Draining the dregs - oops!!!

After a quick trip to China, I'm thinking about what to do next. I've ordered some 6082T6 loominum (T stands for tempered) so that I can attempt to CNC machine up some brackets for the Blidgeport CNC conversion. I previously got quite a way along the road in terms of machining them manually but it was bloody slow going and there is still a fair bit to finish off if you look objectively at what I've done so far.

I finished the Z axis bracket in steel. This was the first mechanism I tackled and it came out well. It's pretty complex, as it has to fit with the existing head. I managed to pull it off, although I had to chop it in half to get it in the lathe, then weld it back together afterwards. I hadn't realised it was too big to swing on the Bantam. Next time I would simply(?) CNC mill it out, I'd like to think, possibly even in loominum.

The X and Y axes are simpler but bigger. The largest components are the pulley housings / motor brackets. These are fine in loominum, as the stresses are fairly low and they are pretty big. Gouging them out of large still blocks would be a nightmare - at at least unnecessary.

It seems that loominum is quite a bit easier to machine than steel (if you get the right stuff), which I guess is why the Youtube CNC heroes seem to prefer it to steel. But without lubricant / coolant, it is prone to sticking to the tool, which can be disastrous. So I need to get the coolant situation sorted out. With the pump ready to go, the job of cleaning out the sump has to be finished off.

I've washed out most of the stinky water from the sump now and with only an inch or so depth, the central heating pump can't suck any more out. Once air gets in, it loses the ability to develop any kind of a head. So the simplest thing would be to put a bucket under the inspection hatch, remove the hatch and catch the water in a suitable container. Luckily the machine is sitting on a home-made pallet, so it's about 5-6" off the ground. 

I found some of those flexible plastic "Hippo"-type buckets in Aldi for £3.50, so it's no big problem to cut one down to the correct height. I already had a black one in use (ie filthy after my bilge pumping exploits, so in fact I'll cut it and use the lovely new pink one for rubbish bin duties.

Quick sanity check. I don't like floods, especially when it's oily smelly stuff and we are talking about the workshop floor. Is the cut down bucket going to be big enough to take the remaining crud without overflowing? Let's do some quick sums.

Luckily, when the machines were unloaded onto the driveway back in October 2016, the machine mover chappy managed to partially invert the machine and empty out much of the sump onto his vehicle and the road. Idiot had used 2 long straps rather than 4 short ones. Given that the lifting lugs are at ground level, some way below the centre of gravity, inversion was inevitable. If you can't understand why that would happen, simply don't ever try to move heavy machinery is all I can suggest.

Here they are, innocently waiting to be offloaded:

Oooops. Talk about upshots! Reader's Machines, eh? Fnaaaaar!

Some sort of machine monkey? Bloody lucky it stopped where it did. Nothing hit the ground, no parts broken off, leadscrews bent etc. Could have been a tragic outcome - for the machine if not the oppo. I was at the back of the house at the time, so no idea how close mateyboy came to squashing himself - or indeed "touching cloth" (aka shitting himself).

Safely installed on the workshop pad. Pity about the lack of actual workshop at this stage but it was the best I could do.

Obviously I covered them to try to protect them from the worst of the Winter weather.

All good jolly japes - but back to the sump - this episode gave me an unusual opportunity to view and photograph the bottom of my new (to me) machine. Sounds a bit pervy I know but today it's proved to be pretty handy because now I can make a half decent guestimate of the sump volume.

• From photo, outline of sump is approx 430 x 700mm and the depth of bilge seems to be about 25mm, using a crude dipstick.
• This has an area of around 300,000 mm2.
• There is approx 1/6 of the area not used, so effective area of sump floor is approx 250,000 mm2.
• With a depth of 25mm, that would mean a volume of approx 6,300,000 mm ie about 6.3 litres.
• The cut-off bucket is about 330 mm effective ID at the narrowest point near the base. That's an effective area of around 85,000 mm2.
• If I release the sump into this, it should come up to a depth of around 6300 / 85 (mm) ie about 75mm or 3". That should be OK.
• In other words, the bucket has an area of around 1/3 of the sump. That seems feasible.

What could possibly go wrong? Let's find out!