The metal shaper man’s blog

This was sort of a fun project for me.  I had this push mower that I had inadvertently busted the roller bracket on when I backed it up hard on my driveway

I had some stock with pre drilled holes in stock which I need to plan down in thickness but my width was perfect. I had a couple of false starts which you see in the picture as I was trying to get the tool group properly. Originally I had this my mill and it wasn’t fun.  The material was hardened and I don’t have a power feed on my mill. Hand cranking was very tedius. The autofeed on the shaper was much nicer.

I’m actually doing a straight downward plunge in this picture.  What I did was take a rough cut.  Measure the width and than adjust the horizontal with the indicator.. It seemed to work pretty good.

In needed to replicate the boss than was in the original part  So, I scribed the center lines and hit it with a optical center punch.  In the picture I’m getting the punch mark zero’d out in my four jaw chuck.

You can see the machined boss in this picture. Here I’m center drilling it, in preparation for drilling and tapping

Here you can I’m tapping the part, using a tap holder I made in a shop class many many years ago.

I wound up using a shoulder bolt of the correct diameter, got some loc-tite and screwed it in. I than cut the head off and rounded what needed to be ground. Hopefully the loc-tite will hold, since I just realized looking at the picture that the stud could in theory unwind. As you can tell from the leaves on the mower its fall and I won’t be mowing the lawn till spring. Hmm…. The blades are sort of dull, I wonder if I could rig something up to sharpen them.

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One of my projects was to replace a worn counter shaft on my ammco metal shaper replace the babbit bearing with Bronze.
A friend with a jig-bore machine the counter shaft for me in his jig-bore to fit the bushings.

I got the thing completely rebuilt, repainted and ready to install and I noticed that the base rocked when I was getting read to  bolt it down.  I suppose I could have shimmed it with some washer but that just seem like a slock solution to me.  Machining the base was out of the question, my mill isn’t big enough to mount the assembly and I couldn’t really dissemble without major pain..
What to do.  So… I thought I give my Armstrong scraping tool a whirl.   The following pictures shows the progression of the scraping project:

A few years back I got Mike Morgans video on scraping and went to town scrapping a cast iron surface plate I had. I wound up giving myself tennis elbow, or should I say scrapping elbow and took a good year to heal. So I you decide to scrape all I have to say is keep the elbow tucked against your body and let your hips do the work.

Now I got the thing almost as flat as a surface plate and life is good…

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Ok… I was looking over my last post and it looks like I was coming off a bad week…. This week seems better but I’ve got some things piling up on my gtd list that I’ve been wanting to get done.

I’ve been taking some pictures of some shop projects that I’ve been wanting to post on my blog.  But they are just way to big.

I’ve had this thread bookmarked for a long time and just haven’t had the time to really go through it: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-518662.html

From what I gather to reduce file size of a picture you can:

• Reduce the image size
• Reduce the number of colors
• Save in a different format

That seems fairly self evident.
Well… lets see what I got here..
I have a series of really pretty pictures of my counter-shaft base of my ammco shaper. Err… starting to get off OT here.. Lets just say, I just have this nice picture buts its big.

I fired up the GIMP (I’m sorry put I can’t help but keep thinking of Pulp Fiction when I write that)and went to Image properties.  Its a JPEG 2272 X 1740 pixels, print size 31.556 X 23.667 Inches, Resolution 72 X 72 ppi, 831 KB.
I did a quick google search “gimp how is print size calculated” and came up with link http://docs.gimp.org/en/gimp-image-print-size.html

First experiment. Take Image save as Png (compression level 9).
Lets see what I got.  Hmm.. Everything else is the same… file size just shot up to 5.26Mb..

Second experiment.  I just tried Image=>Scale and changed the image scale to 640X480. When I saved as Jpeg it asked me about quality.. I selected 50%. Seemed like a reasonable number. (File size was 40.1 Kb) That’s better.
Let me try that again with maximum quality and see what happens. at Maximum Quality it shoots up to 309.7 KB (picture seems nicer but file size is not that great

I just tried Image mode indexing and save at 85% quality with web colors enabled.  Looks like crap.  Saved as Jpeg at original Original image scale.  File size at 821KB…

Another experiment. I changed to 640 X 480 saved as Png max compression. 536.8 KB

Ok… It’s seems for me at the moment, the best result I came up with using the Gimp, was 640X480 resolution and saved with 50% qc.  I reduced the file size from 831.7 Kb to 40.1 KB.. This seems reasonable..
For now, I’m just going to do this one at a time.  The post had some methods for doing this in batch mode.

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