Today is a warm one. The weather service says we may break a heat record today or tomorrow. The record is 102, and my phone says that is where we are now. I stepped outside to get mail, and I think the 102 is the reading at the airport... inside the Control Tower... with the AC on high!
I have the workroom mostly presentable (pics soon, I promise). The jewelry bench is done, so I took the pieces that I have already made and ran them through the ultrasonic cleaner.
The tumbler bench needs more organization. The lower shelf will hold all three rock tumblers. I put down some packing foam on the shelf, and the tumblers sit on that to absorb some of the vibration. When all three are going, I have tumbling 15 lbs of rocks. I have an old sleeping bag that goes under the shelf to help with sound dampening.
Two of the tumblers are almost ready to go; they just need maintenance first. A quick cleaning and a drop of oil on the bearings, and they will be ready. The third tumbler is my "problem child". It is on its third rebuild. Ugh.
It is a Chicago Electric (Harbor Freight) brand. Shortly after I bought it, I found a design flaw. Instead of roller bearings on the shafts, it had plastic bushings that held the rollers off the metal frame. The rollers are metal shafts that support the barrels that are holding six pounds of rocks (3 lbs per barrel). It looks good on paper, but when you add dust, dirt, and silicon carbide abrasive grit, plastic bushings will not last very long.
I ordered four steel roller bearings (used in 3D printers) to replace the plastic bushings. The bearings were the wrong size due to a Standard-to-Metric calculation error. Then a guy I know through an online Rock Tumbling Group, referred me to another guy who makes a plastic-to-metal-bearing conversion kit specifically for this model rock tumbler. Apparently, I'm not the only one disappointed in the poor design.
The conversion kit worked very well, and we were up and running again... sort of. The original design allows two 3-lb barrels to roll inside the metal frame with very little wiggle room. When you add the new bearing housing on each end of the two roller shafts, things get really tight. Too tight. Fortunately, the bearing mounts are made of plastic, and there is exactly enough room between the outer circumference and the metal bearing. A quick trim with the Dremel tool removed just enough of the housing to allow the barrel to roll without compromising the mount.
Before long, it was back up and doing its job. Then, while doing the next maintenance, I noticed that one of the shafts had slid completely out of one of the end bearings. When the shaft was rolling inside the plastic bushing with grease and dirt, and abrasive grit, it wore down the ends of the shaft, making the groove too shallow for the snap rings to keep it in place. The snap ring popped off, allowing the shaft to slide out.
Grrr. Time to fix another flaw. I plan to just drill holes near the ends of the shafts and secure them with Cotter pins. Easy-peazy. But to get to the end of the shafts to remove them, one must first remove the cover and pull the drive motor. And for some mysterious reason, the motor mounting screws were cross-threaded and couldn't be removed. I cut off the screws, put everything in a box, and sealed it with massive amounts of duct tape and Holy Water. I put it in a box and forgot about it until after I moved to Colorado.
So, here I am. I have managed to remove all of the duct tape, and the machine is now on my workbench. I have replacement screws (steel, not aluminum this time), nuts, flat washers, and lock washers. Everything I need to put this beast back together.
Except that I forgot that I still need to drill holes in the roller shafts, and I don't have any Cotter pins.
