A little more progress this weekend.
After roughing in all the plates with the jigsaw, assembled the entire stack together and refined the edges on my lathe. Had to remove the M8 bolts and rely on the 5mm bolts in the pilot holes, the M8 heads were too close to the edge and would have snagged on my file in the lathe.
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I had been using a short 5mm bolt to hold the plates together, swapped this out for a 5x60mm stainless bolt, which gave me enough "shank" to grip with the lathe drive chuck. Left the other short 5mm in which kept the plates spinning at the same speed.
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I did this on my wood lathe, which I understand I might get a little flak for using for metal - it's a little unsafe. I'm pretty confident on my wood lathe though, and I know the machine well (not saying accidents don't happen regardless!). So I ran it at its lowest speed, removed the tool rest so that the was one less thing to get fingers/tools caught in, and used a live centre in the tailstock to help support the weight of the plates. I started by very carefully brining the angle grinder up with both hands and knocked the bulk of the material off, then used a flat second cut file with both hands to finish off the edge. Worked well in the end - the angle grinder and file didnt "grab" on the metal at any point much to my surprise. I wouldn't use anything more aggressive then a second cut file though, I reckon it would probably grab and take fingers with it. :scared-eek:
Once this was done, bolted everything back together, then into the drill press to bore out the pilot holes to 19mm. Only 6 plates this time, used a bit of WD-40 as cutting fluid and gave the plate stack a dunk in water for 10 minutes after each hole to cool down (and give the bit time to cool).
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I realised before doing the boring, that my symmetry between plates was a little out - I had gathered all the plates back up and found that pretty much none of the outer (rod) holes lined up anymore, some were several millimetres out. This would obviously equal crooked rods when everything was assembled down the track. Luckily I had been marking things with a nikko around the edges of the plates when I started, so figuring out which way around the plates needed to be for the holes to line up again using the nikko marks wasn't too hard. I decided to make this permanent by making a punch mark next to the hole which will be at the back of the still. This way I always know which way around each plate should be in the future, and which side the bubble caps and downcomers need to be on for everything to line up perfectly.
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So, a bit of a long winded post for only a little bit of gain, but as a total newbie these are things I'm discovering as I go so if I write them down and it helps someone else, then its worth it.
Last photo, 6 bubble plates bored and ready for caps, the top four plates will be for my packed section/botanical basket but they're not finished yet so stay tuned.
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