Here are some closeups of the broken bearing from the side where it opened up:

Note the broken cage and missing balls. No idea where they went:

The shaft was pitted beneath the bearing. At first I thought it was damage, and it may be, but I’m leaning a bit toward it being a deliberate roughing-up of the surface to help hold the bearing in place through its high-vibe activities. That’s the story I’m sticking with. let me know if you think otherwise.

I think if the bearing itself caused pitting, it would be more ‘smeared’ around the shaft. This doesn’t look ground in. It looks like someone took a pin and a hammer and banged in some dents somewhat evenly around the shaft before sliding on the bearing. I didn’t note any ground-up metal falling out from the bearing when I pulled it free with the gear puller. Again, who knows?

Here’s a blurry shot with my finger for scale:

The current, full gallery of pics in this mini saga is here.

It didn’t get any easier once inside, and I’d say it even got harder. I’ll save you all of that, but suffice it to say that after giving up on it for 3 weeks (I can’t believe how fast time is flying by this year), I spent the last 2 days on it and finally found the issue. As I said, Jimi_C got it right in my last post. The bearing was blown out on one end of the knife wheel.

Here’s the good bearing on the knife wheel:

And here’s the one that blew out. Note that it’s all streaked with black, and the cap is popped out. You can see the retaining ring inside the cap, too:

Next up, I have to figure out how to pull it. I’ve already used my gear puller on several pieces to get in this far, but it’s about 3/16” too short to reach the bearing with that long rod sticking through it. Also, because it’s a 2-arm puller, instead of a 3-arm, one sits nicely in a flat, and the other would bang into one of the knife edges, if it could reach. I’m not super keen on removing the knives just yet. I tried to torque one of the hex screws out, and couldn’t get it to budge. There are a bunch of them on each knife, and these were lined up very nicely and still sharp enough. I just want to pull that bearing, pop a new one on, and probably spend 2 days fighting it all back together. That reminds me. I’m going to have to find a new bearing somewhere, too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Special

The manufacturing subsection at the link is a fun read for woodworkers and guitar enthusiasts alike.

But enough of that. I did work up enough motivation today to try to make a little oak grip device I’ve wanted to make for a few weeks now. I found a piece of scrap thicker than the usual 3/4” stuff of which I have tons, cut it into 2 lengths, then spent about 20 minutes going at the 6” Jet jointer with derusting agent, steel wool, and finally applying a coat of Johnson’s paste wax, now that I have some. It’s been half a year since I’ve used the jointer, and it’s just been holding tall stacks of drying turning blanks, as I had no other surfaces upon which to set them. I moved them finally to a temporary place outside. I’m trying to push to finally have a shop [albeit, tiny] wherein all tools are accessible at all times. Piles really get in the way and kill my motivation to work on projects even more. It’s virtually impossible to get anything accomplished when literally every tool and worksurface has a tall pile of junk on it, and there’s literally nowhere to move any of it to in such a tiny garage – not until I build some storage solutions that will hold it all up on walls or hanging from rafters (which I’ve begun to do). Leaving that aside for now, the paste wax really does make a difference on the jointer. Wipe it on, let it dry a moment, buff it off with paper towels, and wood slides across it like an air-hockey puck. It should help prevent more rust, too. The jointer worked great, and a few minutes later the narrow oak pieces had a perfectly flat side.

The planer was a different story. I noticed a change in its sound early this year when I was using it on some shelving. It started to sound like it was fighting just to spin, and instead of winding down when I’d turn it off, it would brake very quickly. It seemed like something was jammed, but I could never find anything. I still worry about it, so today I had a more forensic search, and still found nothing. Unplugged, turning it by hand, I did find locations where it felt like the rotation was sticking. I couldn’t figure out why, and it’s a carnival of unremovable walls in there, so I couldn’t get to the root problem. I just went with it, hoping the tight spots were magnetic things involving the motor. It still sounded rough as it had earlier this year, but I managed to plane the two oak pieces down to 1” thickness in several passes. I was going to make one more pass (they were actually 1-1/128” thick) to get them to size, but the whole planer jammed before I could insert the pieces. I jumped back and kicked the huge E-OFF panel with my foot. I really hate the noise and dangerous feeling of that machine, and having it jam, making a squealing rubber sound (the belt) really shook me. As my heart slowed back down, I unplugged it and set about to do a full autopsy. I’ve determined that this is nearly impossible.

