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Machine shop land: Pics & Videos from my job

Avery4jc

Avery4jc

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There's a ton of pics around here related to "fab". Cut, grind, bend, weld type of stuff but not a lot related to machine shop type work.
I'm a conventional machinist, started in January of 2007 sweeping floors in high school and although many parts of my life have changed over the years I've always had the shop.

I don't take pics of hardly any of the cool stuff I work on but I'm going to start making an effort to snap pics of neat jobs. I do a little bit of everything around the shop so you never know what the next day will bring.

Here we go...

I turned an entire Dana 60 housing for a guy a while back. He rolled his crawler and totaled it and was concerned about the straightness of the housing. Plus he bought new Reid C's and the C's are machined to fit "most" Dana 60 tubes. There's a few years that they're slightly different so I checked it for straight and machined the ends for a press-fit with his new Reid C's.




 
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I work on a lot of heavy equipment parts. Pins and bushing areas for days!!!!
On most of the big steel housings (quick coupler in this case) we bore weld the areas then machine them back to fit the factory pin...
 
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This was a housing that had an integrated pin cast into it. It was worn so I setup in our horizontal mill and machined the OD of the pin. I machined a sleeve and shrunk it on to fit the factory bushing.

 
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A particular skill-set I've been trying to pick up lately is portable engine boring. It's becoming a lost art as long blocks are getting cheaper and cheaper. Only problem is some equipment is "obsolete" which is BS. So that's where we step in.
Often times it's a piece of equipment that just needs to keep running, we're not talking top fuel cars here. I've done plenty of jobs where we just machine and sleeve one or two cylinders and leave the other ones alone. It's cost effective and everyone wins.

This was one of the first engines I did "on my own". My boss still comes out on site with me for now but lets me do everything. I'm grateful he takes the time to do this until I'm comfortable enough on my own.



You find yourself doing all types of in-frame work...


 
A couple weeks ago I went out and bored all 6 cylinders .030" over in a 315L. It's way up there and there's nowhere to sit or stand!





 
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Back in the shop we go!

I tend to do a lot of the "high volume" (as high as a conventional shop does) work. There's a company I make about six different parts for that are stainless steel and aluminum in batches of about 20. Lots of machine work, welding, and steps go into their stuff. Here's some spindles I took pics of part way through. After I TIG weld the stubs in I do all the finish work for bearings and seals.





Piles and piles of stainless shafts with bearing areas...
 
Pretty cool Avery!

The last two fabricator jobs I had I ended up doing a fair bit of machining as well. A couple of larger mills, a smaller Bridgeport, a 72" horizontal boring mill, and a bunch of in situ line boring. Funny thing is I enjoyed it much more than fabbing and welding. If I could turn the clock back I think I would have taken machining instead of welding...fun stuff, til you get a hot chip down yer neck. :D
 
Sometimes I just get to make little one-off stuff from prints or broken/worn out samples. I don't know what it is or why it's done the way it is most of the time. Welcome to being a machinist, just make the parts and move on. :)


 
"High" volume run of rollers I fabricated and machined from scratch for a customer. They're actually pretty intricate with multiple bolt patterns, tapped holes, counter bores both in the end plates and for all the bolt heads. One side has a part that registers on the ID of the tube, the other end has a part that registers on the bore of the end plate.




 
Some sort of conveyor rollers? Looks like a driver and a bunch of rollers?
 
These days we're finding ourselves doing more mechanic type work. Not really sure why but we hypothesize it's because people suck and the dealerships can't find anyone worth a crap so they just pay us machine shop rates to do the whole job.
This is a big spring that is captured with a pin through the middle. It's a track tensioner off a huge dozer.
Customer needed us to compress the spring and install the new pin.

Those square pieces of tube we temporarily clamped in place are 2" square for size reference.

 
It's not all kittens and rainbows in machine shop land though. Every once in a while things just don't go right. Safety is a big deal and I'm glad nobody was hurt.
I had a couple hours into changing the orientation of this fan and long story short it came out of the chuck in the final step of machine work.



 
More general machine work. I made these from scratch out of 8" x 1-5/8" slugs of aluminum. Sleeved them with brass including a spiral grease groove.
They're guide wheels for hydraulic hoses on what I'm assuming is a huge forklift or over the road hay squeeze.




 
tRustyK5 said:
Pretty cool Avery!
If I could turn the clock back I think I would have taken machining instead of welding...fun stuff, til you get a hot chip down yer neck. :D
Click to expand...

Ahhh yes... the evil hot chips. I'm sure I look like I have the chicken pox all the time because my arms, hands and neck always have little red burn marks on them.

tRustyK5 said:
Some sort of conveyor rollers? Looks like a driver and a bunch of rollers?
Click to expand...

Yes they're off of a conveyor line. Those stainless spindles pictured earlier fit into one side of the roller. The other side has an aluminum hub (which I also make, I'll take pics next time) that couples the roller to another stainless drive axle. It uses 3/4" pins to drive it and the aluminum coupler is a throw away wear part. Cheaper than wearing out all the stainless parts all the time.
 
Between buying my combo machine a couple months ago and beginning to run the CNC mill at work Im beginning to really get into this. Thanks for sharing dude. Having a d60 housing chucked up in a lathe is an end goal for machine size for me lol. I know its not squat compared to the big turns they do at like 3 RPM on machines that are taller that 10 guys but still.
 
Some steel hubs I machined for a customer. Pretty standard except they needed a slotted bolt pattern. I setup a jig on the rotary table and made it happen....

 
Stomis said:
Between buying my combo machine a couple months ago and beginning to run the CNC mill at work Im beginning to really get into this. Thanks for sharing dude. Having a d60 housing chucked up in a lathe is an end goal for machine size for me lol. I know its not squat compared to the big turns they do at like 3 RPM on machines that are taller that 10 guys but still.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's our biggest lathe at the moment and gets used pretty often. It'd be nice if it had a larger through bore but the big 4 jaw chuck is handy. We'd like to get a lathe about twice that size, it's only about 12 feet between centers.
 
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