My interest in hand tools is generally rather limited.  While I admire (and am frequently awed by) the skill of artisans the likes of Roy Underhill (who is arguably the patron saint of human powered woodworking), I rarely find metalworking hand tools to be anything more than quaint when powered alternatives exist. There are exceptions, of course – I still don’t have a bandsaw in the garage, as my hacksaw is far more space efficient and far less expensive (plus, I can bring my bar stock to work and use one of our large cutoff saws). Hand files are almost always more useful than a powered filer, etc. Drills, however, are another matter – you would have to be daft to want to use a hand drill rather than an electric drill. Or so I had thought.

Many years ago I purchased The Machinist’s Bedside Reader series from Guy Lautard. The third volume had a fascinating description of a very old (though at the time, still in production), very simple hand cranked drill. What made the device so interesting was that it was able to drill holes through almost anything thrown at it – steel armor plate, bearing raceways, high speed steel, even plate glass. By hand. The secret to the Cole Drill was a threaded collar below the crank arm that applied massive downward pressure.  “Low speed, high feed” in machining parlance.  Not only that, but the drill was designed in a very modular fashion – the column is nothing more than a piece of pipe or solid rod, as the drill is generally intended to be bolted to whatever it is that you’re trying to make holes in.  Rather than taking your work to a drill press, you take the drill press to your work.  Granted, you can do the same with a portable electric drill, but the Cole has the advantages of rigidity, extreme feed pressure, no electricity needed, and won’t tear your arm off if the bit catches.

As mentioned, the Cole Drill was still being manufactured up until maybe 2005 or so by Cole Tool Mfg.  Despite being ‘old’ tech, they still commanded a rather hefty retail price (presumably limited demand led to the product being discontinued).  While the drills have been routinely available used on Ebay since that time, it seems that prices have been going up – I seem to recall the going price to be around $60 or so a few years back, but now it seems that getting one for under $100 is a bargain.  Admittedly, I have zero use for a Cole Drill.  However, given the ‘field expediency’ of such a tool (drilling holes in a truck frame miles away from a power source being a good example), it’s a tool that I’d really like to be able to put my hands on in a hurry should the need ever arise.

I finally found one on Ebay that wasn’t horribly expensive, owing to a fairly rusty look to it.  However, the seller said that the drill had been purchased new, had been barely used, and had been sitting in an Arizona workshop for the past 30 years or so.  There was a pretty good chance of it cleaning up very nicely, so I bought it.  When it arrived, I eagerly opened up the box to have a look.  ‘Stout’ would be the adjective at the top of the list when attempting to describe the unit.  It was a little larger than expected, and most certainly heavier.

I hosed it down with Gibbs spray (another product touted by Guy Lautard) and set it aside to soak in and and help remove some of the rust. After wiping it off, things looked a bit cleaner, and I took it along to metalworking class so that Frankie could make patterns from it and hopefully bang out a few castings.

Once I had the drill back in my hands, I printed out a few pieces of information from the web and gave them and the drill to my dad as a long-planned present.  Dad is one of the few people I know who has the mechanical ingenuity to use such a tool to its full potential, and will probably have far more opportunities to put it to good use than I ever will.  But at least I now know where I can borrow one in a hurry if I ever need it!

I had been eager to pick up a class again this semester at MATC, and when browsing through the classes this past summer, I figured I’d give the foundry class a try.  We did a little bit of foundry work way back in high school shop class (I’m sure those days are long gone thanks to a lawsuit-happy society), and I’ve seen a number of Rick Chownyk’s backyard metal casting demos during past CNC Workshops.

