Mom's Birthday Present

It has been ages since I posted an entry into my blog, but I recently completed a project that I am pretty proud of, so I figured I would share a picture and explain how it was made. This is a necklace rack that I built for my mother as a birthday present.

The base is a disk that I cast out of aluminum a while back. I machined the casting and added a step to it using my 1943 South Bend Lathe (thanks to Kirk Stephens for one of the coolest gifts ever). With the disk machined, I set forth to do another casting. Being sick of the smell and soot of using a charcoal fueled foundry, i decided to upgrade to a propane burner. I got the design of the burner from the web. It was designed by Ron Reil. He has an excellent website. I actually had most of the burner built a while back, but was waiting for the right time to approach the minister of finance about buying the high pressure regulator, hose, and propane tank. Well, last weekend was the right time, and with my purchases in hand, i finished the burner, fired up my new gas fueled foundry and cast the cube at the top.

The new burner worked very well and cut the melting time in half or less, compared to using charcoal. It didn't smell at all, and I was very pleased with it's performance. I quickly got the furnace up to temperature, and with the sand mold ready, I poured the first melt using my new burner. After the cube was cast, I chucked it up in my four jaw chuck and faced off all six sides using my lathe. The next step was to create the center post. This started off as 3/4 inch round aluminum stock, I secured one end with the 3 jaw chuck, and the other was center drilled and supported with a dead center mounted in the tailstock. I machined this part, and then center drilled both ends about 1/2 inch deep with a #7 drill bit. The holes were then threaded with a 1/4-20tpi tap.

With the center post finished, I center drilled the base disk and threaded it with the same thread as the post. The cube was next and I drilled straight through the center of two adjacent faces, and halfway through the bottom face. I tapped the holes with the same 1/4-20tpi tap and then used 1 short length of threaded steel rod to attach the base to the centerpost, and another piece of threaded rod to secure the cube to the top of the centerpost.

The four arms started as 1/4 inch round bar about 6 inches long each. I turned a recess on one end, and threaded about 3/8 inch of the other end using the lathe. The quick change gearbox on the old south bend can make just about any standard thread pitch. After finishing the four arms, I threaded them into the cube and VOILA, my project was finally finished.