Dumbo The Flying Elephant

[Larry Hill]

12/31/23 starts the 2024 racing season. A lot of work to do before the Gators.

[Larry Hill]

The lathe is finished. Microscope is doing its job. New vee blocks and UK is playing well. All is going in the best direction.

[Lyn Smith]

Originally Posted by Larry Hill

12/31/23 starts the 2024 racing season. A lot of work to do before the Gators.

You can look at it this way Larry. We are all tied for first in the World, and Division points race. LOL

[Larry Hill]

Spent a lot of the day working on tooling to make a few valve train parts. As the old machinist often say “big holes big problems, little holes bigger problems. I’ve made some stuff that almost works, but it’s not like it needs to be. It’s not as bad as the fixture we made to drill a .031 hole in a .021 ring land without hitting the ring land.
We will get’er done.

[Larry Hill]

Tail stock off by . 040” shame on me for not checking it in the beginning. As it stands no harm no foul.

[Frank Castros]

Larry works as hard as anyone in the game.

[Larry Hill]

Using a microscope and a drill index I can figure out what is the size of some of the small radius. If my modification to the parts cause them to break, I at least observed the radius.

[Larry Hill]

I’m really happy with the lathe. Once I got a few items of tooling done we knocked out the 18 parts in first operation quickly.

[Larry Hill]

Talk about no knowing that you need a tool until you get the tool, a microscope is a good example. Modifying the oh so popular Gen 3 Hemi valve train to get it to “fit”. I wanted to observe all of the radii of the parts that needed some trimming. So I find the radius gage set from our crankshaft grinding days and find a few popular Chevy size missing. I must have left them close to the grinding wheel radius dresser when we sold the crank grinder. I figured out what we need to observe and unwrap new tool bits that supposedly have the correct radius, not. The radius was not full it had a point in the middle. It may have been ok to use but if there is very little parts support it’s not good enough.
As i think Dennis Miller would sign off with “ And so it goes”

[Larry Hill]

The loner test fit head got here Friday but being a grandparent was way more important than working on the elephant this past weekend.