Hello again, everyone!
I had just about finished getting organized with my shed after having moved more than 1000 miles from Arizona into the Idaho Panhandle, and established a daily routine that allows me about 12 hours per week of activity with respect to jewelry making which I could count on.
Yavanna is also happy having just finished planting some flowers in the front and getting the interior cupboards of the house more to her liking. And Little One is having the time of her life in 2nd grade, going even so far as to experiment with worm farms and slug ranches with her classmates during recess!
I had done some things since last post… like making a dedicated wet alcove so that I could slab, cab, cut, and polish to my heart’s content without making an incredible mess all over my shed floor as a consequence.
But since I had the wet alcove made, I had to figure out just how I was going to use it. It took me a little while… To begin the story I have to take you back to more than a year ago, when I was living in Eastern Arizona.
I had made a few trips to Albuquerque to take courses toward a possible doctorate in computer science, but that didn’t pan out because the professor no longer seemed interested in my research topic and there were no other professors willing to pick it up.
Even so, during one of those trips I had received from Freecycle a broken down Diazo machine. This is a mechanism for making duplicates of blue prints. I had a very fun time taking it apart, but the real prize was a working 117 volt fluid pump complete with tubing.
As a beginning lapidary I knew that I was in deperate need of such a beastie, but I didn’t have the room to use it properly in my drafty steel 8 X 12 shed. And I had bigger fish to fry, such as obtaining an understanding of the basics of forging and annealing fine silver for the crosses I made last Christmas! But as this Christmas was coming up, in my airtight double-decker 12 X 16 shed I finally had some time to have some fun with the fluid pump, with a little help from a child’s toy bench I had picked up a swap meet.
Now, the basic idea of wet alcoves is that the wet stuff stays inside, and the stuff which absolutely must remain dry (such as motors and electrical cords) stays outside. I therefore made a stand for my pump on the outside right of the alcove in a place well shielded from water spray, then drilled a couple holes in the right hand wall of the alcove to admit hoses for water in and water out.
Naturally, I used the child’s toy bench as a support for various water lubricated lapidary tools, with a tank for fresh water placed underneath as the source for water in to the motor. I then slapped together, out of wood and corner braces, a support for a water drip fed by the water out.
And so now, you have the background to this episode’s adventure… Which begins with a slab of opalite which I had really, really wanted to cut, but I was afraid it was just too large for my poor little Inland Swap-Top trim saw.
Slab of opalite that is normally too large for Inland tools.
However, having a continous drip feed coming from a much larger water source than the gravity operated drip tank, with a little bit of duct tape in the right place for applying the water directly on the saw edge, rather than using the saw cover to route water into the rock to be cut, completely changed the rules of the game:
(Helpful hint… The Inland swap top is misdesigned in such a way as to rotate the blade towards you, throwing at you a delightfully chilly and gritty water spray as you attempt to feed rock into the blade in a push-away motion. I found it considerably more pleasant to operate the saw backwards, that is, turn it around so that the electrical cord faces you, and feed the rock into the saw by pulling into the blade towards you. Now, if only Inland could see fit to have a reverse spin switch on the motor… sigh…)
Inland swaptop trim saw rerigged as mini slab saw.
Even so, adding the drip feed helped me to really be able to place a fair amount of pressure on the trim saw blade. It was still an effort to cut apart the opalite into chunks that I could handle, but now a far more pleasant effort:
Cutting the opalite into slabs.
Within a half hour, I was able to cut into the opalite to expose slices of a nice bilaterally symmetrical pattern, very nice for possible earrings once polished!
A pair of opalite slabs, possible freeforms for earrings.
But wait, there’s more! Remember the inlayers’ lathe I attempted to make from a Sears 12 inch wood lathe? Well, it wasn’t really working out for me the way it was because it simply wasn’t waterproofed. So, I decided to rebuild the lathe into a more waterproof configuration.
I had no trouble removing the headstock and the motor from the housing. I re-mounted the motor and cord on the right hand side of the wet alcove, on the outside, so that the shaft projected through the plywood wall of the alcove. I re-mounted the headstock onto the toy bench.
I had some trouble with the cast aluminum pulley being partially hollow and therefore unable to fit onto the remaining portion of the motor shaft that had not been covered by the plywood, but that was easily enough fixed by splitting it into two narrower pulleys with the aid of Mister Ryobi, then drilling and retapping a new set screw hole for the smaller pulley.
I then laid the drive belt between the pulleys again, added another mount for drip feed, and there you have it: instant wet lathe!
Wood lathe headstock repurposed as wet lathe.
The wet lathe works fantasically as a stone turner. Any kind of abrasive tools will work. Flex-shaft bits work great when mounted on the flex-shaft and turning so as to expose fresh abrasive at every possible moment. Do go gently, however, for best results. So does emery boards, abrasive sticks, and wet-or-dry sandpaper, operated as chisels.
I quickly worked out a sequence of grits from 150 to 2000 to shape a nearly square piece of marble I had epoxied onto a dop stick as a test piece for practicing cabbing, into a nicely polished cabochon in just under ten minutes.
Sawing the cabochon off at the correct height took judicious application of an abrasive cut off-wheel operated from a flex shaft, which is something you simply cannot do with a flat flap or a pixie!
Marble cabochon, polished done in minutes using wet lathe.
Too bad my camera isn’t better, the picture hardly does justice to the results.
Happy Turkey Day,
Aulë
