How to make a spinner

"John Szalay" wrote in message
42...
wrote in

Its really an art...

The metal in the video looked like stainless. How is
aluminum spun without it galling on the tool? Do they use a roller
instead of the bar?

Dan

Depending on the metal being worked, for Aluminum IIRC: we used a type
of animal fat. later we used a Teflon spray to coat the metal .

Stainless and aluminum both work harded, so its best if you can do the
spin in one push or a series of pushes.
there were some spins that we had to place the metal in the oven at a
low heat for a short time to anneal it , to continue.

Copper was the worst. took several annealing cycles if you did'nt get
in one run..

The guy in the video was good.. that was impressive..

at the end of that video, It looked to me, that what he sprayed on
the part was a solvent so that he could clean the the lube off it..

one of the hardest things to learn is to not get in a hurry, if you
push to hard and fast, you end up bunching the metal and crashing.
that where the skill comes in, I know I crashed a lot at first..
its been years since I did any..

We always used metal tools, some with rollers, some with "Spoons"
but notice the size of the handles on the tools in the video.
They are stout, for a reason.. you need that strength on the tool and
on the spinners body..


IIRC, when I saw them making these in production, they used a large
hydraulic tracer lathe, and did them in one shot.

On Sat, 1 Dec 2007 12:09:12 -0800 (PST), "
wrote:

You may find the message cited below to be of interest.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/volksplane/message/23610

-R.S.Hoover


Bob, I tried for this message, but Yahoo insisted I join Vplane first
and told me to wait for an approval.....

Brian Whatcott Altus OK

"Maxwell" wrote in news:CQj4j.11542$KK1.11438

IIRC, when I saw them making these in production, they used a large
hydraulic tracer lathe, and did them in one shot.




Yep, its really hard to find someone to learn the skill.
and IF you can get a machine to do it, the corp. folks love it.

When I first learned, there were only 3 of us in the shop out of
50 that could do it. when I retired, I was the last..
Now the work is done in India...that shop is no more.
the Corp. decided that they could do the work overseas rather
than train and maintain an all-around machine shop...
End of political statement...

wrote

You may find the message cited below to be of interest.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/volksplane/message/23610

Would you mind doing a copy and paste for us?

I don't belong to yahoo groups, and would rather not join.
--
Jim in NC

"John Szalay" wrote in message
42...
"Maxwell" wrote in news:CQj4j.11542$KK1.11438

When I first learned, there were only 3 of us in the shop out of
50 that could do it. when I retired, I was the last..
Now the work is done in India...that shop is no more.
the Corp. decided that they could do the work overseas rather
than train and maintain an all-around machine shop...
End of political statement...

Having only seen it done years ago with all steel tooling, I never actually
tried it myself. But he made it look so easy using much less tooling, I
think I'm going to have to give it a try some day.

On Dec 1, 1:49 pm, "Morgans" wrote:


Would you mind doing a copy and paste for us?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posting only the message I cited would throw things out of context,
which you'd see for yourself if you went there, read the msg and saw
the associated thread. (Which was about using ALUMINUM instead of
fiberglas.) To keep it IN context makes it a bit clumsy to cut & paste
but since this is a fairly small Group, odds are no one will notice,
so here goes.

In January of '07 we were talking about Fuel Tanks over on the
Volksplane Group. Which lead to the following exchange:

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The most difficult part was
developing the cone for the sump...

----------------------------------------------------

Doesn't HAVE to be a cone (although it looks nicer). What it HAS to be
is a SUMP; lowest point of the tank.

Go down to the Goodwill Store, see if they've got an aluminum
sauce-pan the right size. Or even buy one NEW, if you're that sorta
fella :-)

Flat also works. (Think of a pyramid sliced down the middle, top to
bottom.) Get some poster-board or just heavy paper, fool around with
it. (Duct tape is your Friend :-) Aluminum isn't all that tricky --
it wants to work with you. Take your time, do a couple of trial tanks
using flashing, siding or whatever to build up your confidence. You
CAN do it... and it won't look all that bad when you done neither.

