As I describe in my first reply to Jackson Wagner above, I can tolerate some inefficiency, as long as I stay above Soviet-style negative productivity. The goal is minimum reproduction time. Once I’ve scaled up, I can build a rolling mill if needed.
You could mill every single plate in a motor core out of sheet stock on a milling machine...
As you point out, that would be madness. I’ve got a sheet rolling machine listed, so I assume I can take plate and cold-roll it into sheet. Or heat the plate and hot-roll it if need be. The sheets are only a meter long and a few centimeters wide, so the rolling machine fits inside. They function like shingles for building the outside enclosure, and for various machine guards internally, so they don’t have to be big.
where are you quenching the stuff?
I’m quenching in a jar of used lubricant. Or fresh oil, if need be. 6% of the input is oil.
alloys isn’t necessarily that you can’t substitute X for Y, but that X costs three or four or ten times as much as Y for the specific application that Y is optimized for.
I’m a little reluctant to introduce this kind of evidence, but I’ve seen lots of machinist videos where they say “I pulled this out of the scrap bin, not sure what it is, but lets use it for this mandrel” (or whatever). And then it works fine. I am happy to believe that different alloys differ by tens of percent in their characteristics, and that getting the right alloy is an important occupation for real engineers. I just don’t think that many thousands of them all vary by “three or four or ten times.” I think I can get away with six or so.
As I describe in my first reply to Jackson Wagner above, I can tolerate some inefficiency, as long as I stay above Soviet-style negative productivity. The goal is minimum reproduction time. Once I’ve scaled up, I can build a rolling mill if needed.
As you point out, that would be madness. I’ve got a sheet rolling machine listed, so I assume I can take plate and cold-roll it into sheet. Or heat the plate and hot-roll it if need be. The sheets are only a meter long and a few centimeters wide, so the rolling machine fits inside. They function like shingles for building the outside enclosure, and for various machine guards internally, so they don’t have to be big.
I’m quenching in a jar of used lubricant. Or fresh oil, if need be. 6% of the input is oil.
I’m a little reluctant to introduce this kind of evidence, but I’ve seen lots of machinist videos where they say “I pulled this out of the scrap bin, not sure what it is, but lets use it for this mandrel” (or whatever). And then it works fine. I am happy to believe that different alloys differ by tens of percent in their characteristics, and that getting the right alloy is an important occupation for real engineers. I just don’t think that many thousands of them all vary by “three or four or ten times.” I think I can get away with six or so.