Rich King's scraping/machine rebuilding class (Picture Heavy)

We just completed Rich King's 3-day (36 hour!) scraping and machine rebuilding class.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Rich King, his father was a master machinery rebuilder who invented the Kingway Alignment jig. Rich has spent most of his career rebuilding machines and teaching students all over the world -- well over 12,000 students so far, IIRC.

Or, in Forrest's words:

Forrest Addy said:

It's run by Rich King, a long established expert in the scraping world. When I worked for the Gummint we contracted with him every few years to teach our guys how to scrape and align etc. It was a good deal for us because it greatly improved productivity.

Click to expand...

Rich's class is far more than teaching manual and power scraping and flaking. It's effectively 36 hours of drinking from a firehose of 2 generations of machinery rebuilding tips and techniques. As much as I learned and practiced in 3 days, it's going to take me awhile to assimilate a lot of what Rich taught us, and a lot more practice to get really good at it.

Before the class starts, Rich sends you a booklet of scraping techniques, and his DVD. It's really important that you read and watch the materials beforehand -- he assumes you're familiar with the materials, and hits the ground running.

I've read all of Forrest's posts, Connelly, Moore and Mike Morgan's books, and scraped some parts in my shop. But Rich's class was fantastic -- it really pulled together a bunch of concepts that would have taken me years to figure out on my own. Highly recommended!

Here are a bunch of pictures showing the progression of the class, and various topics/projects we did...

The obligatory (and traditional) blanchard ground cast iron block. Roughed in with criss-crosses to plough through the circular crests, and then the first bluing:



Takes several passes just to get a reasonable bearing



Several of the blocks were out by 4 - 6 thou. Rich showed us how to step scrape it, which saves a ton of work.



Early on the first morning. Lewis isn't tired yet

Rich having Nate measure the difference in height between a high spot and an adjacent low spot. Really critical for bearing % and oil retainment. This is a quantitative test of "Chicken Scratches"



Manual flaking. PITA to do if there's blade mount hardware where you want to pop your fist.



Rich showing me that the rubber insert goes below the Biax blade



Bryce pulling a Tom Sawyer on Rich

My hand scraping starting to look respectable.



Lots and lots of spontaneous instruction/theory sections. Here Rich explains how to scrape-in an angle iron:



After you achieved at least 24 points per inch on the blanchard-ground bar (about 8 hours of hand scraping), Rich explained that there's no reason to hand scrape anymore. Power scraping is 5 - 10 times faster, the scrapes are more consistent in depth, width and stroke. Now he tells us!

My first power scraping project: a small "scraped surface plate" I bought off Ebay. This is the initial bluing as received:



Once I got some bearing, I found a big mound in the center, with a hole at 2 O'Clock. Rich wiped off the blue on the borders, and had me scrape off the mound:



All gone:

The Biax is so much faster, and so much more consistent -- everyone was saying they never wanted to see a hand scraper again But you hit a wall at 24 - 30 points per inch. You have to really start being exceptional clean in everything you do: bluing, deburring, stoning...

After that last picture, where the contact looks nice and uniform, I started getting weird bluing. I'd clean the part off again, re-blue, but somehow I had gone backward. A lot.

Rich came over, took my stone to the power washer, scrubbed it with another stone, and then lapped it with a piece of fresh sandpaper. The stones load up pretty quickly when you're scraping 12 hours/day...



A light stoning with the cleaned stone, and I'm looking at 50 or so points per inch It's a wet spotting because I thought I had gone backwards in PPI.



I re-did the spotting with a very light coating to confirm the bearing, which Rich thought was a good time to stop for a class picture

From left to right: Ken, Mike, Me, Lewis, Gary, Nate, Bryce, and Scott:

Rich dancing with Bryce.



Measuring the wear on Nate's round-ram Bridgeport with the Kingway alignment jig.

Rich explaining how to mark and scrape a compound dovetail:



Applying Turcite (Rulon-142, actually) to a faux slideway:



Let it sit, weighted, on a surface plate so everything's flat:



Scraping the Turcite for bearing:



Cutting the oil grooves:

Looked like fun. But Rich does look like he's hot. I saw window unit, I hope it was working.

Rich had a rusted old section of prismatic scraping master, which became my project for the third day. Even after wire brushing and scrubbing with a coarse Scotchbrite, it was pretty rough at the start. But it gave me a whole new notion of the kinds of things that can be restored by precision scraping.

