The general idea is to hold the wave washer (it’s mashed under the flat washer, honest) above those bumps on the plate holding the mirror and stalk balls. It’s a few millimeters from the end of a ¼ inch brass rod, drilled for the M3 screw, and reduced to 4.5 mm with a parting tool to clear the bumps.
While I was at it, I made two spare mirrors, just to have ’em around:
I should replace the steel clamp plates with a stainless-steel doodad of some sort to eliminate the unsightly rust, but that’s definitely in the nature of fine tuning.
However, it’s worth noting my original, butt-ugly Az-El mounts lasted for all of those nine years, admittedly with adjustments along the way, which is far more than the commercial mountsmaking me unhappy enough to scratch my itch.
Scaling it down for a 10 mm polypropylene ball around the base of the 30 mm inspection mirror’s shaft simplified everything:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – drilled ball test
I’m reasonably sure I couldn’t have bought 100 polypro balls for eight bucks a decade ago, but we’ll never know. Drilling the hole was a complete botch job, about which more later. The shaft came from a spare mirror mount I made up a while ago; a new shaft appears below.
The solid model, like Gaul, is in three parts divided:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – Slic3r
The helmet plate (on the right) has a slight indent more-or-less matching the helmet curvature and gets a layer of good double-stick foam tape. The clamp base (on the left) has a pair of brass inserts epoxied into matching recesses below the M3 clearance holes:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – inserts
A layer of epoxy then sticks the helmet plate in place, with the inserts providing positive alignment:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – plates
The clamp screws pull the inserts against the plastic in the clamp base, so they can’t pull out or through, and the plates give the epoxy enough bonding surface that (I’m pretty sure) they won’t ever come apart.
I turned down a 2 mm brass insert to fit inside the butt end of the mirror shaft and topped it off with a random screw harvested from a dead hard drive:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – assembled – rear view
At the start, it wasn’t obvious the shaft would stay stuck in the ball, so I figured making it impossible to pull out would eliminate the need to find it by the side of the road. As things turned out, the clamp exerts enough force to ensure the shaft ain’t goin’ nowhere, so I’ll plug future shafts with epoxy.
The front side of the clamp looks downright sleek:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – assembled – front view
Well, how about “chunky”?
The weird gray-black highlights are optical effects from clear / natural PETG, rather than embedded grunge; it looks better in person. I should have used retina-burn orange or stylin’ black.
This mount is much smaller than the old one and should, in the event of a crash, not cause much injury. Based on how the running light clamp fractures, I expect the clamp will simply tear out of the base on impact. In the last decade, neither of us has crashed, so I don’t know what the old mount would do.
The clamp is 7 mm thick (front-to-back), set by the M3 washer diameter, with 1.5 mm of ball sticking out on each side. The model has a kerf one thread high (0.25 mm) between the pieces to add clamping force and, with the screws tightened down, moving the ball requires a disturbingly large effort. I added a touch of rosin and that ball straight-up won’t move, which probably means the shaft will bend upon droppage; I have several spare mirrors in stock.
On the other paw, the ball turns smoothly in the clamp and it’s easy to position the shaft as needed: much better than the old Az-El mount!
The inspection mirror hangs from a double ball joint which arrives with a crappy screw + nut. I epoxied the old mirror mount nut in place, but this time around I drilled the plates for a 3 mm stainless SHCS, used a wave washer for a bit of flexible force, and topped it off with a nyloc nut:
Helmet Mirror Ball Mount – mirror joint
I’m unhappy with how it looks and don’t like how the washer hangs in free space between those bumps, so I may eventually turn little brass fittings to even things out. It’s either that or more epoxy.
So far, though, it’s working pretty well and both units meet customer requirements.
The ER-16 and ER-32 collet chucks use an M12×1.75 bolt to snug their MT3 tapers in the Mini-Lathe spindle. As nearly as I could figure, I needed a 190 mm bolt to get enough thread engagement, but the nearest available sizes were either too short or too long.
Fortunately, making round things is what a lathe is all about:
MT3 drawbar – assembled
The aluminum bellyband adds 30 mm to the length and aligns the bolt sections, with the threaded section from a long 5/16-18 bolt inside holding the metric bolt together:
MT3 drawbar – parts
Although I got it right on the first try (!), the bellyband lets me fine-tune the length as needed.
The original dimension doodle and some in-flight updates:
ER Collets – MT3 drawbar bolt – dimension doodles
The fancy brass / bronze washer comes from a battered rod with mushroomed ends. A pair of V-blocks let me cut a chunk off one end with negligible drama:
Bronze Bar Stock – support fixture
It’s clamped firmly to the right block and a few licks with a file knocked off enough of the mushroom on the left end to put it flat(-ish) into the V; the near side of the right block is barely raised off the surface.
