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RE: Tools used - was [PSUBS-MAILIST] Bill Gifford's Project

William,

I'll describe it in the order it is assembled, so hopefully you can picture it. There is an actual picture on PSUBS in the "PSUBS picture gallery", but it's smal and dark. 

Anyway, I bolted a rectangular plate 3/4" thick and about 1'x2' to the table of my mill drill. This plate is reinforced with a vertical flange a couple of inches tall and also 3/4" thick, to prevent it from flexing as it sticks out past the edge of the table. The point of this rectangular plate is to extend the table, as I want to turn objects about 3' in diameter... the center of which would be in midair.

On the top of the rectangular plate I mounted my 8" conventional, hand cranked rotary table.

On the underside, a gear motor I got on eBay for $20. 

I removed the handle of the table and adapted a gear in its place. Also a small gear on the gear motor shaft, and connected both of them with a timing belt. I picked gears that drive the table at 4 rpm, although I can vary that somewhat by running the motor on 6V instead of 12V.  

Topping this off is a large disc of 1/2" thick plate about 3' in diameter. To mount things on the table, I have a series of holes drilled in the plate, and use the same sort of clamps you would use on the mill.

I've used this for milling the edge of the acrylic dome, for milling the hatch seat, for getting the stiffeners really round and the right diameter, and for a lots of lesser uses. All of this could be done on a giant lather, but who has a lathe that can handle 3' diameters? The only drawback is it's REALLY slow when you turn something at 4 rpm... it takes a week to do something that would take minutes on a lathe.

Coming up with this sort of custom device is typical of where all the time goes.

rgds,

Alec


-----Original Message-----
From:	William Alford [mailto:walford@dbtech.net]
Sent:	Sun 5/25/2003 10:39 AM
To:	personal_submersibles@psubs.org
Cc:	
Subject:	RE: Tools used - was [PSUBS-MAILIST] Bill Gifford's Project

At 01:34 AM 5/25/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Two key home-made items were 
>the sub dolly and a home-made, motorized rotary table large enough to mill 
>circular objects the diameter of the pressure hull.

Hey Alec,  care to expand on your constructioni of the home-made rotary table?
William Alford

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