Here's the basic idea: Just sitting, moisture will condense inside
your fuel tank. So you want a tank in which any water will flow to
the lowest point, which is where your outlet needs to be located, both
for the parked attitude of the plane and for when it's in normal
flight.

All of your plumbing is bent so there's ALWAYS a 'down-hill' slope
between the tank and the gascolator, which is the physically lowest
point of the fuel system.

That means ANY liquid water in the system ends up in the gascolator,
so's you can drain it out before you go flying. You can define all
that in engineering terms if you want but it's just plain
old-fashioned common sense as practiced by aviators even before we had
airy-nautical engineers :-)

It's kinda like the joke about Orville Wright's flight instructor :-)

Of course, if you ain't got no common sense then you need all them
rules & regulations, agencies & engineers just to protect you against
yourself, even though it can get kinda crowded in in single-place
flying machine. Fortunately for the human race, most folks DO have a
good dose of Common Sense.

-R.S.Hoover

REMEMBER NOW, THE BASIC CONTEXT HAD TO DO WITH ALUMINUM vs FIBERGLAS.

(Making spinners, we usta start with a 6-qt 'Wearever' aluminum sauce
pan. When you got done, you could still see the 'Wearever' logo on
the nose :-)

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That closing paragraph caused Steve Bray to ask:

Chief
Please say a little more about the Wearever spinner.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
-----------------------------------------------------------

Long, long ago in a garage far, far away a fellow combined parts of a
heavy-duty wood-turning lathe with a work bench made out of steel
I-beams. He used it to make 'Moon' hub caps and other spun shapes.

A couple of us crazies talked him into making us some spinners, which
he finally agreed to do after a suitable exchange of valuta. What we
didn't know was that you need a form to spin things on and for a
prop-spinner you needed three of the damn things: The spinner itself,
the base-plate (ie, UNDER the prop) and the spider-plate (ie, OVER the
prop. all of which had to fit AND match the depth of the prop itself,
none of which were equal. (Yeah, there's other ways to do it; this is
the Good Way :-)

The form for the spinner was made of concentric stacks of maple,
glued-up one at a time until we had a beehive about ten inches in
diameter and mebbe 12 inches high. The spinner-guy then mounted it on
a base-plate and turned it to a beautiful curve. He then made a live
center that matched the nose and fitted into the tail-stock of his
spinning machine.

To make a prop-spinner you clamped a piece of dead soft 3003 on the
nose of the maple form, holding it in place with the live center, the
cup of which was also maple.

To form the metal you used an old fashioned screw-driver the size of a
pry-bar -- at least 2 feet long -- the end of which had been heated,
bent into a hook (!) and then polished shinier than a new dime. (He
had a whole rack of the things, each with a different shape on the
end.) You dipped the hook into a can of awful smelling stuff (rancid
lanolin was one of the ingredients) and turned on the machine, which
was powered by a 3hp AC-DC motor belted to the head-stock. Not a
vee-belt, the flat kind.

Instead of a carriage the lathe had a kind of adjustable rail that
could be set-up parallel to the work. The rail had a row of holes in
the top into which the spinner would drop a steel rod about
three-quarters of an inch in diameter and mebbe six inches long, so
that about half the rod -- or pin -- was sticking out.

What happened next is a bit hard to believe but he'd wedge that long
screw-driver against the pin so it acted as a lever with the pin as
the fulcrum, and press the under-side of that greasy, polished hook
against the disk of aluminum... and then LEAN INTO IT, bending the
aluminum disk as it spun around, molding it to the shape of the maple
form.

He didn't do it all at one go. He'd move the pin and adjust the bar
and what-not until he'd smoothed/bent/spun that sheet of aluminum
right up to the face-plate.

It didn't always work -- sometimes the aluminum would tear or crack
where he tried to smooth out a wrinkle, and sometimes it would simply
come out too thin.

He told us to bring him better metal and suggested the aluminum pots,
which worked better than a disk of aluminum 'borrowed' from the 500
Shop at NAS Alameda.

-R.S.Hoover

PS -- Counting back, that was 49 years ago. I may have forgotten some
of the details but I can still smell that greasy stuff :-)