The Curse of the Dual Drum Sander

It begins with a piece of machinery that always breaks.  This is our beloved Dual Drum Sander, often the last power tool to be used before the finishing process begins.  When this breaks, all work seems to stop.  We've spent hours fixing this thing only to have it break again.  The drums go round and round, but the table doesn't want to go up and down.  That seems to be a simple enough task for it to accomplish, so why does it keep breaking?

This piece provides a clue.  That should be a flat piece of metal, but it shows obvious signs of erosion, especially as it is filed down flat.  Something must be digging into this causing it to seize up.  We could repair this piece, but what caused the damage in the first place?

The threaded rod is supposed to turn inside this plate.  This one isn't.  A large burr has formed and frozen this in its tracks.

Here's the lift assembly as it came from the factory.

Time to make some new parts.  Rather than steel on steel, I'm going to machine a bronze bushing.  While I'm at it, I'll dress all of the original parts so that they are true and free of burrs.  In addition to the bushings, I'll have to modify the original parts to fit and add a retaining washer to keep it from falling off.

Here's the finished end with the modifications.

And the plates with the pressed-in bronze bushings.

The finished assembly is complete.

And ready to put back in the machine.  I think I'll send this to PowerMatic as an upgrade suggestion.

CNC Cribbage Board

Somebody mentioned making a cribbage board and the idea has been on my mind for awhile.  The biggest challenge, I thought, would be arranging 360 holes along a vector.  As it turns out, Aspire makes this quite easy.  Here's a short tutorial I found on how to do this.

Here's my first attempt.  It was pushing midnight and I'm short five holes.  I discovered that tight curves don't make for friendly cribbage paths.  My solution was to delete the holes in weird places, but then I ended up short.  This is one of those projects that's going to take you some fiddling to get right, but has the potential for a very cool project!

Update:

I'm getting the hang of this now.  One thing that I've learned is that oval or rectangular tracks are the best to keep the holes from bunching up in the tight corners.  My latest iteration is below.  Total machine time is 25 minutes, but there's the whole process of how to paint it without messing up the alignment.

Let's explore developing and selling these!

Resources

Now that the shop is clean, I can concentrate on putting resources online for your reference.  (Thank you all for your amazing efforts!  I couldn't have done it on my own!)

Until I get the actual web page up, look here for resources.

General Resources
(Includes time cards, syllabi, and project evaluation forms.)

Exploring Woods Resources
(Includes all of those long, pesky workbook packets!)

Woods I/II Resources
(I've lumped these together this year, but that will change next year... just wait!)
Be sure to look at the end of semester requirements and first semester grade requests.

Tortilla Press

Abel wanted to make a tortilla press and I suddenly remembered that I had started one years ago. Together we came up with a design. Here's what I started with. Stay tuned for the finished product.