Saturday 11 May 2013

It may be boring to you but it is rivetting to me :-) (it's my living)

In my day job I am a bulk handling engineer and we use steel backed, wear resistant rubber to line chutes, hoppers and trucks. Fixing this is not easy and we often need to counterbore up to 120mm into the rubber at 60mm dia.

After much struggle and smoke I came across a 1930's engineering manual which suggested some cutting and clearance angles for machining rubber. I made up a boring bar with a mandrel guide to run in a pre-drilled pilot hole (which would later take the fixing)  and ground up some cutters from HSS steel lathe blanks.

The results speak for themselves, clean hole and shaving, rather than smoke and gunge.





A classic example of not re-inventing the wheel.

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