As it turned out, the class isn’t so much a class as it is an open workshop – most of the students have been taking the class for years (two of them started taking it 28 years ago) as a way to easily make parts for their own projects (one of the fellows is a live steam locomotive enthusiast, and always has something interesting that he’s molding).  Just the sort of environment I was eventually hoping to find!  I quickly found that as with so many opportunities, I really didn’t have a clue as to what I wanted to make – I had signed up with the intent to learn, not to do. Sure, there was a bit of learning, but weeks later, I’ve only been able to figure out a single thing that I’d actually like to cast (a fixture block for machining an upcoming project). As such, every class has started with me pawing through the cabinet of patterns, wondering what to try this week. Not that this hasn’t been helpful – I managed to screw up 2 weeks in a row by focusing so much on forming a good parting line around a complex pattern that I forgot to actually remove the pattern from the mold before the aluminum was poured in. Fortunately, the temperature difference is enough between the aluminum pattern and the molten incoming aluminum that the two didn’t fuse (my tendency to create very narrow runners also helped in this regard).  Here’s a brief photo collection of some of my successes and failures.

After my first successes with anodizing I became a bit more adventurous with techniques. The results weren’t as good, but it was still fun to try. Here’s the rundown of samples.

1) I recall reading somewhere that hot glue worked for a masking agent.  I dyed the piece turquoise, then threw on some stripes of glue from a hot glue gun.  I then dunked the piece into the pickle bath (where the glue actually seemed to do okay as a mask), and then the piece went into the sealing bath (just boiling water).  That may have been my failing – it probably would have been better to try and remove the glue first.  After boiling, the glue’s grip on the aluminum became even more tenacious, and I really didn’t have a chance of removing it.  You can see all the remnants that remain as the whitish areas.

2) I wanted to try doing a droplet of pickling solution onto a piece, hoping for a splash pattern like Edgerton’s legendary high speed photos.  You can barely make out some of the radial splash pattern, but it’s not nearly as marked as I had hoped.

3) I believe I had come across mention on Caswell’s forum about the use of a baby medicine syringe to squirt/spray on rubber cement for a nice chaotic looking splash pattern.  This sounded like a great idea, so I picked up a baby medicine syringe at Toys ‘R’ Us, and gave it a shot.  Try as I might, I simply could not get the cement to ‘spray’ out of the nozzle, no matter how I attempted it.  What happened was a giant loogie of rubber cement blobbed onto the  orange dyed piece.  I shrugged, pickled the piece and threw it into the electric blue dye.  I’m guessing you could probably build a sprayer to get the effect I was trying for – maybe creating a big external mix airbrush that feeds rubber cement rather than paint?

4) An attempt at doing an ‘acid wash’ finish.  After dying, I used a sponge to dab on the pickle solution, then washed it off.

5) Another attempt at the same technique.  You can see the rectangular impressions of the sponge block.  The acid wash technique apparently takes a good deal of practice to master!

6) For this piece, I tried ‘spraying’ on the pickle solution onto an olive drab dyed piece by running my thumb over the head of a toothbrush loaded with the solution.  I let it sit for a while, then dyed it in bronze.  The result is a barely noticeable color combination.

7) I had wanted to try a toner transfer technique I had read about (use a laser printer or copier to print to a piece of transparency, then use an iron to transfer to toner to the piece as a mask).  Frankie had an even better solution, which was to use Press-n-Peel Blue, which is used for etching PCB boards.  We tried this little cupcake guy on a piece of flourescent yellow dyed aluminum, then put in the pickle and dyed bordeaux red.  After wiping off the mask with acetone, the results looked pretty good.

8) I had also read that Sharpie magic markers worked for anodizing, as you could simply draw onto the surface and then seal the anno.  This worked like a champ, although you can’t really scribble over areas to fill them (you can see where strokes overlapped, just like on paper, though the blue marker didn’t really exhibit this).  As an aside, many many years ago in Action Pursuit Games, there was an article on some of Carter Machine’s custom paintguns. One that I recall was called the “Lil’ Pounder” – it was a standard Nelson style gun that had been so heavily machined that it weighed a whopping 16 ounces as a result. The caption had noted that “anodizing pens” has been used to accent some of the milling cuts, and I spent years looking for these mythical “anodizing pens”. In the end, I’m betting that Earon Carter used nothing more than a red Sharpie!

