On 2010-08-15, Pete C. wrote:

Ignoramus30661 wrote:

On 2010-08-14, Jim Wilkins wrote:
On Aug 13, 8:46?pm, "Pete C." wrote:
RogerN wrote:

I've been considering making some home shop machines that seem cost
effective to make (you can make them cheaper than you can buy them).
These include:
slip roll
bead roll
knife makers grinder
line boring bar
break
English wheel
planishing hammer
...

Machines that can be made with a few parts or a few weldments that cost very
little but do the job. ?For the knife makers grinder couldn't you grind a
polyurethane caster wheel on a lathe for the contact wheel. ?Maybe we could
do some team effort and perhaps Iggy could make some parts on his CNC mill
that would take him 5 minutes but take a half hour or more on a manual
machine. ?My lathe could make rolls for a bead roller, but they could be
made on a manual lathe pretty easily also. ?Anyway, it seems HSM'ers should
be able to make thousands of dollars worth of metal working equipment for
$0.10 on the dollar without much effort, especially if they utilize others
that have specialized equipment to make the difficult parts.

RogerN

Sorry, Harbor Freight beat you to it on a number of those such as the
rolls, break, english wheel, planishing hammer, etc. You definitely
can't build them for less unless you have a source of free raw
materials. They may not be quite perfect, but they are decent and can be
improved.

I'll build machines for fun
http://picasaweb.google.com/KB1DAL/H...53242652915618
but generally have to agree with the others here. Even if the steel is
already on my scrap pile the amount of trial-and-error labor involved
in a custom prototype is so high that it's effectively at less than
minimum wage. For that sawmill I had to buy new components for most of
the transmission and spent more on them than the whole rest of the
machine.

I will try to make a pig roaster, but I am under no illusion that it
will be dirt cheap. If I can find a bunch of sheet metal cheap, it wil
be better. Right now I do not have much of it in larer pieces (I have
some 12x12 pieces).

i

When you build something like that, it isn't to save money (unless you
own a scrapyard), it is to both learn, and to build one that is better
in some way than the commercially available item.

In my case, it will be to fit my environment better, to be more
portable.

i