Tag: Thread Cutting

Shop Made Yo-Yos

Over 6 months ago now I finally finished a pair of yo-yos I made for family friends who gave us a wagon for our kids.  The wagon was a very well made wagon and I wanted to make a special gift for the family in return.  I remembered how much I enjoyed yo-yos when I was a kid so I decided to make up one for each of their 2 girls.

The design is very straightforward.  Essentially it is 2 aluminum halves with a tool steel axle.  I chose to make the bearing / bushing out of some Teflon I had in the shop.   You could easily modify the design to use the very common rolling element bearings that so many yo-yos utilize these days.  The trickiest part of the design is sizing the o-ring that sits in each of the halves.  The size and cross sectional area of the o-ring used determines how easily (if at all) the yo-you will return to your hand.  If you remove the o-ring completely the yo-yo may never return to your hand and probably will require what is called a “binding” trick which causes the yo-yo to recoil its string.  Since I wanted these yo-yos to be easy to use for beginners I sized the o-ring so the yo-yo will return with a easy flick of the wrist.

The project made heavy use of the 5C collet chuck that I previously reviewed.  The chuck worked out very well and the soft 5C collets that I used made the job much easier and quicker than it would have taken using the old 4 jaw standby.

I chose to press in 12 pieces of brass on the outer rim for added mass where it is needed most.  Besides making up 48 pieces of brass for 2 yo-yos the process was very easy.  After the brass was pressed in I cut the outside radii with a custom form tool I made up in the shop.  I also made a video of making the form tool.  You can watch that video here:

Besides the custom form tool for the radii, there were a number of other tools I ground up to make this yo-yo.  The project once again highlights the basic home shop need of being able to grind high speed steel tools.  If I had to purchase all the cutting tools I needed for this project the cost would have been significant.

I also did a full build video of the process.  Many thanks to Megan for recording music for the introduction.

If you are interested in the drawings you can download them here:

Body – Rev 01, Bushing – Rev 01, Axle – Rev 01, Yo-Yo – Rev 01.

 

Tool Post Lock Nut and Handle

I decided to start the New Year off by making some small productivity improvements in the shop.  One of the things I find myself constantly doing is reaching for a wrench to tighten the tool post, and also the tailstock (more on this soon!).  I decided to make a tool post lock nut and handle.

From this point on I’m going to try to make drawings for all the projects that I do in Autodesk Fusion.  I’ll also share the CAD data in Fusion once I get that setup.  Below are the drawings for each of the parts:

  1. Tool Post Nut Arm
  2. Tool Post Nut

In the video I talk a little about the taps I primarily purchase and use in the shop.  YG’s spiral flute bottoming machine tap is my go to tap.  The quality on these taps is exceptional, and work well in many materials that you find in the home shop.  They are designed for tapping blind holes, but work equally well in through holes so to keep costs down I try to just purchase these.  Avoid the cheap import sets for thread cutting.  Usually these sets are made from high carbon steel (not high speed steel), and they generally do a poor job in the shop.

If anyone says you can’t tap properly by hand using machine taps, they probably aren’t using good machine taps, or need more practice I guess.  I find that the YG machine taps are easier to use and start than standard hand taps and do a much better job on the thread.  Let them pick out the broken hand tap.