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A Bearing Fit Question

These are good thoughts...I'm of a mind to make up a holding fixture and do 2 bearings at a time. The fixture would, perhaps, separate the two bearings an inch or so so you'd get a much "deeper" hole to work with. I was also thinking of maybe doing it in the drill press with the fixture attached to the table.

This project has been going on for 10 years and is nowhere near completed. I work on it almost every day but I'm both slow and learning as I go (having no prior metal working experience). I'll bet at least half that time was spent fixing the machines and making mistakes. Then there are the jobs that take a week to make the fixtures and an hour to do the job. No one could make a living doing it this way...

Be careful with a drill press. When the drive source, drill press, and the part being honed are both held ridged you need two universal joints to hold geometry. One universal joint will allow the hone head to knuckle and mess with your geometry, no matter how good you think your alignment is. The hand hone, you are talking about using, has one universal joint and it is meant to be held by the operator. The operator is not ridged and becomes the second Universal joint.

The hand hones you are talking about using were never meant for this type of work you would be better off taking it to someone who has a pedestal hone,rod hone as most people call them.
 
Be careful with a drill press. When the drive source, drill press, and the part being honed are both held ridged you need two universal joints to hold geometry. One universal joint will allow the hone head to knuckle and mess with your geometry, no matter how good you think your alignment is. The hand hone, you are talking about using, has one universal joint and it is meant to be held by the operator. The operator is not ridged and becomes the second Universal joint.

The hand hones you are talking about using were never meant for this type of work you would be better off taking it to someone who has a pedestal hone,rod hone as most people call them.

As long as the drill press is well aligned to the center axis of the bore being honed he will be just fine. Alternatively he could float the head of the drill press or the vise so it can self-align. But yes you are absolutely correct, if those conditions aren't met it could cause strain on the hone and/or cause the hone to not remove material uniformly from the bores.
 
All of the original bearings in this car are damaged beyond use and none of them correspond to modern sizes. I'm going to be making adapter sleeves that will press into the hubs to take modern bearing races and, in most cases, sleeves that will press onto the spindles for the same purpose. This was only the first step in a much larger process. Having never used, or even seen a hone like this I wanted to try it. Now I'll go about collecting the necessary equipment as I think I have 14 or 16 of the adapter sleeves to make. A second universal joint is not a problem and I'm thinking of adapting a small antique belt driven drill press I have to use with the fixtures I'm making to hold the sleeves. Of course, I still don't know if all my plans will work. I'm planning on grinding the OD of the adapter sleeves with my tool post grinder — another took I've never used (even though I have 3 of them!).

All of this is more in the way of teaching myself how to make things. It isn't machine work in the commercial sense and I am not, and have never claimed to be a machinist. I am a clever mechanic and the one thing I have in abundance is time which is why I appreciate all the suggestions from people who have much more experience than I do.
 
As long as the drill press is well aligned to the center axis of the bore being honed he will be just fine. Alternatively he could float the head of the drill press or the vise so it can self-align. But yes you are absolutely correct, if those conditions aren't met it could cause strain on the hone and/or cause the hone to not remove material uniformly from the bores.

You can align the part to the spindle but a portable hone is not precision. The stones are not going to be the same height and don't always wear at the same rate. Also the guide shoes are as is die cast so height can vary.

Even with all those faults the portable hone will for a good job, roundness 1/2 thousands, but something has to float.
 
You can align the part to the spindle but a portable hone is not precision. The stones are not going to be the same height and don't always wear at the same rate. Also the guide shoes are as is die cast so height can vary.

Even with all those faults the portable hone will for a good job, roundness 1/2 thousands, but something has to float.

That is true, but the guide shoes are not supposed to touch the bore as I understand it, (I always ground them back to a slight gap or had all kinds of trouble with squealing and chatter) and I was assuming new stones, which are generally pretty darn close. But in this application, plenty close enough.
 
That is true, but the guide shoes are not supposed to touch the bore as I understand it, (I always ground them back to a slight gap or had all kinds of trouble with squealing and chatter) and I was assuming new stones, which are generally pretty darn close. But in this application, plenty close enough.

That's always been my understanding as well for the guides, and always had trouble if using them. I've had better success throwing the guides away and using 4 stones.

Again, I would not call a precision instrument. I primarily used for quick fast passes to clean cylinder bores, or add some cross hatch. On dry liner fits, where the liner was too tight, but boring not an option or necessary, we might run this to be able to get the liner to fit down the hole.
 
The guides are actually spring loaded. They have to touch or they wouldn't wear. The trick is you don't want them so tight they bottom out the springs. Take a guide shoe and push the rack pins toward each other and watch them flex. You will see a small leaf spring between the rack pin and the guide.

The smaller SN and JN hones also have springs.
 
To update this post and show that everything worked...I finished the rear hubs. This also involved making sleeves that were pressed into the hubs to hold the bearing races. It proved a much more complicated project than I'd anticipated but so far all has come out well.

Hub.jpg
 
To update this post and show that everything worked...I finished the rear hubs. This also involved making sleeves that were pressed into the hubs to hold the bearing races. It proved a much more complicated project than I'd anticipated but so far all has come out well.

View attachment 344286


Those sorta jobs tend to do that on you :D ......but you made a nice looking job of it :)
 
Again, I would not call a precision instrument.
I wouldnt say they are, but they can be. I have a friend who built race bike engines, he'd hold a few tenths from end to end and better on round. (Checked with quality bore gauges). In fact, one thing you can do by hand that I am not sure you can do on a "better" machine is, he'd hone a taper into the bore. On an air-cooled engine the top half runs hotter than the bottom so it grows more, so he'd hone the opposite into the cylinder cold to get a straight bore running.

I have no way of knowing if this trick made any difference but his engines won several nationals so I wasn't going to argue :D
 
I wouldnt say they are, but they can be. I have a friend who built race bike engines, he'd hold a few tenths from end to end and better on round. (Checked with quality bore gauges). In fact, one thing you can do by hand that I am not sure you can do on a "better" machine is, he'd hone a taper into the bore. On an air-cooled engine the top half runs hotter than the bottom so it grows more, so he'd hone the opposite into the cylinder cold to get a straight bore running.

I have no way of knowing if this trick made any difference but his engines won several nationals so I wasn't going to argue :D

As told me by an old timer bike racer about race engines - ''build em loose boy, cos they don't go until they rattle.''
 
I bought a little Pommy truck years ago....both rear hubs had bearings loose in the cast iron,and the previous owner had shimmed them with strips cut from beer cans.....I sleeved the hubs to suit the existing bearings.......never had another problem with the wheel bearings....It was a 4 ton truck,and I often put an 8 ton load of scrap or a machine on it.
 








 
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