MetalworkingFun Forum

Ya, good job Greg I have to do the same thing to my "detached" garage but since I still haven't built my backhoe I guess I'll have to dig it by hand (and back, etc.) .
At least I have the black plastic pipe for conduit.

Darren and I worked on getting the parts for his Kondia milling machine's head fixed the day before yesterday. Here's a shot of the quill feed forward-reverse selector shaft with the original hole for the ball detent far off-center. I know lighting and parallax error can be deceptive, but that mangled 5mm hole is definitely off to the upper side of the shaft. The M8 threads of new collar that carries the ball detent set screw, spring and ball is also off by a tiny bit (perhaps .005") but in the opposite direction.



We discussed it and decided that the only practical solution was to weld up the hole and put a new one in. The cautions with that are that we have to keep the 7mm bore in the shaft clear for the mating sliding shaft, not sure if the weld will harden or soften anything, and could bend from welding. We went to see Jennifer (Allescence) and she expertly TIG welded the hole full. The copper plug we made kept weld mostly out of the bore.



We fastened the copper plug to a piece of CRS that we threaded. It worked good, but Darren did have to turn the #10-32 threaded shaft into a slide hammer to get the plug out after the welding. And the whole thing had a peculiar bend form welding. No worries, Darren did a nice job of straightening it out with my plumber's torch and a piece of black iron pipe. A final tap on the lathe for true, turn the weld down and file smooth, ream the 7mm bore and it's near perfect!



Now re-drilled and chamfered, it lines up perfect with the collar and all is well as an assembly.

Words cannot express how happy I am that we were able to fix that part. It was lucky that I had purchased a 5 mm reamer whilst I was there (for a different task) and that Ken had recently been given a 7 mm reamer.

I'm in Dubai airport right now and really looking forward to getting home and progressing the repair of my mill.

Back making sawdust. A friends neighbour had a tree service take down a big white pine that had spit and grown as two two trunks. I ended up with the logs, hauled 8, 8 and 12 foot logs home yesterday that came from above the crotch. My poor little tractor wouldn't lift the butt log on the forks so it got slung on the loader arms, still had to push it on as the geometry of the loader would'd lift it at the end to clear the trailer.




The fault ran into the butt log, I split it down there and got two book matched boards that the end would make an interesting table top.



Being that the tree was in a yard limbs had been trimmed then grew over. No nails yet.



The rest of the log is yielding some beautiful clear lumber.

DaveH

looks like its time for smaller logs or a bigger saw

your right that would make an interesting table top

DA

Smaller logs, every time I tie into one of these I say never again. Far too much work handling them when they're this heavy, but they always yield such nice lumber.

my dad worked at a sawmill when I was a kid, the head saws were 72 inches, they used to get in big Douglas Fir that was 6, 7 feet across the butt. And Red Woods that had to be split so they would fit on the saw carriage.

Made a little more progress on my project today, not much but a little.



DA

Now here's how I need to split them dallen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kldc_R9yfmQ

Greg, that's just what I need! I have a number of core rotten maples that I could split just that way. Any idea what kinda charge I'd need for an 8 to 16 inch diameter tree / 16" junk?
BTW, anyone know what's with maple tree core rot? Is it unique to Nova Scotia?