Ok, nothing special. A buddy of mine had a broken plastic bushing in the
top of his seat pedestal on his bass boat.

I took a piece of aluminum stock and bored it out to .500 on the cheap mill
drill with my cheap chinese (didn't know that when I ordered it as it came
from Chicago) 5" vise holding the round stock nice and straight. Then I
squared off the face where I did a lousy job of cutting off the stiock to
begin with.

Then I the a 1/2" bolt in the Harbor Fright mini lathe and made the head
nice and round. Then I turned it around and center drilled the other end.
This made a nice arbor for the piece of aluminum stock. I turned it to
round and to shape between centers. Then back on the mill / drill and bored
it out to 3/4 for his seat base.

It was a perfect mallet (press) fit into the tube. The seat base dropped
right in.

What I found particularly satisfying is I just did it. Didn't have to stop
and think about a single step.

"James Waldby" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:32:32 -0700, Bob La Londe wrote:
Ok, nothing special. A buddy of mine had a broken plastic bushing in
the top of his seat pedestal on his bass boat.

I took a piece of aluminum stock and bored it out to .500 on the cheap
mill drill with my cheap chinese (didn't know that when I ordered it as
it came from Chicago) 5" vise holding the round stock nice and straight.
[...]
Then [...] made a nice arbor for the piece of aluminum stock. I turned
it to round and to shape between centers. Then back on the mill / drill
and bored it out to 3/4 for his seat base.

It was a perfect mallet (press) fit into the tube. The seat base
dropped right in.

What I found particularly satisfying is I just did it. Didn't have to
stop and think about a single step.

I modified half-a-dozen wheel-mounting parts (shoulder bolts, carriage
bolts, axle spacers) yesterday, and had to stop and think about a couple
of steps. I needed to attach a positioning lever to a wheel strut, with
less than an eighth inch of clearance for bolt heads. I decided to thin
the heads of carriage bolts rather than of hex-head bolts; which was easy
to do. The part I had to think about was how to round the corners of the
short square section under the heads of the bolts so that they would seat
better. There was interference between lathe tool and chuck jaws, lathe
tool and bolt head, etc., depending on whether I chucked the head or the
stem of the bolt. Ended up using a parting blade for this step, which
worked fine.


I've tried a parting blade a couple times for turning operations, and I
learned that the blade makes a really neat tone when it pops out of the
holder.

On Mon, 17 Jan 2011 19:43:52 -0700, Bob La Londe wrote:
"James Waldby" wrote ...
On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:32:32 -0700, Bob La Londe wrote:
Ok, nothing special. A buddy of mine had a broken plastic bushing in
the top of his seat pedestal on his bass boat.
[...]
I modified half-a-dozen wheel-mounting parts (shoulder bolts, carriage
bolts, axle spacers) yesterday, and had to stop and think about a
couple of steps. I needed to attach a positioning lever to a wheel
strut, with less than an eighth inch of clearance for bolt heads. I
decided to thin the heads of carriage bolts rather than of hex-head
bolts; which was easy to do. The part I had to think about was how to
round the corners of the short square section under the heads of the
bolts so that they would seat better. There was interference between
lathe tool and chuck jaws, lathe tool and bolt head, etc., depending on
whether I chucked the head or the stem of the bolt. Ended up using a
parting blade for this step, which worked fine.


I've tried a parting blade a couple times for turning operations, and I
learned that the blade makes a really neat tone when it pops out of the
holder.

I haven't tried moving the compound with parting blade engaged -- never
occurred to me to try that -- so I haven't heard that "really neat tone".
What I did was move the blade +Y-Y+X 3 times and was done without incident.

--
jiw