A weal of wheels

Progress is really starting to pick up. We'll that is a little disingenuous. I'm spending about the same amount of time each week working on my tin beast; but instead of primarily cutting out stuff, I am instead mostly assembling various components from the stuff that has been already cut out. Gives the appearance of being more productive I suppose. It certainly is more gratifying. I also have two video updates to share. That is mostly caused from just being lazy and not updating my blog. :)

Let's get started with the drive sprockets. As of right now, I am not 100% satisfied with how they have turned out. All of my dissatisfaction revolves around the center cones. Since they are very important to the drive sprocket, I chose to have a machine shop roll them up into their cones shapes as opposed to doing it myself. I had thought that professionals would do a better job than what I am capable of. Unfortunately, I was very much in error. They are neither round nor consistent. It will not effect the drive sprockets while in use, but it does case some cosmetic issues. Once everything is hard welded in you will be hard pressed to find the errors, but it does make getting the cone centered a real pain during the assembly process.

Here are some shots of the drive sprockets getting lined up in the jig I made for assembling them.

Jig is together and welding is about to begin.

The drive sprockets have been tack welded together. I will go through a do the final welds at a later time. Mostly I am letting the idea of dismantling them simmer. I am trying to convince myself that I do not need to tear them apart and cut out/roll up a new set of cones.

Now for the road wheels. After getting the issue with the rims hammered out or rolled to be more accurate, the road wheels went together very easy. As of right now, all have been tacked together and about 3/4's have been completely welded. I started welding the road wheels onto their hubs to start playing around with how best to assemble them.

You can see here the stack of road wheels.

Here are two different angles on a pair that have been welded onto their hub.

Moving forward, over the next few weeks I need to finish the road wheels and get the pairs welded on to their hubs. I also need to hurry up and finish the threads on the axles and spindles. 

Lord of the Rings

Previously I have discussed the problems I have had in rolling the rings that will become the rims of the road wheels and return rollers. So I decided to make my own ring roller. To be perfectly honest, I had no idea if my fabrication skills would up to the challenge. To be effective, the rollers don't need to be perfect, but a close approximation there of. This is complicated somewhat by my desire to do this with as little cash outlay as possible. Yeah I can be real cheap at inopportune times.

My idea was pretty simple; take the basic tube bender design and modify it for flatbar and the rollers to be compressed from the bottom instead of the top. The rollers are a section of schedule 80 2" pipe with a piece of 1" road bar through the middle and 1" washers on the ends. The hard part was getting everything lined up and centered when they were welded together. I used some blocks of wood and drilled appropriate sized holes to help center everything up.

I thought about using bushings to keep the rollers in place, but I have a number of pillow block bearings sitting around. The bearings will be used in the final drive for the Brummbär; however, I'm sure they will not mind being put to work a little early.

Everything went together fairly easy. No big surprises. All of the rollers center axis seems to be parallel (important) but a couple of them were off center by about 1/64". Not too bad for a rookie and quite usable. Normally a slip roller has two rollers that turn (feeding the material) and the third is used to adjust the distance between all three. I did the opposite. Only one roller feeds the material (top roller) and the other two (bottom rollers) move up and down to adjust the distance between the rollers. One of the concerns with this approach is that one feed roller may not have enough "grab" to feed the material through the three rollers. However, this was not an issue as there was very little or no slippage.

Everything worked well. I was able to use this to fix (mostly) the rings the Harbor Freight ring roller twisted in the Z axis. There was an issue with flat spots on the ends of the ring, but a few love taps with a small sledge took care of that with little fuss. All of the rings for the road wheel rims are rolled. I still need to cut and roll the rings for the return rollers. That will be for another day though....

Twisted

Brummbär Video Log Update

A little more work was done this week. The good news is the road wheel axle hubs are tack welded and ready to go.

The bad news is I broke my ring roller. However, the good news is I broke my ring roller. Probably a blessing in disguise. It rolled some terrible rings. It put a twist in the Z axis. I am in the process of making a ring roller from scratch. I hope to have it done before the coming weekend. I also hope that I can flatten out the remaining 6 or 7 seven rings I rolled with the old roller and then run them through the new one and get the twist out. I hate to throw 20' of flatbar in the recycle bin. :(

I did play around with some of the rings I do have on some extra road wheels. Did not go all that well. The twist in the ring caused all manner of issues. I probably will not try tacking any more until the ring issue is resolved.

In the next couple weeks, I hope to have my ring issue resolved and the drive sprockets assembled.