Notice the hole 3 inches in from the right side. There's a deeper one under the rust at mid-point -- they were a PITA:



Plowing-off the rust:





That damn hole in the top:

daryl bane said:

Looked like fun. But Rich does look like he's hot. I saw window unit, I hope it was working.

Click to expand...

Great setup for me to thank Nate for hosting -- the shop was well air conditioned, and had great lighting. That was the first day, and manual scraping is hard work, as you know But even though the 2nd and 3rd days were power scraping, we were all beat by the end of the third day.

My scraping is looking much better (more consistent) by the third day:





Finis

Very nice Lazlo, looks like you learnt a heap.. I have yet to master the Biax to the point where I can use it for finishing... Once I get a part ready for finishing I swap to hand scraping...

Years ago the Biax was only made for roughing. The old blue ones were one speed, FAST and you could not finish scrape with them. If you noticed, Robert has a Var-i-ack reostat to slow down his machine. Lewis made one from a dimmer switch. Try that and shorten your stroke to about 1/8", put in a Biax blade 15-150 (3/4" x 6") blade (the old short blades and blade holders that hold the carbide blade should only be used to rough scrape) and move side ways to get scrape marks like you do when you hand scraping. I have had students shorten the stroke to 1/16" and get 60 points just to see if they could. So the days of rough scraping with a biax and finishing by hand is years gone by. Sip the jig bore company scrapes with the biax until their final pass and then scrape it by hand to get their signature or "look" . My students I am sure will teach you if you live close...You can ask me anytime too....

Nice job Lazlo!

When can I send my stuff to you to scrape for me?

My Daughter is heading your direction tomorrow, I could send some of it with her?

Did anyone wind up staying at the Motel 6???

Ken

Great job and some good pics Robert. I will get Ryan to pull the Eisele down and send the ways over for a little TLC. This might be a skill that you wish you hadn't fessed up to.

Good luck, I tried to get Lazlo to scrape my old cast iron surface plate. Maybe you will have better luck.

I had a great time, met some great guys, and got the skills I need to rebuild all my clapped out stuff.

I highly recommend the class for anybody who is interested in scraping and machine tool reconditioning.

Good pics

Robert,
You really did a great job with the pics.

Thanks, Robert! Excellent photos and descriptions!

We were too busy for me to attend - would have liked to learn to rescrape my old 60" camelback straightedge for later use in sharpening up the Sheldon lathe. I would have LOVED to learn, or at least try to learn, some of the techniques you guys practiced.

Did Lewis get the Oliver die filer operating yet? I am still working on the Deckel GK-21 and have not started the other Oliver yet - too hot without A/C!

A.T.

WOW!! Thanks for posting this I love the photos.

Marci

This the type of class I teach....scraping plus rebuilding... My 45+ years of scraping experience gives the students some expert advice so no more guessing is needed. I answer al the questions asked and don't need to guess at the answer. As I stated in your site Marci, I teach scraping, but its easy to learn to scrape, but knowing how to scrape for alignment is what you need to know and is what most of students want. I give many tricks of the trade in the seminar from how to scrape, leveling, alignment, gib straightening, scraping and checking the taper of a gib, etc, etc. If you only want to learn how to scrape a 1-2-3 block I'm not interested in teaching in Huntsville. I charge more, but you get an education on Rebuilding with scraping being a part of it. I am sure these men, my students, my "Kids" ( I call my students my kids, as I am teaching them as if they are my family) will tell you what they spent was well worth it.

I have to give Richard a big THANK YOU for teaching the scraping class. My money was well spent, and with 1100+ miles and 4 nights in motels my out of pocket cost was over twice the direct class fee.

Knowing how to scrape is, by itself, almost worthless. You could rework obsolete surface plates or become a steam fitter and scrape turbine casings. There just aren't a lot of applications for scraping by itself.

Richard talked about how scraping fits into the scope of machine rebuilding. Alignment, scraping, fixing and fitting gibs, oiling way surfaces, applying turcite, and several other subjects were covered. The class was three days of drinking from a fire hose. I'd sure like to do it again.

Also, nlambright deserves a thank you for hosting the class. And a special thanks to his wife, who tolerated Nathan having all those strange folks in her back yard.

I like the flying Carlson in the background.