VICKERS MK6B's resto

[Howard]

Magic!

[James P]

Good lord you folks down there don,t do things half ways do you ?? Both your work and Big Ds M8 certainly rise the bar to new heights.

[Mike K]

Low carbon mild steel: normally it isn't suitable for heating/quenching . MS is usually case/surface hardened in an oven with charcoal or casenite powder. For small items a flame and hardening powder is suitable. These days you can buy the modern less hazardous case hardening powder , they used nasty stuff years ago with cyanide or something in it. The TAFE I went to, they had "casenite" hardening powder and a big oven .

The higher carbon steels suitable for quenching have special elements added , its a science on its own and its a complicated topic !

[Lynn Eades]

I made mine from 4140 and 4340. They work harden and have done quite a few rivets

[colin jones]

Hi Mike, Lynn, I'm familiar with Casenite and other products available along with the hardening process, and the different types of steel. As I'm not going into production and it's about 20minutes to make these, I find they serve my purpose very well. I Quench in oil first, reheat and then in water. I did about 50 rivets last night and my former has not distorted at all, bearing in mind though, they are not very bug rivets and I use oxy/acet to heat the end so there's not much pressure required to form the head. It is a very interesting topic as I saw a demonstration of quenching in oil then water and then in salt water and the salt water was better than the other two. Obviously is't not a deep process at all but it is better than just MS. I bet this could start a complete new topic and discussion of what different methods people have used.

[jack neville]

When I rebuilt my Marmon Herrington gun tractor the entire chassis was disassembled, sandblasted, repaired and rerivetted. I didn't have a lathe at the time to fashion tools but I did have an oxy to heat the rivets and a son who is a builder and very good at sustained periods of hammering.

Colin, yes refitting could be another chapter in my book- 'Mr Jones and why I wished I lived closer to him'.

Carry on with the fine work Sir.

I do have a small lathe now and I get that your tools only require limited use but would certainly last long enough and are cheap easy to replace. Could you detail a bit more about the process of hardening you have used on a new thread so others can get on board and we all might become tool makers.

[colin jones]

Jack, I'm sure your lathe would get quite a bit of use as mine certainly does and I'll take pics of my heat process next time I need another rivet tool.
I need to make two of these return roller brackets. The original two I have are cast so my choice was to fabricate them. It took me all day yesterday to make one and 3 hrs to make the second one after I got frustrated and cursed a lot trying to workout the concave and convex curves in one piece which I decided was way too hard. Individual pieces was the go. A bit of extra welding and grinding but so much quicker.