More scrap ?

For me messing with those would be misdirected energy.

Good idea, time for Steve to stop improving his tools and put them to work! Converting an odd shape into something useful is always satisfying, and holding and cutting that odd shape will be a worthwhile exercise.

However, rather than going free-form as artists sometimes do with an angle grinder, a better engineering exercise is work to a dimensioned plan. Looking good isn't the main engineering challenge, rather the hard part is first making objects to a particular pre-planned size and finish. (Any fool can polish an old penny, much harder to make a replica.)

I'd suggest some other targets just to make it interesting. Everything in the new shape to be made from the Golf part, and at least two parts must be screwed together.

Go for it!

Dave

Reading this post on scrap and what can be made from that, I made two of these the other week. A flower pot ,a kneeling mat, a bit of stainless from a waste bin, a bit of old sofit board, roasting rack for the feet, and a beer ca a bit of rod for the counterbalance . They make good wind garden ornaments, it would be good for some others making one as a rest from the shed as they can be made outside in this nice weather.

Bob

Edited By BOB BLACKSHAW on 10/04/2020 10:34:36

Apart from the electrics, I made this entirely from scrap.

you mean if he follows his original intention of a cutting fluid container he will find himself using more than he expected?

If you can find a use for the parent metal, it is raw material, not scrap.

It is only scrap when it is either too small to hold, or blue and curly!

One of my show stand attractions, I hope, started life as an aluminium alloy candlestick. It stands alongside another made by a friend using a modified bicycle wheel.

Let your imagination run riot! "It will come in handy one day"

Howard

Scrap? No. New to me.

I cut the original motor-plinth from the back of my Harrison lathe cabinet as it made the machine stand a wasteful foot away from the wall, in a workshop already tight for space. The new 3ph motor, physically smaller than the 1ph motor it replaced, is on a frame above the headstock, where it's also clear of dust and dirt around the floor. I had to modify the guard to suit.

I didn't throw the welded-steel box away, not with a lot of 5/8-, 1/2 and 1/8- inch plate on it, though it took a fair number of 4.5 inch cutting discs to dismantle.

One of the thick bits is earmarked for my wagon con-rods, the thin bits have supplied material for the wagon and the workshop hoist. A small off-cut picked up from the floor became a washer for a bolt clamping work to an angle-plate.

A manual winch I built for a cave-digging project on Mendip uses a fabricated PVC drum thrown out at work (a left-over from something), between hexagonal frames I welded (well, very-hot-glued) from old miniature-railway rails that looked as if they'd been dragged through a hedge backwards then left there – as they had, for a couple of years in fact.

There's something satisfying in finding a tatty, heavily-rusted old steel bar or plate has decent steel inside it waiting to be let out and put to new use. As long as it's easier to machine than some old cable-drum tie-rods I have in stock.

The only new-to-me items I've really had to abandon hope on, were a cast-iron sash-weight so hard it even defeated a heavy hacksawing machine at work, a bit of architectural cast-iron that was free-cutting but with blow-holes reminding me of a pikelet, and a half-shaft too hard even for a carbide tip.

Actually I tell a lie… I recall now the cast-iron pikelet was useless for a piston but fine for the heavy inner part of the lid on my steam-wagon's vertical ' stoking-shoot ', as the original was described.

No such thing as scrap. Instead a valuable source of raw material. Unless it is too small to hold in a vice or lathe chuck. Its only after you throw it out that you realise a use for it.

Paul.