This week I was working on getting set up to turn the tube of the ROV. My process was not very efficient and came with a lot of time wasted aligning things in a way they shouldn’t be. This week really just flew by too quickly to accomplish what I wanted to.
I started by putting the 4-Jaw chuck and tube roughly centered on the lathe.
I spent the entirety of Monday assembling the steady rest. I tapped the holes and tried to put the arms in, however my math was a little bit off when calculating the coordinates of the holes, so the grooves were not aligned perfectly with the holes. I used a file to widen the grooves in the arms to allow the bolts to fit through.
Once the arms were in place, I tried to align the steady rest vertically. I had no idea what I was doing, so I just re-faced the bed interface so that the bolt holes would line up with the channels.
Then I had to take the tube and 4-Jaw chuck off the lathe to try and align the steady rest. I put the 3-Jaw chuck on the lathe and put a piece of doughnut-shaped scrap in the chuck. Then I faced the outside of the scrap to make the exterior face perfectly concentric to the lathe axis. I checked this with the dial indicator.
I then lined up the steady rest on the scrap piece. I had a brain fart and kept facing down the bed interface when I should have been adding shims. I got it working, so I started trying how it ran on different rpms.
I tried up to the max surface rate that I will be turning the tube at. The bearings weren’t sounding great so I tried doubling up the bearings. This led to uneven contact, so I switched to larger bearings. These sounded a lot better. I then looked up the bearing model number and found that the RPM it was running at was well within the acceptable range.
The new bearings came with a problem. The bearings covered the hex of the locking bolt when in the position that interfaces with the tube. I am still working on this issue.
I roughed up a design for a part to go in the end of the tube to prevent the tube from collapsing. Adam made it on the router table, however because I couldn’t use the lathe on wood, I had to do some wacko stuff with a drill press and stuff. Long story short, I couldn’t get the precision right to use it, so I will just turn the tube without it.
I then put the tube back into the mill and tried to align it for a couple hours. I got it within 3 thou deviation at the chuck, however it is a lot more at the end of the tube. The 3 thou at the chuck is almost good enough, however I need that to be exactly the same along the rest of the tube.
