I'll drop this in here first. This is the corner of the shop that slowly became a place to work on machines. I made the oak bench, a fairly successful mortise and tenon job, for ww, but it kept acquiring vises and stuff... It is the best corner of the shop. To the left, shrouded, are table saws and such. The only way I can move around in here is to simply stack machines against each other when not needed. The unfortunate part is I have trapped drill press du nord in the corner. Billy Bob makes a wonderful work table.
If you link back to the first J.W. page at the bottom you will see my questions on the upper wheel babbitt. Here is a solution: I have drilled anchor holes for nubs of babbitt to harden in to hold this small piece in place.
Nothing much to see on the left. I have once again used pieces of small nails to create a space for the arbor to set above the box-bottom. Push the nail into the babbitt and then very firmly seat the arbor into the babbitt dam.
The red arrow, above, points to one of the 4 pieces. The ones on the right aren't visible. I used much thinner strips of Babbitrite on the ends this time so when i press the shaft in I won't get so much going insde the box. I have also put thin strips on the lands on each side of the little center pieces: red dots. These lands were free of babbitt when I took the boxes apart.
Here is the outdoor babbitt shop. The table in the back I welded up to have some place to do hot work. The modified BBQ on the left, heretofore to be known as the 'preheat furnace', is my present pride and joy.
The neighbors had thrown out their old BBQ; I grabbed it and found it to be on an intolerably flimsy base, but otherwise ok. I put it on a welded steel frame and then bolted what I needed, the cooker and control panel, onto the frame. Total cost was $4 for a trade in on the old tank which was outdated.
The preheat furnace has a layer of ceramic wool placed in the bottom. The double burner puts out good heat.
Got the preheat done and the babbitt fluid and discover the ladle wasn't going to work with the pot I was using. Went over to a ladle/pot combo and then used it to melt and pour. Very nice.
And here is about 30 secs after the pour. I had preheated about 15 minutes and then found that the babbitt stayed liquid in the pour for a good 10 min. after I had turned the propane off, which I did before I poured. From lighting off the two stoves to the end of the pour is only about 10 minutes. Easier than you would think once you start to get it.
Ok, pulled the arbor out and found I had a huge mess. Note to self: do not just watch all that extra babbitt harden where you don't need it - scrape it off while you can, you dumb shit. Left is the mess and I spent a long time filing and then went over to judicious use of an angle grinder. Never again.
I could get a lot more heat in there if I lined it all, sides and top, with ceramic wool.
Left is the babbitt after more work with chisel and scraper. My dissatisfaction remains high.
Another day and I pour 7 babbitts, or the same babbitt 7 times, and melt out 8. Right; I melted this sucker out after several hours work on it. I don't want to give the impression that I am any sort of perfectionist; I am not. I am a very pragmatic guy; if it works, use it. But this babbitt thing has just gotten
ahold of me. I need to get it right. Now some of you have poured babbitts and the second or third time around you are making perfect bearings. Well, my ineptness is well nigh insurmountable, it seems. I have now done 20 pours and have a top and bottom box with which I am willling to go forward. The pitfalls, for me, seem to be many: setup not level and doesn't pour right, babbitt dam leaks, air pockets. Just name it and I have managed it. Left is an example: I thought 'why not use Babbittrite to make a channel for the oil groove'? I did, as you see, above, but I didn't have it high enough to be well compressed by the shaft and it floated when I poured. Otherwise, not a bad looking pour. You can see that I have given up trying to keep those lands clear. Having babbitt down inside the pour leads to inclusions that are difficult to dig out, and might be a problem later.
I took a lot more pics, looked them over, and thought 'why bother?' You have seen enough pics. You will figure it out by doing it, just like me A kindly correspondent subtly hinted that I re-read the Gingery pamphlet, "How I Pour Babbitt Bearings". I don't know when I got away from bluing the shaft instead of the bearing, but it was ill advised. Do what Dave Gingery suggests and blue the shaft for scraping. It doesn't go any faster, but you do see what you are doing better. You spin the blued shaft in a clean babbitt and scrape of the blue spots. Very good visual.
It is much easier to apply the Babbittrite dams to cold metal than to hot. I have tried both and making up your dams and putting it all together and then doing the preheat to the entire unit works far better than heating box and shaft separately and then trying to put it to rights for a pour before it cools.
I tired several times to pour the top box with it setting in place on the bottom, as I had done with Billy Bob, bolted together, shims in place.... But the upper box only has 2 little tiny tautalogical oil holes to pour into and successive failures were my reward; hand-eye coordination zilch - not to mention I was a clumsy child. A cast iron funnel that didn't leech the heat out of the pour might work, but I didn't even consider an aloominem kitchen funnel. Give yourself a break and use gravity when you can: turn it all upside down and pour the top as if it were a bottom. Giant leak problems suddenly precluded. Whew.
I think my 'frosty' pours were possibly due to metal separation. If not stirred, gently from the bottom up, in the pot before the pour the heavier components will stay at the bottom. I think maybe the same can happen if the preheat is too high and the babbitt stays liquid in the pour for several minutes. I cut the preheat time and started getting much shinier and smoother pours.
A soldering iron will melt babbitt, that is true, and then you can fill those annoying little empty spots - not!. Don't even try it! Really. Those little empty spots can act as small reservoirs for oil. Unless you have so many of them that when you are all scraped and fitted you don't have at least 60 or 70% contact, according to the bluing, then leave the little holes alone. If you have too many then just repour. With an oxyactylene outfit I can melt out a bearing in a couple of minutes, and the with the little Coleman stove and the 'pre heat furnace' I can be ready to pour again within 15 minutes, tops. The only thing that slows you down in doing repours is waiting for the arbor and boxes to cool enough to put in the new dams. I think maybe a Mapp torch would work out fine for all this if you don't have a gas welding outfit.
One other point, I did so many pours on these because I was trying to figure out how to deal with shimmng the keyway-locking design of the top and bottom boxes. Finally, I said, ' the hell with it', and decided to just pour and deal with the shimming afterwards. So many of the problems you will encounter will be around set-up. You think it thru, it looks good, you pour, and it doesn't come out right. Par for the course. Not to fret.
After about 30 hours of scraping - no kidding... I have a top wheel babbitt I like. Let me warn you not to scrape one box and then the other and then try to put them together. Unnnhuuuh. No workee too slickee. Using nails to space the shaft in the box for the pour is problematic itself in that if they aren't exactly spaced the same in both ends of both boxes you will have an alignment problem. But add to that that the casting is so rough that the ends of the boxes, the area where you set the nail-spacers, aren't equally thick, or round, then w.t.f.?, and you are going to find you do not have two boxes poured in quite the same longitudinal axis. Scrape one, scrape the other, and find that the journal doesn't even go in all the way with the bolts fitting too. I rescraped both bearings using the 2 boxes, plus shimming, all the way thru, every fit and scrape. Came out fine, but took a long time. So, do yourself a favor and get the journal to go down into both boxes so they can be lightly bolted together and go from there. It may take some scraping on each box, especially up on the margins of the pour were the shims go, before you reach this point, but make it the first thing you go for.
This alignment problem does not exist if you can pour with both with top and bottom boxes bolted together, as I did with Billy Bob.
You will decide how much Prussian Blue you want to put on the shaft for spotting the babbitt; start out with not too much. I was tightening down the boxes onto each other enough that I could barely turn the shaft. This is tighter than you will have them when it is all done and the machine running, but it seems to work well for spotting. Toward the end I was using little Bluing and going very tight and then scraping off the spots that had a mirror-like quality to them and had obviously been burnished by the turning shaft. Turn the shaft a good few times each go round.
