The above pictures show the finishing stages of the dummy saw bench drive. First three pieces of wood were cut into circles and trimmed to represent a toothed wheel. After several stages of processing they were clamped together and glued. The second picture shows the toothed wheel in place on the shaft. We think this must be pretty much how the thing would have looked.
Among other jobs, Richard made some adjustments to the chains on the dump valve. This included putting adjustable links in so we could make sure the gate dropped level.
With the stone lifted for its winter clean, Richard has adapted the wooden bearing blocks to take a grease nipple, as suggested by one of the comments on this blog. This will make it much easier to keep the shaft lubricated in future, and removes the need for the masses of supposedly grease-soaked sacking that filled the other 3 slots in the bearing casting.
Instead we have cut some complicated wooden pieces to fill the 3 slots, while not bearing directly on the shaft. Here Richard is trying one in place.
Other jobs have included still more cobbling of the yard, and work on the "declutch" lever for the shelling stone, which has not worked since some modifications we made last year.
Good to see you have installed grease nipples, very clever to fit them in the wooden bearings themselves, including the recess for the grease to spread. In fact the idea came from Graham Morrison at Garrabost on the Isle of Lewis, but I fitted grease pipes into the middle of the mat of cloth (Hessian) between the (fixed) wooden blocks. I had just reamed them to suit the stone spindle which I had re-sleeved oversize. Both had worn hour-glass in shape. Don't worry about the notifications, yours don't come to me, but I am now going to click on the 'notify me' box below and see what happens! Try it, and Happy Milling!
ReplyDelete