9) This was done simply by using pieces of electrical tape to mask off areas.  With custom vinyl stickers, you can create fairly complex hard-edged patterns.

10) I wanted to try something a little different with this one – specifically, I wanted to have an effect that looked like a sponge pattern had been brushed on.  I dyed the piece in fluorescent yellow, sponged on Krylon matte clear spray, pickled and dyed orange.  I then removed the masking with acetone, and brushed on rubber cement.  After pickling and dying red bordeaux, I got the result shown.  It’s not as convincing as I would have liked – the sponging still shows through the red.

11) This was pretty simple – dyed bronze, sponged on Krylon mask, pickled, and dyed green (I forget which specific shade).

12) Similar to (10), I did a dual sponge and brush effect.  But in this case , I did both the sponge and brush at the same time (violet was the base color, with red bordeaux after pickling).

A few weekends ago was Frankie’s aluminum anodizing class at UWM. I had done a little anodizing during the open session last summer, but that was limited to single colors and I wanted to play with multicolor effects this time around. I’ve purchased a video on DIY anodizing as well as the MoonLite and Caswell anodizing manuals, and have done a lot of web research on the process. While these resources cover the basics of anodizing, they say almost nothing about how to create multicolor effects (the MoonLite manual does discuss a few techniques, however). The more complex techniques appear to be closely guarded secrets, and companies like PK Selective (who actually invented splash anodizing – a pair of good examples are here) are not keen on discussing how finishes such as their legendary ‘thunderstruck‘ anno is created.  Piers Wiggett was a true master, and once he left PK, I seem to recall that their prices jumped noticeably – like magicians, anodizing artists are generally not known for revealing their secrets!

Still, there’s plenty than can be experimented with, and lots of tidbits exist on Caswell’s anodizing forum.  By masking with vinyl tape, you can apply different colors to different areas.  More complex and organic looking masking can be done by applying a fast-drying liquid by brush or sponge.  Parts can be dipped into bleach or a sulfuric acid solution (which is what we used) to bleach the dyed color back out, and by slowly dipping into the dye bath or bleaching bath, you can achieve a color gradient.

Anodizing actually ‘grows’ a very thin (perhaps a thousandth of an inch) layer of oxide out of the base aluminum (unlike plating, in which a dissolved metal is deposited out of solution onto the substrate).  This oxide layer is porous and can absorb certain dyes, hence the basis for the class.  The process of dyeing/masking/bleaching is not unlike reverse glass painting – what you put down first will be ‘on top’, so for complicated patterns, you have to think through the procedure in reverse and plan out your steps in advance.

Here’s some of the samples I made during class – photographs just can’t fully capture the look of an anodized piece, unfortunately:

1) Dyed the piece in fluorescent yellow, then brushed on rubber cement, and did a slow dip in the pickle (the weak sulfuric acid bath we used for bleaching) for a color gradient.  I’m not sure why the base color darkened towards the top.

2) Dyed yellow 4A, then lightly sponged on Krylon clear matte spray finish, pickled and then dyed electric blue.  I wish it was possible to get a resulting blue as vibrant as the pieces look right when you pull them out of the dye – the color is so deep and saturated that it really defies description.

3) This was actually my first attempt at a gold/blue scheme.  I did a sponge mask on the undyed aluminum, then I taped a scrubbing pad to the piece.  I then dripped yellow 4A and blue 4A (thickened with corn starch) through the pad, hoping for a fairly sharp color delineation, but the corn starch didn’t make for a very solid paste, so the colors faded together.  Still an interesting effect, though.

4) Brushed on rubber cement over the undyed metal, and then dripped on electric blue and fluorescent pink (again mixed with corn starch).  I tried a few pieces with fluorescent pink, but just could never get it to take well – it always leached out when I rinsed it after the dye bath.

5) Dyed fluorescent yellow, brushed on rubber cement, then dyed deep red.  I didn’t do an intermediate pickle step, assuming that the red would still overwhelm the yellow, but this didn’t really happen.

