making blades

I spent Friday making blades for the new pizza cutters. I rough cut these out of 16ga. stainless steel on the bandsaw, and then center drill these and mount them in the lathe against a face plate with a live center butted up against them. Then I true up the outside, cut the bevel on the edge, flip them around and do the same to the other side, and then cut out the center to release the outer blade portion. I then turned down the wheels to match the ID of the blade. Then it's just a matter of de-burring them, sanding and then polishing.

The South Bend lathe's motor croaked right in the middle of things. Luckily I had a 1/3 horse motor that I had dug out of someone's trash. The old motor had been on it's last leg for a while. The bearing had been going out for a while. The thing had gotten noisier and noisier in the last year. I started to take the old motor apart to rebuild it, but I figured I needn't waste time at that moment (I can rebuild it another day). I got the other motor installed and was pleasantly surprised that it worked and even is reversible like the old one, so I still have a reverse on the old lathe (which is handy for cutting threads on the lathe). I didn't know what to think when I got it hooked up because you can't even hear the lather running it's so quiet. I guess I never realized how bad the old motor was.

I spent today working on mating them to the wheels. It's always fun drilling tiny 0-80 holes in these. I worked out a good production method for this though. It seems like once you break through the outer skin of the stainless that is gets a lot easier to drill. I wound up using an endmill to drill them. It was like butter then.