Great work on that bracket!
I concur. I love seeing people make parts like that themselves rather than buying. Bravo! Looks great.
This is impressive. Eager for more.
Thanks guys! It’s been a really enjoyable project so far; each step has been a learning experience and I find myself continually planning ahead as I proceed forwards throughout the whole thing. :mrgreen:
I got the ion arm mounted…it was err…fun to drill and tap. I may have accidentally made it out of stainless crop (okay, I knew I made it out of stainless crop when I was fitting it and the magnet wouldn’t stick! Check your material first folks!) Truth be told, it was quite spectacular to drill; fire shooting everywhere and whatnot! It’s held on with four 1/4" bolts. There is a 1/8" gap on the bottom inside right hand corner but I’m probably going to bondo that at a later date; right now the corner in question is shimmed with a washer! I forgot to mention this earlier, but the injectors are held on with two 1/4" bolts.
And the V-hook! I made real progress on that can-o-worms! :lol:
I started by verifying that my center lines were still on center and re-scribed my center line…on center and I marked a line 1/2" down from the top and 1/2" up from the bottom. No idea why 1/2", it just seemed like a nice round number! drilled the holes out to accept threading for 1/4" bolts.
Ugly inside face
Nice outside face!
I then did the same with the center part; you could transfer punch the holes, but I wanted to practice doing layout. I drilled these out to the same size, although later I drilled them out to be a 1/32" over 1/4" for bolt clearance. The “A” just tells me which face faces towards the hook; at one time the main hook had an “A” on it, but alas it wore off…no matter though, the big gouge up the center tells me which face is which!
For the base I eyeballed the location and scribed a line around the middle piece.
I scribed another centerline and marked the bottom hole 1/2" up from the line representing the bottom of the bracket. I then measured the center-to-center distance of the holes and marked for the top hole.
Which left me with
And after tapping the hook and drilling out the other two parts we’re left with
On my next update this will be attached to the pack! Eventually I’ll build a doubler plate for on the inside out of thin gauge steel, but for now it’ll be held on with the two bolts and subsequent washers; the bolts might be long, but I won’t know until I dry-fit it to the pack! Even if they are long, shortening them won’t be difficult! (watch, now they’ll be to short! :walterpeck: )
erm…the bolts were totally to short! Need to pick up some 1 1/4" ones! Ah well, for photo purposes they’ll work, but they aint staying in there for long! An observation: fiberglass drills remarkably similar to steel in that the bit does the work; anyway,
I eyeballed the bracket’s placement and traced my holes with a pencil where I was going to drill (doesn’t need to be super precise; so long as they’re relatively center, there is 1/32" allotted for play in the fit) And then started by piloting with a smaller bit for two reasons: accuracy and ease of starting where I want the hole to actually be without the need to center punch the fiberglass; it also acts as a guide for the larger drill bit! I used regular, run of the mill HSS steel drill bits for this. Use lube.
two pilot holes
One hole
Two holes! (red holes, blue holes!)
As I was saying the bolts are to short, but for a quick photo and test fit, they’ll work! The mounting plate sits just off the radius of the…rectangle, not the fins! And is squared to the fins…not the rectangle!
Not the greatest picture, but it works! One observation though: I think I need to make a narrower center hook piece for the matty wand; I could sand the one I have narrower, but I’d rather make a second one in case I decide to swap out throwers down the road!
Next update we’ll install this onto the ion arm! (Care of our “friendly certified parts supplier”, aka the shop here on the site!)
That’s cheating! I was expecting you to fab everything!
Just kidding, it’s looking great! I’m jealous that you can make a lot of this yourself. Give me instructions and parts, I’m good. Not so much if I had to make something from scratch.
Same here Jay. I wish I had taken shop classes but my physical and technical skills led me away from it. Abd almost losing fingers. That did me in lol
Did you have a shop teacher that was missing a finger and a half too?!
Nope dent in forehead from golf accident.
Thanks guys! I’m a cheater, I admit it! I’m only making the parts I want to make, although a tabletop manual milling machine is on my wishlist for future endeavors; wish they were cheaper!
Golf ■■■■■ will do that; they tend to come out of nowhere…especially when I’m out golfing! Seriously…if I’m golfing the ball tends to go everywhere EXCEPT where it’s supposed to!
This was fun. Tapping the NPT holes was character building; had I…oh I don’t know…used the right material they would have been a breeze! We’ll get to that later, let’s fit that end cap!
