The Home Machinist!

here you go I used cheap flange bearings, a piece of aluminum bar stock (3/4 x 2) I had on the shelf and some 1 x 2 bar for the cross piece. the 3/4" (5/8?) bolts rest on some brass bearings that allow the bolt to be drawn up tight without binding on the aluminum. the ball bearings are (i beli...

here you go I used cheap flange bearings, a piece of aluminum bar stock (3/4 x 2) I had on the shelf and some 1 x 2 bar for the cross piece. the 3/4" (5/8?) bolts rest on some brass bearings that allow the bolt to be drawn up tight without binding on the aluminum. the ball bearings are (i beli...

Thank you for the responses. I was curious how thin the material was on those and I figured it would be too good to be useful.

I would have thought that as creative as live steamers are, someone would have cut up one of these racks for an engine stand.

This is the rail bender my friend loaned me. It has 2" square tubing to go into the trailer hitch receiver of his truck.

Hello, Has anyone used a personal watercraft stand for an engine stand? If you do a search on them, you can find them for a reasonable price, and they hold around 1,200 - 1,500 lbs. Just don't install the bunks and use channel at 7-5/8" gauge, and a lot of the work would already done when it sh...

As others have noted, the search function within Chaski can be overwhelming and will provide too much data. Using Google and adding "chaski" to the first part of the search results in far better success to find results. Getting back on topic, there have been topics related to this in the ...

Sometimes a Google search works better than the search built into the forum software. Type the following query (without the quotes) into Google and see if you don't get more and/or better results: "rail bender site:chaski.org" -- Russ Thank you for the explanation and I tried it and it st...

I have searched this forum, YouTube, Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc., and found that there is a real lacking of track tamping pictures and videos, unless I am searching the subject incorrectly. There is one video from many years ago at Pennsylvania Live Steamers that I found to be very helpful, an...

When you build a switch with the springs in it to move the points, I.E. a Sprung switch, you need to be careful about how stiff you make your springs. if they are too stiff, then lighter cars will end up derailing instead of moving the points over and running through the switch. If they are too lig...

Thank you for all of the information, it is greatly appreciated. A friend has come to the rescue and loaned us a rail bender saving us time, materials, and effort building one. I was going to build a rail bender, because of all the track I have installed or helped to maintain ever since I was in my ...

Hello, I did a search on this site for making a rail bender and I was surprised to only find nine (9) pages on the subject. Of the nine pages, a lot of them were actually not really about making/modifying/repairing/etc., a rail bender for aluminum 7-1/2/7-1/4" sized rail. It could be operator e...