As some of you might be aware I tore down a washing machine over the weekend
to see what I could salvage.

For personal projects I am always stingy about material. It just irks me to
spend $20 for a piece of metal to make a $10 tool. Anyway except for the
sheet metal there isn't much useable metal in this thing. The biggest piece
after the very light gage stainless steel basket is a piece of cast aluminum
that support the basket and had a steel shaft cast into it for the bearings
it spins on.

At first I was going to pitch it, I kept looking at that steel shaft. Its
a nice hunk of metal to go in my useable scraps bucket. The problem was
this huge piece of badly oxidized cast aluminum wrapped around it. I set it
in the little 12 ton press and decided to see if I could press the shaft out
of the aluminum. Will I managed to shatter the aluminum casting down into a
smaller more manageable nasty lump. LOL. For anybody who is curious I was
right at the limit of the 12ton, and was considering moving it over to the
20 ton when it gave way. After that I was able to cut the aluminum down to
a more manageable nasty lump with the bandsaw.

Still there was a big nasty lump of oxidized and dirty cast aluminum around
the end of the shaft. I had made such progress I hated to give up or just
cut the steel off at the edge of the casting, so I chucked it up in the
PM14x40 lathe and started doing some very interrupted turning with a hand
ground HSS bit. It worked beautifully. I ramped up the speed to 750, and
started taking off upto 0.150 at a time and it just sailed through it. I
could hear the impact, but even with my hand resting on the head of the
lathe I didn't feel the vibration you might expect. I got right down to the
steel core with just a very thin film of aluminum still on the the steel
shaft. It just made me smile to salvage that piece of steel almost
effortlessly with the PM lathe.

As a side note: The aluminum was very definitely cast around the piece of
steel is it filled some keying flats milled into the side of the shaft.
Those did a fantastic job of locking the two pieces together, but what
surprised me is how tenacious the aluminum stuck to the surface of the steel
in general. Right down to the point where I can see the steel through the
aluminum all the way around and the aluminum didn't flake away from the
steel in a single spot. I wonder how they got that bond. If just the heat
was enough or if they used some kind of flux on the steel before casting the
aluminum around it.

Someday that piece of steel (seemed to be pretty soft) is going to get use
for some project and I'll be glad I wasted all those electrons salvaging it.
Now to salvage the bearings.