Swing over bed limitation for flywheels

[noel shelleyParticipant @noelshelley55608]

That’s cheating ! At that diameter I bet the motor worked hard.  Noel

[PeteParticipant @pete41194]

Those old model engineer magazines had a lot of clever and make do innovations. A flywheel is turning the OD, a bit of face turning on each side of the rim, then facing each side of the hub, drilling and boring for the crank. All pretty simple and basic. If you want it bad enough it can be figured out. And Julies point about using a horizontal mill as a flywheel lathe is a very good one. You don’t even need a larger lathe chuck, what you do need is a face plate adapted to the horizontal mills spindle and a bit larger than the largest flywheel you intend on turning, a few bolts and shop made hold down hardware. Face plates seem to be highly underrated for what there actually capable of. And everybody needs a horizontal mill just in case. 😁

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Or just leave the flywheel on the crankshaft and spin the whole assembly. Hanging it off the side of the mill allows more swing. Or in this case using an angle drive on the top of the head to increse distance to table

[PeteParticipant @pete41194]

Wow!!!! There’s that same innovation. But just eyeballing it, I think the tool is a bit below center. 😃

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Looking at some points raised…

Swinging the flywheel by hand, on a spigot, while machining the rim with a fly-cutter.

Errr, I’m not putting my hands anywhere near a fly-cutter and freely-rotating work-piece!  They’ve been with me for over three-score-and-ten years and I am rather attached to them.

…..

Risk of cracking the spokes if the wheel is held only by its centre: On the odd occasions I have machined items that really stretched the lathe’s capacity I have made “extension” faceplates screwed to the standard one, to carry the work.

For the flywheel, that can then be held from inside the rim, with some of the strain taken by blocks against the spokes. Last time I did this the extension plate was of thick plywood.

…

Throat-depth for milling such items, on a vertical mill: fit the rotary-table to a stout cantilever plate so the work will overhang the front of the table, and the cutter will be at something like “two o’clock”. NB: bolt the cantilever to all the Tee-slots with as many bolts as possible, as the method does put unfair stresses on the table.

I have used a version of this approach to drill radially, the rivet-holes around an 8″-diameter smokebox in a small horizontal mill.

””’

Cutting a gap in a full-length lathe bed: Not sacrilege perhaps, but very unwise. You cannot predict how the weakened bed might distort; and you could also have problems with working close-in to the chuck or a collet.

[Author]

Posts