Finishing the Flywheel
The flywheel was a bit tipsy, but I straightened it some, and then trued it up on the mandrel which is still in the lathe. Here I faced the side.
Here I'm straightening up inside the rim. At this point I noticed that the spokes are just a little wobbly. Somehow they got a bit out of square with the hub. For now I left that problem as-is.
Here I'm turning the outside of the rim. I decided to try my boring bar. This worked well, although I didn't have one for the right direction so I spun the lathe backwards and ran the bar upside down. It didn't seem to care about gravity
. You can see I'm taking a bit of wobble out of the surface. Almost done.
A little touch-up on the hub since everything is concentric now. May as well get all the bits aligned. I had to take off about 10 thousandths, and I remembered to remove the setscrew! Note that the rim got quite a bit thinner...but I like the look.
And there it is....
I decided to leave the wobble in the spokes for now. I can still skim them, but I'm thinking it's not worth it. They wobble a little, but the hub and flywheel seem quite concentric with each other so the wheel itself isn't wobbling at all.
I'm still mulling over what I'd do different. Maybe if I cut the spokes after fitting to the rim things might not warp so much. But it was very convenient to do that tricky work when it was nice and flat. So at the moment, I think I'd try the same order. Maybe I'd heat it just a bit more -- getting the whole rim to start turning blue.
In the grand scheme of things I like how it turned out. Hopefully this log will be useful to someone. Now this flywheel needs an engine!
Todd