
Bought a broken lathe for cheap. Sherline 4000, which is nice for small work. 1987 edition though and getting rusty, motor and electronics are shot. Here after some cleanup

Cleaned the motor, fixed brushes, reassembled it.
Speed control board is dead. No blown capacitors or anything visibly wrong. Took ages to find a supplier of a new one.
Old board

New one even has LEDs, welcome to 2019 sherline.

In the old mountings, it fits.

New rocker switch needed too. Took the old one apart and it had worn out the brass internals. Crazy how many times it must have been used

Uh-huh. Easy enough

And it works, after a bit of alignment to make it suitable for fine work like this. 2mm diam pins for the legs out of alu 6061. Would upload a video lathing if there was an easy way to do so...

Legs are going together. 4 pins made... 20 to go. Circlips added to 1.6mm shaft sections.

Which reminds me, leg struts were cnc milled. 1mm alu and 2mm alu sheet,

Made some spares since i need spare leg modules since... they wont survive any hits.

So a lot of the bot will be polycarbonate. The flex and toughness is a good pair with the rigidity of the aluminium. So i started on the frame elements. Turns out breathing the dust is bad... learnt to use a dust mask now...
1st Attempt with polycarb, cuts ok. Needed some hand finishing

Much better result


So the main frame is 3mm polycarb. With supports it should be pretty rigid.



And the other side. Lengthy milling these.. id rather these parts didnt break..

Next lathed up some standoffs for the frame from alu 7075. My late grandad worked building early war planes, I have been clearing his garage and inherited some nice alumimium stock. I think he would have been pleased his aircraft grade metal stash is going to some good use


Ahh 0.5mm tolerance between moving parts is satisfying when it works in the real world as well as CAD

Time to make the weapon bar end tooth. Will need a few of these, as spinner to spinner impacts will chip away at it.
Lengthy ...

process...

is...

lengthy...

But all done.

Now just a load more aluminium parts to make and we will plod along with the second half of this bot! More coming next month when i have made more progress on the parts