote
"I've found that not giving a damn about meaningless crap makes me a happier person"  Meredith Searcy

Wood Added

A while back there was a post on the blog titled "Just Add Wood". This post is a follow up to show the wood added to a couple of the plane bodies featured in that post.

Early in my plane making career I was having a conversation with my good friend Johnny Kleso. He told me something that has certainly proven to be a fact. Two things that are exactly the same size cannot be put together. In other words if you're trying to fit an infill that measures 2.187 in width into a plane body that has an inside measurement of 2.187 you will never be able to put that infill into that plane body. However if you make the infill 2.1865 to 2.186 it can happen and when it goes in it will be a suction type fit. Once installed it will not move until forced to do so. So all this begs the question, how do you make that happen?

First thing is to create a very accurate plane body. If a great deal of care is taken the worst condition you typically get is a plane body that is slightly smaller at the top as compared to the  dimension at the sole. Typically you can still make the infill dead square and given the shape of the infills the plane sides will expand just slightly as you slide them into place. This makes for a perfect fit and a rather square plane.

I use my milling machine to get my infills close to the final dimension and this also goes a long way to keeping them very square, however when it comes to the final fitting nothing works quite as well as a hand plane. A well set up plane with an extremely sharp iron allows you to work in increments not possible with any other tool.

I had fit the Gabon Ebony infills in the 875 plane pictured above. A weather system containing a lot of moisture and unseasonably high temperatures came  thru our area. Two days later when I attempted to install the rear infill it would not go in. I lightly lapped one side on a piece of 320 grit paper adhered to a surface plate. Total material removal was probably somewhere between 1/2 to 1 thousandth. The rear infill once again went right in with steady pressure. 

Ron

“When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon

Julie Wants a Porch (Part 1)

When Julie and I were building our house we stayed the course and put all the details I had designed into each of the respective rooms. As the project was growing long (we moved in 4 years after we started) it would have been easier and faster not to put in the horizontal wainscoting on the living room walls that ties into the window trim and the mantel. It would have been faster and less expensive to have foregone all these details but then our house would not have the look that we had dreamed of during all the years of planning.

One of the last items to be completed before we could move in was the back porch. I spent a lot of time sorting out all the other details of the house but I was at a bit of a loss as to the back porch. I just never could get my head wrapped around an idea for the back porch and with the construction account dwindling we built a plane 8 foot x 20 foot deck. It was close enough to the ground that no hand rails were necessary so a pressure treat timber platform was what we got and we moved in.

That was about 6 years ago. During this time exposure to sun and rain had taken quite a toll on the decking boards. In earlier discussions about the future of the porch Julie had expressed a desire to have a screened porch. She expressed this desire on many occasions so when I asked her what she wanted for Christmas this year she  answered "I want a screened porch". Okay I can take a hint especially when it's that direct.

I set about designing the screened porch.  Fall and Winter were coming so we decided that we would build the porch in two phases. The deck, the columns, roof and flooring would be Phase 1 and in the following spring and early summer Phase 2 would include the actual screening of the walls.

To use the porch as we intended we needed to increase the width by four feet. This meant several large shrubs, including some very over grown forsythia and junipers had to go. The shrubs were incredibly well anchored to the ground and did not go willingly but a nylon strap and a Toyota Tundra helped us accomplish this task. Fortunately we had some friends that wanted the old decking boards so they removed the old boards from the frame.

One other problem we had with the old deck was armadillos. It was open access underneath so one of those critters took up residence and made a burrow against the foundation of the house where it proceeded to dig down all the way to the footing. We had to back fill the burrow and tamp everything back into place.  Settling and shrinking pressure treat lumber make it necessary to reset the grade on the old frame.  Finally we were ready to do some actual building.

In the picture above you can see the contrast between the old framing and the new. We also sistered on end joists to tie everything together. If you look closely at the picture below you will see some heavy duty plastic netting that is nailed to the rim joist and anchored to the ground with rebar. Hopefully this will keep out armadillos and other animals.

More construction details in the next post,

Ron

An old saying from India,

Everything will be okay in the end, if it’s not okay then it’s not the end”