RF30 Traverse Power Feed - Part 2 - May 2006


Adding the manual hand wheel

One of the things I wanted to do on this project was to provide a hand wheel on the power feed end of the machine. This was a feature that some commercial power feeds miss out on.
This page covers the hand wheel portion of the project and can be skipped over should the manual hand wheel not be needed. This is only part of the project that had some casting of parts involved.

I realized that after looking at the amount of shaft protruding from the windscreen wiper, that this wasn't enough for the hand wheel to mount on to. To address this, I decided to cut the bearing housing down which would expose more of the shaft. As the wiper motor no longer has the cranking function with high side loads, I figured that reducing the bearing size would be OK. The bearing on this motor I have, has two bushes pressed into the aluminum body with a 5mm gap between each bush. I pressed the outer bush in till the 5mm gap no longer existed and then cut off the excess body material. Here in this first photo is the bush after being pushed in.

This next photo shows the housing being machined off.

The next part of putting the manual hand wheel on was casting the hand wheel. I used the original cast iron hand wheel as a pattern and recasted it in aluminum as I wanted to reduce the amount of weight hanging out on the wiper motor bearings. The hand wheel casting was pretty rough as it was a "rush job" but a little machining didn't take long to clean it up. I clamped the casting into the 3 jaw chuck and center drilled the rough end so that I could apply pressure against the chuck with the tail stock. I found this to work well when the chuck hasn't got much to grip on to.

Ahhh, this looks better.! I machined as much as I could with the live center in place and then gently did the remaining machining without the tail stock pressure.

Here in the parts photo, are the two parts of the manual hand wheel labeled 1 & 2 . The wheel itself(1) and the nut(2). The nut(2) which is a gold color and sitting in the handle in this photo, was made from a 12mm cadmium plated bolt. I cut off most of the threaded section which left me with about 12-14mm of shaft. I machined out the hand wheel so that the 12mm bolt was a nice fit and then drilled and tapped the shaft end of the bolt to fit the wiper motor shaft.

Here is the nut screwed onto the wiper shaft without the hand wheel to show how it fits.

Open the next Power Feed page - Part 3 page.(opens a new window)