Ken's Techno Tidbits

I’ve been keeping a collection of emails sent by my Dad, as he works in his shop to get a disk brake attached to our (small) wheels. I think it’s pretty amazing that he’s got the energy and persistence (at 85!) to keep working away at a problem until he solves it.

Two days ago:

I have been chasing my tail for several days trying to get the brake discs to rotate without ‘runout’ when installed with the wheel on my support brackets. I have gotten as close as +/- .005″; not good enough.

Each time I lapped the face the disc bolts to, and reinstalled the disc, I got different results. I tried adding shims to the bearing outer races – no luck.

Finally, tonight I removed one of the spacers from between the bearings and measured the length at 4 points with a micrometer. 1.0303, 1.0302, 1.0295, 1.0288. That calculates to an angle of 0.1836 degrees.

Now I wonder how to true up the sleeve. I don’t know which end is off. And I don’t know if my lathe and chuck are accurate enough. I can also chuck it in my milling chuck. If I grind off a little I will need to add a hard stainless shim type washer to compensate and keep the length to 1.030. I have shim stock in various thicknesses.

Yesterday was:

1) I checked out the lathe; it is pretty accurate.
2) I trued up the sleeves by chucking in the lathe and grinding with my Dremel. One end was off on each of them.
3) Brake disc run-out, and the wheel still wobbles!!

And today, victory!

Today it finally dawned on me that the top hat we made to mount the brake disc to the wheel really forms a backbone for both. The disc is pretty flexible; the wheels are made from fiberglass reinforced plastic which has a low modulus of elasticity. In between is the rigid metal top hat.

By adjusting the bolts to the wheel, I have the one wheel running less than +/- .002 instead of +/- .020. Now I am working on the face of the hat against the disc. If need be I can shim and get it accurate. The gap in the brake clamp is .090 with a little drag on the feeler gauge. The disc is .070 thick, leaving less than .020 total.

I’m glad he’s on our team 🙂

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 7:11 pm and is filed under Soapbox Derby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.