The socket heads are 10NC-24. What the heck? Having no idea what a “10” even was, I decided to look it up! It turns out at some point, anything under 1/4" was changed to some number system. (http://bbs.homeshopmachinist.net/threads/38988-10-screw-and-3-16-screw)
Well okay, that’s great! Now what drill bit size do I need? I referred to this chart (Thread - Drill & Tap Chart) which listed the drill bit size as being a “20” for steel and stainless…oh goody…what does that mean? I don’t even have a “20” drill bit! I then noticed the decimal bit size next to that… 0.1610. Perfect!
From this point I referred to yet another list! Inches and their decimal equivalents (Inches: Fractional to Decimal Equivalents Conversion Chart) and chose the closest size from the list; in this case, I opted for 11/64". Excellent!
I then drilled and tapped a test hole on a scrap piece of yellow tubing…it doesn’t have to be yellow, mind you. Rust brown, fire engine red, sea foam green…all that matters is that a) it’s drill-able and b) it’s tap-able!
Success!
Now we can move onto the end cap. I centered it and transfer punched the first hole. I then tapped said first hole and bolted the end cap back on. Because the tolerances are so tight on these two holes, transfer punching is the way to go; you don’t need to smack the ever living–you don’t need to hammer the transfer punch very hard, it just needs to leave a mark. After I took the end cap off, I went and center-punched it deeper using a normal center punch.
For demonstration purposes, this is what I’m talking about!
Having learned our lesson from the first endeavors in drilling and tapping stainless, the results came about much easier using generous amounts of 3 in 1 household oil…wd-40? Nope; not good enough! Ironically in the picture but that’s merely coincidental.
Success!
The NPT tapped holes are where things got ignorant; not only did the drillpress keep jamming up using the drill bit I needed, come time to tap I had to do so much filing on the holes to get the tap to start it was like watching an episode of the road runner…with a lot more colorful language! After about an hour and a half and a bit of sweat, blood (I jabbed my hand with the pointy end of a needle point file; doh! Not badly, but enough to draw blood!) and…sweat…success! Barely. Now had I used the correct material…well…it would have been a breeze! But nope. For continuity, this link has the npt tap drilling sizes (Tap Drill Sizes and Tap Drill Size Calculator - Newman Tools) :lol:
I guess the next update will be (ugh…) tapping the side of the cyclotron! Tapered threading…I get the concept, but it sure is a fickle thing!
This was really easy to do; drilled a pilot hole, drilled the hole out to 3/8", ran my 1/8" npt tap about half the length of the tap into the shell using a 1/3 forward turn, 1/4 back technique and threaded the fitting into the hole. The grey elbow spins on the brass part, which makes having it point in the right direction really simple! :mrgreen:
Thanks for the info. I’ve been dreading doing this step. How much sticks out the other side?
About 1/8" of the fitting sticks through on the inside of the shell.
Ok, perfect. Are you going to use a nut like I’ve seen a few do? I’m having a heck of a time finding anything here to fit those or my original Legris straights.
I wasn’t planning on it; a little loc-tite or epoxy on the threads during final assembly should suffice; it seems fairly sturdy as is. I know that they make hex jam nuts to fit pipe threads though.
A bit of epoxy works perfectly. I didn’t have a tap for those threads so I drilled the hole a bit bigger and just epoxied them in place… Very sturdy.
So I finished the v-hook finally. It fits nice now! On top of making that new center piece, I took the bracket off the thrower, slid the hook part inside it and worked the edges with a hammer to make the fit even better; worked like a charm!
…and to much amusement, storing the other one on the inside and the doubler plate made the 1 1/4" bolts fit perfectly! Was not expecting that to actually work but now I won’t lose the thing! :lol:
Started on the injector bracket…it’s just a piece of 1" x 1/8" flat bar that I bent using a vice and a big hammer.
I picked up this neat little chaser to put inside the n-filter! It has a couple of different flashing modes and even though it’s 1 led shy of the 9 holes, I think it’ll add some horizontal flash! Besides, it seems a shame to have drilled those holes and not have anything seizure inducing inside! It literally just fits inside if the leds are angled slightly as pictured! :walterpeck:
I decided to continue working on it tonight; got the injector bracket done and mounted. I’ve had a lot on my mind lately but hey, hobby therapy! :mrgreen:
I decided to go straight through both the shell and motherboard with the bracket’s mounting bolt. It’s double nutted (one nut for adjustment when the injectors are bolted onto the shell, the other on the outside of the motherboard for added enforcement.) I’ll probably replace the two bolts on the injectors with machine screws (washer bolts?) or socket heads when I have a chance; airing towards machine screws for a lower profile. It really adds a lot of structural integrity!
This thing is a TANK!