4th Annual BLF/OL Scratch Made Light Contest- Hand Made 10/31 finished

How awesome that there is so much wood in the contest this year. I am looking very much forwards to your build!

hijacking this post for build updates.

8/1

I decided to go a bit further than 5/8” so I started this phase by opening the ends more with a 3/4” step drill bit and then spent several hours using up most of a sheet of 150 sandpaper and a few feet of 2” masking tape to ream the narrow part between the ends. iballing with my iPhone. Here with a 3/4” OD brass tube. I started out with a 3/8” carriage bolt(head removed to fit smooth end in chuck), one layer of tape, and just enough sandpaper to wrap the bolt plus 1” under the tape. Spin it until it’s no longer snug then add another piece of tape under the sandpaper. When the paper gets dull(wood heats up with very little removed) turn the paper end for end to bring the fresh grit out and repeat ad nauseum. At times the wood got too hot to hold but the epoxy sealer stayed stable and never became gummy.

Later that same day… I took the other piece of wood out to the garage and cut out the center with a 1” hole saw. Then I popped the piece out with a chisel keeping some of the plywood attached for stability and switched to a 7/8” hole saw with tape and 150 grit to clean up the inside. Back to the 1” hole saw with enough tape to make it snug and clamped my hack saw blade to the table and oh so carefully nudged the table and blade into range as I pulled the handle on the spinning piece. That’s enough for now on this piece, it’s still ~1 mm bigger than the flat to flat dimension of the brass bezel nut but I need to re saturate it with epoxy sealer before making it closer to final dimension. As the wood gets thinner it tends to swell when saturated. This is the sealer I use.

8/2

Things started out well enough. To make the female threads I need to reduce the ID of 3/4” copper pipe to somewhere close to 19 mm, preferably a but less since the threaded ID of a P60 reflector which has the same 20 x 1mm pitch is ~18.8 mm. I cut a short length of pipe and removed a 5.5 or so mm strip. Then I annealed it on the stove and after a little filing and rolling it slipped right in.
Brazing on that went fine. It needs a small lip on one end and a means to clamp it in a vise on the other that allows the tap to feed through. Seems to be going well. As you can see the tap went skewed even with about 15 mm of extra length on the outer layer to act as a guide. Oh well, I’ll have to start over.

I’ve already remade the tube and liner but using slightly thicker copper sheet instead and a bit more length on the outer tube as well, The first try was a bit large at 19.2 mm. In addition, I’ve cut two strips from an aluminum can that take up the remaining slack between the outer tube and the tap which will hopefully get it started more on axis. I still need to cut the brass nut free from the original one so I can reuse it.

One good piece of news is that my lens arrived today and fits the now squared lip perfectly( lip was sloped before to accommodate the compression sleeve).
Link to more threading

You light building productivity is on a par with mine. You’ll be fine in a couple of weeks. :slight_smile:

Survived a short 6 mi mtb ride this morning so I guess my power of recovery isn’t gone yet. Update in the op.

I’m taking everything you do with that piece of wood on board. :slight_smile:
Nice RBD. The light update that is as well as the quick recovery from the bike ride. Glad you stayed out of intensive care. :stuck_out_tongue:

Me too, 13 hrs after two days of 100+ had me flat out. I pay the extra to live here and avoid that kind of heat but at least it was dry rather than humid. The worst part was running out of water before we finished. We get hot spells causing the fog to form offshore but the high pressure inland kept it there. Don’t need a weatherman to tell me which way the wind blows.

Reaming the tube at the end of the op.

You have magical hands :THUMBS-UP: I would have broken the drill bit around ten times :P

Thanks, I used to break more and still do some but like many things it can be a learned skill. Getting it right to begin with isn’t enough though as each larger bit tends to grab and pull its own path through the wood so you have to keep making adjustments with each one. As long as you stay within the bounds of the finished ID the final reaming will CYA.

August stuff moved to page two(post #32).

I would of thought 19.2mm would have been fine for a 20mm thread.

It worked for awhile but only because the copper was squeezing to form the threads rather than cutting. Looking close I can see two separate ridges instead of one. I’d have been ok with it if the tap had stayed true.

It may have stretched the material as well as slightly cut the thread.

Which thread pitch does your tool have? Also copper is a very nasty material. You need sharp tools and lots of lubrication. It certainly helps if you drown everything in rapeseed oil, at least that’s what I noticed when I worked with it on the lathe.

Looking good RBD :beer:

I’ve got a lot of catch-up to do - everyone seems to have got off to a flying start.

An amazing amount of great work is being done here, thanks for posting every detail.
Watching… :slight_smile:

Hi Fritz, it’s a 20 x 1 mm tap. I used it for the first time last year to make to make a copper added 502b. Had more success then. I’m not worried, or surprised really, just have to try again with another idea to make it better.

Steve, I’ll have to check whether it stretched or not when I cut the brass nut free.

Warning! Random post, deletable to get first post of page 3 if needed. Hopefully cuts down on scrolling to new stuff and speed page loading by spreading image heavy posts over several pages.

Impressive stuff there RBD. Kind of turned the drill press into a mini vertical lathe with that hacksaw blade.

Exactly, my dad has an old “kit” lathe/drill press I used to make the cherry handle for last years prize build but that would have been cheating. Somehow the hack saw fits the notion of hack build much better. I remember some discussions of whether it was the tool or how used that determined qualification but it says drill press ok so I’m drill pressing. There’s still more than enough pure hand and eye in this and coaxing any kind of accuracy out of this concatenation isn’t a high probability but it does let me do things I simply couldn’t hang on to do freehand. Just how close I can get to what I want remains to be seen as there are plenty of places to skew the pooch still.