Today I got some time to work on the Governor. This is just a dummy part – made to look cool. Not sure I succeeded in the ‘cool’ part, but I will claim victory over having it done!
One of the things I was most worried about with this was how to drill little holes in 1/8” brass balls.
I’ve seem other people make a special pot chuck, or create other holding mechanisms, but I decided to try my 1/8” M16 collet. Like so:
It seemed to hold well enough to make a hole, and it was even pretty close to on center! So I made me 3 of those.
Now that I knew I could drill the balls, I moved on to the main body. This was made form some 1/4" brass bar stock. The plans show some cool curvy looking body and I tried to emulate that. I used a tiny parting tool to put some marks in specific locations, then used some small files to shape it. Here’s after marking important spots with the parting tool:
And this shot is after dong the basic shaping, then using the parting tool to take down the upper section.
Following that, I made the dummy pulley which would ostensibly be used to make the governor go round and round. I used a 60
o threading tool to make the groove in the pulley.
Then I carved the pulley shaft in the same part. I could have drilled a hole in the pulley and used 1/16” brass rod for the shaft, but I chose to do it this way so I’d have fewer parts to assemble later. And its only 1/4" brass, so its not like I’m wasting that much brass.
Here are all the parts that will go into the governor. The connecting rods for the governor balls are some of the little brass nails (Rudy calls them escutcheon pins) that I have been using for rivets.
Next, I drilled a hole in the body to accept the pully shaft.
Then holes in the top to attach the governor balls.
And here’s the governor assembled. I’ll have to do some clean-up after the Loktite sets.
Well, that’s it for today. That Governor took a lot longer than it deserves but there were lots of little pieces to it.
Thanks for looking in!
Kim