Nothing Special, but It Still Made Me Smile - Turning
 

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.

Nothing Special, but It Still Made Me Smile - Turning
 

Throwing away the bits and pieces, and double checking for other interesting
bits and pieces. The bearing hub looks like cast iron with the plastic tub
injected around it. I had to do quite a lot of cutting to free the hub.
That's some tough plastic. If they made regular consumer goods out of it
the economy would collapse because people would never throw anything away.
Figured the whole hub might be worth something if I wanted to spin something
heavy in the future. It has SKF bearings in it. I was going to go ahead
and press them out, but then I realized if I used the hub for anything I
might want just those bearings to go with it.

I gotta say that scrapping is an awful lot of work for what you get out of
it. So far a motor that I may or may not be able to use for a future
project. A piece of steel shaft, a couple bearings, a lump of cast iron,
and a really thin stainless wash tub with a million holes in it. Yeah there
is some cast aluminum, but its pretty cruddy and oxidized. I'd probably use
$3 worth of flux to clean $2 worth of aluminum.