Hello Everyone,

The progress on the gearbox today was less dramatic, but work on the one side of the gearbox was completed. The whole assembly has now been flipped and machining can now commence on the other half of the gearbox.

Cleaning up the edge of the gearbox base with a slab mill.

One side of the gearbox now complete with bearing bores and mounting holes. The mounting holes were tapped by hand after removing the gearbox from the CNC.

Here’s a little sneak preview of the sprockets that will sit in this half of the gearbox. Wonder what will go in the other side ….

The finished half of the gearbox bolted down to another plate and ready for machining on the other side. More exciting work to come.

-Michael S.

Hi All,

There’s still a lot of machining to be done on the gearbox, but our second day on the CNC brought a lot of progress. We cut out almost all of the features on the one side of the assembly.

Cutting out the inside of the gearbox. Very milky.

This video shows the radius cutting on the bearing boss. Look at smoothness of the final radius.

The final results of the work on Day 2. Once we cut some bearing bores and drill some holes, it will be time to flip to the other side of the aluminum block. Look for more progress tomorrow.

-Michael

Hello All,

I’m very excited to announce that the machining of our new gearbox began today. During the day today, we completed the first three steps in the machining of the gearbox.

The first step was to square of the face of the aluminum blank as shown in the first image.

The second step involved drilling the two center wholes through the gearbox using a huge drill bit.

Finally the outside edges were cut using an end mill to give us a blank resembling a gearbox by the end of the day.

If all goes well, we’ll be machining out the inside of the casing tomorrow.

-Michael