Face off the mushroom to get a flat spot for a center drill:
MT3 drawbar – battered bronze rod
Some peaceful turning & boring produces a pretty washer:
MT3 drawbar – washer cutoff
The bore needed a bit of relief to seat the bolt head squarely on the outer surface:
MT3 drawbar – spindle washer
And then It Just Fit™:
MT3 drawbar – installed
Loctite on the inner bolt threads should keep everything together.
Those are three lengths of music wire, slightly bent from their storage roll, held in place with a precision clamp metric micrometer. Given the crudity of the setup, the uncalibrated wire diameter, and my lack of thread-fu, the results came out both close and unconvincing.
The 185 mil “wires” (they’re all allegedly ground rod) will let me cut threads matching things like a Jesus nut; they’re suited for 3 TPI / 8 mm pitch screws. Mostly, wires from the front row will be all I ever need.
The black doodad (the set includes half a dozen for all the wire sizes) fits over the micrometer anvil and holds two wires betwixt anvil and screw, leaving me to manipulate the screw, the third wire, and the micrometer with my remaining hands. Hence the vise holding the micrometer, which is known to be Very Bad Practice.
From the side:
Thread Measuring Wires – overview
All of the smaller wires measure 0.5 mil too thin, which is likely due to my lack of calibrated measurement equipment:
Thread Measuring Wires – scant 24 mil
The few thread pitch diameters I measured also came out slightly too small, again likely due to calibration and screw tolerances.
To forestall link rot, a slightly rearranged version of their tables of wire constants:
Thread Wire Measurement Constants
The lower table has metric thread pitches with the wire sizes in inches.
You measure the distance over the recommended wire (in inches or millimeters, as appropriate), subtract the constant, and get the pitch diameter in the same units. Conversely, add the constant to the desired pitch diameter to get the target over-wire distance, carefully cut the thread until it measures a bit less than that, back up sixty seconds, and cut it spot on.
Verily, it is written: there is no UnDo key (⎌) in machine shop work.
Chuck up a length of 5/8 inch aluminum tube, clean up the end, and poke a thread runout slot into it:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – thread runout
Turn the soon-to-be-thread OD to 14.7 mm, well under the minimum 14.794 mm major thread diameter. I figure it’s better to match the existing not-quite-standard tube threads than to get all fussy about tolerances:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – thread OD
Drill out the tube to 27/64 inch = 0.422 inch = 10.7 mm, a bit larger than the OEM fittings, to easily pass the JST-SM connector I added so I could take the lamp apart:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – drilling bore
Yeah, you’re not supposed to let the swarf build up like that, but it’s hard to stop when you’re getting good chip.
The compound is at 90° to the cross slide, because the DRO housing doesn’t let the compound swivel to the proper angle for thread cutting. I’m just ramming the threader straight into the tube, taking sissy cuts, and hoping for the best.
Kiss the OD with the cutter, set the cross slide DRO to zero, position the cutter just off the end of the tube, close the split nuts around the leadscrew, engage the threading dial at a conspicuous mark:
Mini-Lathe Threading Dial – aligned
The first real pass looked good:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – first thread pass
The runout slot is 1/16 inch = 1.6 mm wide and I’m running the lathe dead slow, so there’s plenty of time to punch the STOP button as the cutter enters the slot and let the spindle coast down. Flip the switch to REVERSE, crank the cross slide out a turn (1 mm with 0.3 mm of crank backlash), run the cutter back to the starting point, crank the cross slide in, and iterate until the fitting screws into one of the OEM lamp tubes:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – final thread
The 5/8 inch tube is just a smidge too small for the copper fitting, so knurl the fitting to enlarge the OD slightly more than a smidge:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – knurled
Break the knurl edges, part off the fitting, clean up the new end, and do it all over again:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – threaded adapters
The knurls got filed down to an exact slip fit in the copper elbow and will eventually be epoxied in place.
The cut-off tube on the lamp head also needs internal threads, so bore out the interior to flatten the weld seam:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – cleaning tube bore
No pix of the threading, but you have the general idea; the tube wall is a scant 0.6 mm thick, so this isn’t the place for full-spec threads. I stopped when the OEM tube screwed in place.
Apart from the hideous solder job, it came together pretty well:
Floor Lamp – tube fitting – unpainted
It’s much more stable than Kapton-wrapped tubes jammed into a bare copper fitting, although that’s not saying much.