6) I sandblasted the top half and dyed the piece turquoise.  I’m not really a big fan of blasted finishes on anodizing, as they’re very rarely done well and generally come out far too coarse (in the paintball gun world, at any rate).  From what I recall hearing, the secret to getting a really nice ‘frosted’ type finish is to fully polish the base metal and then very lightly blast it with glass beads, not sand.

7) I ran the metal through a rolling mill with a piece of plastic mesh bag wrapped around it, which provides a neat reptilian skin look.  Dyed bronze, brushed on rubber cement, pickled and then dyed copper.

8) Dyed turquoise, sponged on Krylon matte clear spray, pickled and then dyed electric blue.

9) Dyed bronze, sponged on Krylon matte clear spray, pickled and then dyed olive drab.  The olive drab dyes very quickly, probably the fastest of any of the colors I used.

10) I used another plastic mesh to provide a surface finish with the rolling mill.  Dyed violet DS, and then I used a cotton swab dipped in pickle to draw on the surface.

11) This one went through the rolling mill with a torn piece of paper – it really didn’t apply a noticeable effect unless you hold the piece up to the light.  Dyed in olive drab, brushed on rubber cement, pickled, then dyed in yellow 4A.

12) This one was a pleasant surprise, as I really wasn’t sure of what I was trying to achieve.  Dyed red bordeaux, brushed on rubber cement, pickled, brushed on another layer of rubber cement, pickled, and dyed yellow 4A.  The colors came out nice and rich.

Last summer I was able to attend only two of the summer metalworking classes offered by the art school at UWM.  With the classes running again this summer, I signed up for two more sessions.  The object of this class was to make a prison shiv letter opener via the techniques of riveting, small fasteners, and slots and tabs. In reality, we stuck with various styles of riveting – I’m quite familiar with fasteners, and slots/tabs are kind of a pain.

First up was just making a sample piece. I liked the simplicity and look of flush rivets vs. raised rivets (especially since if done well, you can carefully sand and polish the surface flat to hide the fact that rivets exist, assuming they are the same material as the base), so I did two flush rivets – one hollow and one solid. With that complete, I could turn my attention to the design of the letter opener. I knew I better keep it simple to have a prayer of completing it in 3 classes, but as usual, I vastly underestimated the time required to complete such a project.

I had come across a picture of a Strider MK1A Tanto knife a few years ago, and really liked the lines of it. Rather than pay $450 for one, I thought it might be fun to try making my own (being a simple tanto grind with paracord grip). I took the photo, dropped it into SolidWorks, and traced around the edge to create a 2D profile. I then ordered some flat ground O-1 oil hardening metal stock in the requisite size, and… …that’s as far as I got. So for this letter opener project, I thought it might be a nice profile to try, though I had to shrink the size a little in order to fit it on the supplied piece of nickel sheet. I then needed scales – while hydraulic pressed scales would have been really neat, I’d have to cut my own die from acrylic block, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it right on the first try. So I went the simple (ha!) route and sketched out rounded scales over the blade profile that while ergonomically unsound, at least looked interesting.

Then I tossed in some locations for rivets into the drawing, and determined coordinates for them. With all the math out of the way, I went to the shop, slapped two pieces of brass sheet onto the nickel sheet secured via strips of carpet tape, and started drilling out locations.  The next night I drew the profiles onto the pieces using the holes for location, and bolted the two brass pieces together so I could shape them identically.  After sawing the nickel and brass to a rough outline, I went at them with the belt sander.  This got me to this point:

I wound up going with more margin on the scales (in order to help cover up some mistakes made along the way), which makes it even less ergonomic than before.  Oh well.  As for the riveting, I thought I’d give the grip even more depth by raising the brass slabs up on standoffs.  This required cutting 20 tiny little pieces of brass tubing, and I was cursing myself for making so many blasted holes in the first place.  Hopefully I can have all the pieces ready for assembly in time for the open workshop, and maybe I’ll even be able to complete it.