This has to be the most vault-like tool ever made. The 4 mount holes are nearly impossible to get to, with literally 1/16” clearance in certain directions laterally, and maybe 3/4” vertically on some. You really can’t get tools in there. Trying to remove the sideways hinge bolts that hold the tables on showed me that there isn’t clearance for even the short end of a standard allen wrench. There’s cast aluminum in your way everywhere. I had to go in partially at a diagonal, slipping out with each attempt just to get a little looseness in the screw, then just use my fingertips to undo them the rest of the way. The panels on the sides don’t come off. There are screws I found way up inside, but there’s no way to get a screwdriver to them. I can actually touch the screwdriver head to the screw heads through the handle holes from the outside, but only at about a 45° angle, not enough to engage them. If I could remove them, I’d then have to go through a host of other screws to disassemble everything, including the vertical rods that hold the adjustable height head to be able to get under it. I’d worry about screwing up the accuracy across the 4 posts doing that. The motor is molded in entirely. I can’t find any way to remove it. It’s not a free motor bolted in place. It’s like it’s part of the entire carcass. The chains and gearbox are tucked behind several walls that simply can’t be removed, so I can only peer into a slit with one eye and a flashlight. The bottom of the machine is all solid cast aluminum – no ports in, a fact which I found out after fighting out those tight-clearance mount bolts I mentioned. Wasted [huge] effort. A half hour to remove 4 bolts is absurd, Craftsman.

When you lift the lid on the top to see in, it only goes up about 30° before it bangs into the rest of the machine, so I had to find and disassemble its hinges, which sent 2 small pieces of metal falling into the machine. I managed to fish them out eventually. I can’t imagine that this thing wasn’t designed to make it really hard to self-service, either to avoid people hurting themselves and suing, or to ensure the need to hand it over and pay for maintenance, because it’s like a bank vault in a heist movie. I cannot get inside this thing after hours of vigorously trying. I’m nearly ready to search ebay for a stethoscope so I can try to figure out what’s going on in there. I cranked it to the top, which gave me about 5” of clearance underneath to fit my hands and fight out screws with an allen key, which sent springs I didn’t know were in there shooting all over (sigh…). I can’t take the belt off. It’s tight as hell, and the grooved pulleys do not have a looseness adjustment. It would appear (to my one eye with a keychain flashlight held just beneath it, both peering in through a crack in the side of the machine) that the belt must simply be pried off of the fixed wheels, but there’s no way to develop that leverage while blind and reaching through a tiny opening with my fingertips. I want to see if it’s the blade roller or the motor that’s frozen, but I won’t know until I can free that belt, which btw burned a bit, sending a lot of black rubber powder around that area when it jammed, before I could hit the E-OFF.

Right now it’s laying on its back on the shop floor, piles of unhelpfully disassembled pieces around it and on the workbench, its rollers (and their freed springs) sprawling across its insides, unattached, with the blade cylinder still frozen completely. I tried sticking a hex key in one of the screws that holds the visible blade [of the 3] in place to use as a lever to turn the wheel, and it is frozen solid. It doesn’t even wiggle. It’s like it’s part of the cast housing. I have a feeling this is all I’m going to be working on tomorrow, and I’m hoping that unlike my ancient Apple Performa 6400 PowerPC with its completely cemented on top access panel, I won’t resort to drills and dremel, destroying the planer’s plastic side panels in hopes of finding some way inside the monolith.

Or so we thought.

Looks like it’s finally trickled up, or down, or sideways, and as such, we had The Meeting today. While not officially laid off, I’m on ‘forced vacation’ starting tomorrow morning. The good news is that I don’t have to get up early! The bad news is that we’re waiting on a deal with another company before we can all come back. These kinds of things are notoriously painful and slow. There’s a lot of wishy-washy back-and-forth when trying to get a game started, or in this case, finished. We were told that they “don’t want to cancel it,” but there’s a lot of negotiating still going on. Meanwhile, the bosses – who are really great guys – have tried every avenue they could imagine – old contacts, cell phone games, 1-off stuff we could all do separately, like the script I alone wrote for another company earlier this year, and of course, subcontracted work for larger games being made elsewhere – a usual savior for us. Unfortunately, large companies are all saying the same thing – the recession has them fighting just to feed the mouths in their own companies.

There are 40 in our employ, and with one side job going still, only 5 will be coming in to work on that, and I’m not on that project. I do have 19 vacation days saved up, and will be paid for them as the days off add up, but after that I’m unpaid until we get work. The bosses gave the other company an ultimatum – we must know where we stand by the 15th of October. That’s sort of the cut-off date., but if we get the greenlight to continue tomorrow, we’ll be back to work on Friday. It’s all up in the air. It’s looking like at the very least, some layoffs will unfortunately be in order. The other company hasn’t even paid us for all the work we’ve done up until now, so we’re robbing our own coffers to pay ourselves for that for the time being. Fortunately, I’m one of about 9 leads, and the bosses privately told us that they will consider us last during layoffs. This isn’t really favoritism, though. Mostly it’s just seniority, and our knowing how the bulk of our programs and processes work. Small comfort, though. I’d hate to lose any of us. It’s a great group, and the end of the day was filled with hugs, well-wishes, and scribblings down of email addresses so we could all stay in touch in the interim, or in case that’s it for the company.

