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Beadroller Build (Turned into sheetmetal work thread)

Adam, this is blossoming for ya brother, glad to see it. How does your "employee" like the work?
 
Nice work bud. Looks great! You would just s**t at seeing the quantity of cleco's we have at my company. We must have hundreds of pounds of each size of every type of cleco ever made. They buy them when they buy them by the thousands.

An intresting story. There is a surplus company here locally that has 55 gallon drums full of used and probably new as well surplus cleco's.

They would buy surplus fab shops, aerospace machine shops, and aircraft companies stock at auction for pennies on the dollar. I heard the man who owns this company is a filthy rich ex centric man who loved the aircraft industry and flight. He has a warehouse of metal industry hardware that dwarfs the huge showroom of used and some new junk you can walk through and buy from.

When I had my Logan lathe and wanted a larger capacity chuck for it then stock would handle, I went to this place and spoke with an employee who used to work at one of the machine shops I worked at. I had told my shop manager about wanting a new chuck, at the time. He asked if I had heard of Cal Aero Supply. I said yeah, I had been there before. He said go talk to so and so, he used to work here at our shop but has worked there at Cal for about 7 years at that time. So I did.

I met this rather strange dude and told him where I worked and who my manager was, and that my manager said to talk to him. He became super cool with me once he knew where I worked and that I was a machinist and needed a new chuck for my lathe. He and my manager had gotten along really well when he worked at my shop in the past.

He took me into the warehouse to the "chuck area" where there was literally pallets and box pallets with hundreds of used chucks. I'm talking hundreds of used chucks from tiny chucks to HUGE chucks. Tons in weight of used chucks. I spent over an hour digging through all kinds of different sizes of chucks till I found something that would work that was tight, clean and not heavily worn out. In fact it was in superb shape. I only paid $75 bucks for a close to $1200 chuck when new. I just had to turn up a custom adapter plate to mount it to the new larger chuck to my lathe. I did and that was the main 3 jaw chuck I used the entire time I had my lathe until I sold it. It's what I used to make all the bearing race and seal drivers I sold here when I was a vendor for a very short time.

But this guy proceeded to talk my ear off about this place Cal Aero supply, and when he used to work for my machine shop. He said they had cleco by the ton, every size you could imagine by the 55 gal drum. The place is truly amazing. The showroom is not even one tenth the size of the warehouse. And I think he said the owner had more then one industrial building to store all he owned. Any man would be in heaven to see inside this place. I avoid going there because I want to buy too too much. Things I want but don't even have the need for at the time.
 
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Texted previous post from my cell so the paragraphs are all over the place lol!
 
Damn Adam...how are you beading the "points" on your flames and such? That is some pretty work.
 
rdn2blazer said:
Nice work bud. Looks great! You would just s**t at seeing the quantity of cleco's we have at my company. We must have hundreds of pounds of each size of every type of cleco ever made. They buy them when they buy them by the thousands.

An intresting story. There is a surplus company here locally that has 55 gallon drums full of used and probably new as well surplus cleco's.

They would buy surplus fab shops, aerospace machine shops, and aircraft companies stock at auction for pennies on the dollar. I heard the man who owns this company is a filthy rich ex centric man who loved the aircraft industry and flight. He has a warehouse of metal industry hardware that dwarfs the huge showroom of used and some new junk you can walk through and buy from.

When I had my Logan lathe and wanted a larger capacity chuck for it then stock would handle, I went to this place and spoke with an employee who used to work at one of the machine shops I worked at. I had told my shop manager about wanting a new chuck, at the time. He asked if I had heard of Cal Aero Supply. I said yeah, I had been there before. He said go talk to so and so, he used to work here at our shop but has worked there at Cal for about 7 years at that time. So I did.

I met this rather strange dude and told him where I worked and who my manager was, and that my manager said to talk to him. He became super cool with me once he knew where I worked and that I was a machinist and needed a new chuck for my lathe. He and my manager had gotten along really well when he worked at my shop in the past.

He took me into the warehouse to the "chuck area" where there was literally pallets and box pallets with hundreds of used chucks. I'm talking hundreds of used chucks from tiny chucks to HUGE chucks. Tons in weight of used chucks. I spent over an hour digging through all kinds of different sizes of chucks till I found something that would work that was tight, clean and not heavily worn out. In fact it was in superb shape. I only paid $75 bucks for a close to $1200 chuck when new. I just had to turn up a custom adapter plate to mount it to the new larger chuck to my lathe. I did and that was the main 3 jaw chuck I used the entire time I had my lathe until I sold it. It's what I used to make all the bearing race and seal drivers I sold here when I was a vendor for a very short time.

But this guy proceeded to talk my ear off about this place Cal Aero supply, and when he used to work for my machine shop. He said they had cleco by the ton, every size you could imagine by the 55 gal drum. The place is truly amazing. The showroom is not even one tenth the size of the warehouse. And I think he said the owner had more then one industrial building to store all he owned. Any man would be in heaven to see inside this place. I avoid going there because I want to buy too too much. Things I want but don't even have the need for at the time.
Click to expand...

That sounds like heaven and a lot of hurt on a bank account if I ever went haha.
 
We have had this sitting around the shop for a month now. It's still sitting on it's pallet. We can't use it until safety comes down and renders it just this side of useless. :surepal:

 
Big Ray said:
We have had this sitting around the shop for a month now. It's still sitting on it's pallet. We can't use it until safety comes down and renders it just this side of useless. :surepal:

Click to expand...
I'm surprised that thing has an exposed chain. I think that is the biggest no no on that machine. The safety crew probably want to add guards on the rollers and that would make the machine useless.
 
Send me that baieligh unit right now!!!! LOL

Im totally needing to upgrade the roller. 18" depth is not even close to enough for the things I want to do. Baliegh and MB offer 36" depth units... Oh yes.....



Anyways...

Im pretty proud of this one. Definitely the most detailed thing ive done yet, and time consuming. About 4.5 hours into this one.

All funds are going towards a vinyl cutting machine so i can speed up layout times, and will be nice for all its other advantages.







 
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