Friday Feedback

It has been a filled week.

There are things you do not know you need until you have them. I've been cleaning parts with a spray bottle filled with WD40's cleaner/degreaser, which sort of works. I also have used Purple Power at a 50%, 100% and had good luck with it.

But the chuck I took apart this week had oil and grease that might have been original from the factory, 50 years ago.

I ended up using a simple aquarium type pump with a dish tub on top of a 5 gallon bucket. I was able to clean that chuck in less than an hour. It looks nice.

Which leads me back to why I required that chuck cleaned and put back into production. Back in 2018, I picked up a semi-universal dividing head, BS-0 size. It is somewhere. I knew where it was for a long time, but every time I needed to use it, I didn't actually do it.

Now I can't find it. Instead, of replacing it, I picked up a cheap 8" rotary table. This cost less than the 3" dividing head I had purchased.

The differences are that the rotary table doesn't come with dividing plates, easily fixed for cheap. And it doesn't have a foot stock, or lathe dog, nor a chuck.

That old chuck is about to be mounted on the rotary table. I will finish making the chuck key soon, then it is on to the rotary table work. Making gears.

Which takes us to "Chinesium" goods. Rotary tables can be had for less than $90 from Amazon. That is a 4-inch version. A Yuasa 12" tilting rotary table is only $5,815.

You get what you pay for. Mine is on the very cheap side of things.

The overall quality feels and looks good. Nothing obviously wrong with it.

But, because it is Chinesium, the first task, before first use, is to tear it all the way down, clean it, lube it and put it back together again. The reason is that there is likely to be chips and grinding grit in the tool. Not likely, there is dirt in the system.

There is a handle that is used to rotate the table. I removed that handle with the dial to reveal a machined surface that the dial rides against. There is a glob of grease there, as there should be. But when I wiped my finger across that machined surface, it came out black. This is an indication that there is grinding grit in there.

That grinding grit will destroy a tool if it is left on working surfaces. Thus, we clean it well before putting it into production.

Making progress in the shop.

For your thoughts, Hagar reported that she had watched a video by a young woman that had escaped from Gaza. She suggested that we consider why there are all these pro-terrorist protests throughout the United States, but there does not seem to be any in the countries that have had to deal with the Palestinians.

So the questions are, are there pro-Palestine protests happening in the Middle East? Are there pro-Palestine protests happening in other countries? If so, how many and how big?

Why are they mostly(all) happening in the US?