2 Weeks, 1 Post. That's efficency.

My Christmas present to you is a post! I worked on Dec 8th and 15th. On the 8th I made my biggest mistake yet. You may recall that I had two flanges left to weld onto the hydraulic tank. On that faithful day, I welded both into place. Then I tried to screw in their hydraulic fittings. The top flange got a breather cap and the side flange got a male to male adapter:

Breather Cap on Left, Male to Male adaptor on right

That was the plan at least. The side flange went in just as planned. See it here:

The grey is the tank, the teal is weld and the green is the flange itself

The top flange went in like this:

Can you tell what's different? The flange is upside down. I could screw the breather cap in from the inside of the tank but it wouldn't fit from the outside. This was the state of affairs at the end of the 8th.


With a week to think about it, I decided I would skim the surface of the tank with a cutting tool and go back to square one. In the shop on the 15th I tried that and found that my cutting tool was too dull to cut through the weld (which was made of stainless steel). So I switched to old faithful: the boring head.

I would cut out the flange and weld on a new one. Half way through my first pass with the boring head I stopped. I had an idea! This was the situation:

What would you do? I decided to back off the cutting head and clean out the threads which were buggered a bit by the cut I'd just made. After that, the cap fit!

It probably saved me two weeks of recovery work. I hope you like my diagrams, they were fun to make. The whole process may seem clean by my description above. It was actually pretty messy. I got to practice clamping again-- here is my rig:

A really tall clamping arrangement

I finished my machining course, so I won't be working on the Power Cube until the spring semester. During the down time, I may write down my thoughts on why this is worth doing.

Time Card updated.