I had read recently, somewhere, I think here or in one of the YouTube links
about sharpening tools and blades, that the blue grinder wheel was the one
you wanted. This afternoon, while at Lowes, I saw they had a pretty good
blue wheel, but only in 8" size. No problem, I thinks. I got plenty motors
and arbor adapters around, I'll whip something up.

Funny how grabbing a motor and throwing and adapter on it to mount a 7 buck
wheel can turn into an all evening project.

Seems I did not have the adapter I thought I did, but I did find a 1/2"
reversible motor, and a 12" x 5/8" shaft with pillow block bearings and an
arbor already mounted on one end and enough pulleys to get the job done.
I thought that that would be great, to not have the motor in the way all of
the time, so I set to work.

Found a good piece of 3/4" ply with Formica mounted from a sink cutout, and
thought that that would do nicely for the base. Marked it up, and cut it
and mounted the shaft and motor, and proceeded to mount my wheel. All that
was left to do was plug it in. I did, and the motor cycled in and out of
the starting windings. Then it blew the breaker. There were a few other
things on the same breaker at the time, but still, this was a major problem.

I had used a little bigger pulley on the motor than the shaft, because I
thought it would handle it, and the motor was only a 3450 motor. Plenty of
rpm's to not exceed the max speed of the wheel. Back to the pulley drawer,
and come out with a larger pulley for the shaft.

Rats. The little pulley on the shaft was only a 1/2" pulley, and the shaft
had been turned down. No appropriate pulley in the drawer to deal with
that. Oh, how about putting the pulley between the bearings, then my pulley
would work. OK, that will do. But then the motor will need to be
remounted. OK, whatever.

Disassemble, cut slot in base for pulley to fit through, re-mount motor in
new location, put on pulley, grind a flat in the shaft for the pulley set
screw, reassemble it all, and try it out. Runs nice and smooth, and the
slower rotation is ideal for not burning tools and blades. I like it!

As I stand looking at it, I look at the lonely end of the shaft formerly
occupied by the "too small" pulley. I got to thinking that it would be
pretty cool to mount my wire brush wheel on that, rather than have to swap
it and a cutoff wheel back and forth between another grinder motor I have
set up. So I start rummaging in my bins and come up with an arbor with left
handed threads, which is what I need! My lucky day! And the time of the
job marches on.

The arbor appears to have a 5/8ths inch shaft, so I will have to come up
with a union, or coupler for it to mount it on my 5/8ths shaft. I dig
around and don't come up with anything, so I grab a piece of pipe to drill
out and make my own coupler.

I found out that the new to me, used 18 volt drill I got recently, running
on closer to 20 volts of lithium ion batteries has a hell of a lot of torque
while trying to remove just a little pipe material. It grabbed, and as it
did so, my finger only pushed the trigger harder until the battery came
around and knocked my cheek and my body out of the way. That's gonna leave
a serious mark. (And it did)

OK, I learned how to deal with this problem somewhere. Grab a dremmel tool
and put a cutoff wheel in it, and grind 1 degree negative hook angle on the
bit. Done, and it worked just fine. Go to slip the bored out pipe onto my
arbor shaft and it doesn't fit. What? I checked the drill bit with the
mike before I used it. It was 5/8ths. Get the mike out, and the shaft is
some ******* size, like .658. Crap.

I don't have a metal lathe yet, so now I have to decide whether to chuck it
into the wood lathe and use a very careful angle grinder or drum sander to
take it down to size, or take it to a machine shop. By now, I am almost to
the point where I couldn't decide what to decide, so I hung it up for the
night. I'll probably take it down to an interference fit on my own with my
limited tooling, and do a heat and beat to insure no slop fit, along with
some set screws. It is only going to be holding a wire brush wheel, anyway.
It will be more fun to do it myself, anyway.

So, long story to short conclusion. A half hour job is still not done.

But you know what?

I had a blast! G
--
Jim in NC


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