This week I have been mostly killing time, waiting for stuff to arrive. The PCB, thruster connectors, and dome have all been ordered, but I haven’t been able to work on the ROV without them.
So I decided to refurbish the new baby lathe. (its soooo cute) Although it was given to the shop in a “working” state, all of its lead screws and nuts were very dirty. I started at the tool post and worked through each assembly, disassembling and cleaning each part, before oiling and re-assembling it. The first day I handled the tool post and figured out how to disassemble the compound slide.
The next day I disassembled the compound slide and rotation plate along with the z-axis. The slides had to be carefully wiped and then re-tuned to run smoothly without too much play. I also worked on the long lead screw, taking the main slide off of the way bed.
I disassembled the whole main slide and cleaned it. to clean the lead screw, I sprayed it with wd-40 (like everything else I cleaned) and ran the motor with a flathead screwdriver riding inside the threads. This dislodged most of the gunk, however I re-sprayed the screw and blew out the threads with compressed air. this cleaned out the rest of the gunk. I followed a similar process for the rack, only the scraping was more manual.
While tuning the main bed assembly, I overtightened a set screw, fracturing a cast iron rail alignment part. I went up to metal fab and they gave me bar stock that was almost exactly the right dimensions to make a replacement part. I cut it to length and used the reference surface and sandpaper to clean up the stock and make one face flat. I then placed the part on the mill and milled its ends to size. I then measured the holes and their placements, before converting those measurements to coordinates. I then indicated the piece in the mill and drilled out the holes. I tapped the 2 set screw holes. The tapping went so incredibly smoothly that I thought that I had done something wrong. But no, the steel tapped better with a spiral fluted tap than aluminum does with straight fluted ones.
Once the connectors arrived, I soldered one, before helping Miles and Jonas with the autonomous golf cart. I used Linux(poggers) and changed a single number in the code to a 2 (it was 0, Miles told me 1, that only half worked so I switched it to 2). So I am now a software developer for autonomous vehicles.
