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Tim's Worm Carriage
This Page Is Under
Reconstruction!!
Bonus page!! My good friend Tim Crowe
didn't have a long lathe with which to turn a worm blank, so he came up with a
clever option for a lathe substitute. He calls it a carriage. You can get
a pretty good idea of how to construct one for yourself from the photos. It is
made from wood and uses a common plunge router to do the cutting. It is
rather easily constructed, but some of the details need to be watched pretty
carefully, so I'll let Tim explain some of them to you in his own words.
"It cost about $300.00 for someone to turn a worm
for me, so I came up with this method. It took about 4-5 hours to route.
The length inside the box is 64" . The end blocks must be 1 1/2" thick of the
hardest wood, so I used cocobolo, drilled 3/8" undersized with 3" hex head
bolts ground to a prefect point. double nut inside and out to force the 3/8
bolt into then end of the worm. I drilled in the end 1" to start the
bolt then ran the bolt in the worm with a impact wrench on both ends. WORD TO
THE WISE. YOU MUST DRILL THE END CROSS PIECES ON THE DRILL PRESS TO BE SQUARE,
AND YOU NEED TO FASTEN THE CROSS PIECES WITH GOOD GRK WOOD SCREWS. It is
imperative to get the 3/8" bolt exactly the same height at both ends!
I did not initially, but fortunately made the worm 3 1/4" so there was room
enough to realign the end pieces and reroute down to 2 3/4" to save it.
For milling, I ran the router on a medium speed and
knocked off all the high spots. I found running the router from side to
side in long runs rather than spinning like a lathe helped, but I did some
clean up by turning by hand with the router stationary for the axle areas. 4-6
passes were made taking light cuts and then rotated the worm a 1/4 inch
[because I used a 1/2 wide router bit]. I ended up with a 30-40 sided piece
that was sanded to make round. It was removed from the carriage several
times to make sure it would fit tight into the scrap wood that I had drilled 2
3/4" & 1 7/8" holes into. I did wax the top edges of the carriage, and it does
help. All the wooden pieces were cut dead square and the top edges were
planed flat."
We'll start off with a photo
of his handle and one of how as how he went about cutting the grooves in the
blank worm.
Tom's handle and head stock. Lookin'
pretty fancy, eh?
Tim lays
out the lines to indicate the groove width on the blank worm and then drills a
series of pilot holes between those lines to the desired depth. Then it's
a simple matter of using a hand chisel to do the detailing. Clever fellow!
Here is an end view of Tim's carriage assembly.
One of the 3/8" bolts that has had the end pointed to
facilitate turning the worm blank.
A little peek inside the carriage box.
The blank rifling worm being mounted on a pivot bolt.
Showing the width of the carriage box.
Showing the height of the carriage box.
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