Meanwhile, I have some unexpected free time. Sleeping late, cleaning the workshop “for realz,” sawing up huge Eucalyptus logs, finally conquering The Ebay Pile (most of which isn’t even worth selling anymore – anyone need a 3” thick book on Visual Basic 6.0 from half a decade ago? How about two of ‘em? ;) – it’s all queued up, and for that much I am excited. I do wish I had no money worries so I could go buy all the lumber I need for the half dozen or so projects I really want to build – organizers, wood storage, cabinetry, shelving, etc. Plywood is pricey! I’ve had this happen once before in about 2003, free after we were all let go at the end of months of hard work at a company, trying to enjoy the time, worrying alongside that about finding new work. I’m fine, though. I have a good amount saved up in several different areas. However, with the incredibly high cost of living here in LA, it really isn’t as much as it seems. You can scale things for yourself by noting that a 1-story, 2-bedroom, 1-bath house of about 800-900 sq. ft. on a sub-1-acre lot, with a 1-car, detached garage, all built in and negligibly maintained since 1924 currently goes for – starting – about $650k, rents for about $2500/mo, no A/C. It’s crazy times.

Anyway, good luck to us all. Apparently none of us is safe from this economical beast.

Obviously, no large through-cuts, so no very-wide slabs, but if you need to turn a big pile of pine, or a very huge tree into dimensioned lumber, it seems these are designed to be quickly set to swing and slide to make those cuts in 2 fast passes with a swing of the large lever between each pass. Push it forward, pull the lever, pull it back, and you have a dimensioned plank. I think I saw some 4×6s at the end of that second video, but it looks like the larger ones could make at least up to 8×8 beams.

There’s a good write-up on these saws by Peterson Sawmills here – the link at the end of the first paragraph goes to a PDF of the steps taken to saw out boards. The other name I keep seeing is Lucas, and their page on these saws is here.

One final late-entry – I found another video by Peterson of them milling a log into lumber in under 10 minutes. They really get going at about the 1/3rd mark in the video, and they have a bunch of other videos under their account that obviously I will be digging through next :)

Edit: Timberline has a version that makes both cuts in a single pass, using a secondary ‘edger’ blade pair, with several other little clever enhancements:

I watch the wood chips pile up on his left arm, just as they do for me here in my own present time. I wince sympathetically when his hook tool catches at 6:08. I note the injuries on at lest 3 of his fingertips, dark marks around his cuticles. With some small amount of introspection, I realize he’s a much snappier dresser than I. Also, his lathe is bigger, and he has a more complete set of tools.

Wait… what was that? Was that jealousy? I think I need to get me one of those hats.

I took a week’s hiatus – no motivation – and upon returning to the garage (last Sunday), I found this:

Note it goes right to the pith, as every check I’ve seen in any log, branch, or twig in which I’ve noticed any checking does. This is why so many people remove the pith entirely from their blanks, and why pith-in end-grain turnings can be a bit of a craps shoot.

Note that this was completely green lumber, and turning this thing all the way down, instead of a mere 2” may have helped , as it would have effectively removed the pith over a much greater length, but still… The other probability here is that because this was a branch, and didn’t grow straight up and down, it probably had internal stresses that originally helped it counteract gravity.

Here’s the bottom – note that the check finds the pith again on this side, and there’s a second one, too, which is very common in checking logs:

And this is the part I turned away after realizing it was just way too long. This was sitting on my router table, and checked the same way, right from the pith out:

With the checking, deep, fuzzy tearout which is really hard to manage, and rampant mold control issues, you begin to see why I have such a hard time finding any turnings – or anything – made out of Ficus wood online.

Anyone need about a half cord of this stuff? ;)

A piece of heavy, hard bark about 3”x5”, and around 3/16” thick smacked me really hard in the face. I was wearing a polycarbonate full-face shield from Home Depot, though, and was saved. I’d say it was moving over 50MPH, based on the force – basically the speed of a decent overhand pitch. It could have been bad. It was dead center, right over my nose and eyes, but it’s hard to say where it would have hit without the face shield. Maybe I’d lose a tooth, or get an eye all cut up or punctured, or maybe just a bloody nose, but it would’ve hurt pretty badly. As it was, it did knock my head back a few inches, and sent me tripping back a few feet. I was also dazed for a few seconds, completely unsure of what had happened. There had been no warning. Just suddenly a loud crack, and a glimpse of something black and rectangular occluding my view before I went windmilling backwards.

This comes on the heels of a similar event days prior that sent a piece of bark flying up the surface of the turning tool and into my thumb. Felt like I hit my thumb with a hammer. This turning can be dangerous stuff. The face shield worked, though. I was entirely unharmed, and after shaking it off, I went back in and finished up the work.

SAFETY FIRST