Had a thread going recently under the excavator section, about line boring my swing tower. Made some Youtube videos for anyone interested. It's more a beginners guide by a beginner so don't be too hard on me please http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHSxLmJBD4Y I've certainly learnt my lesson about ductile iron, which I found out my swing tower was made of AFTER I welded on it Never thought there were grades of cast iron that could be used in items like swing towers, etc. I thought anything like this would be cast steel. What a way to learn about it. Everything is back together and not a tiny amount of play in my swing tower now, unlike before. Keith.
nice videos. I wouldn't have thought you could line bore with an everyday electric drill
Pretty cool, looks like you did your homework.
Watched all three video's, nice job on the boring bar and setup, out of all the boring bar video's I've ever seen, you had the best explaination on how to do it and go about it, thanks for sharing it with us.
Thanks for the compliments lads. Sorry if my voice sends some of you to sleep LOL, I'm not the fastest of talkers, seems like it's in my brain but comes out slow from my mouth. I'm sure I've watched just about every line boring video on Youtube, so I could learn about this stuff. And yeah too many of them left me with more questions on how do they do this, and do that, etc. So thought my explanations of my experience might help someone if they want to give it a go. You know I took a 2mm depth of cut (4 mm diameter increase) and my drill hardly bogged down at all. It is 1100 watts and in low gear. Figured if it can just about twist me arm off when I'm holding it, it should be able to take light cuts with a sharp tool. Because the feed mechanism basically just pushes and does not have a backlash free feedscrew, etc, I ground the HSS tool with a view to the possibility of it wanting to "dive" into the material. I put less releif on the front of the tool and more relief on the top of the tool. Still cut good but didn't dive. Lots of calculated guess work LOL, and hoping it works. It was actually quite nerve wracking putting my machine out of action for a repair I might have stuffed up, never having done it before. The biggest lesson of all has been test the material before working on it, especially the weld test. Put a blob of weld on and see if it goes hard, if it does can't do the build up with weld and bore out thing, and clamp the bearing plates instead of tack welding them on. Just put the swing tower back on yesterday and not even a tiny amount of play, so I'm pretty happy. Of course it won't be long before that snug fit wears out. Keith.
Nice videos and great work! Hope to see more videos from you. :drinkup