Hi folks,
A bit of an update showing one of the little things I get lumbered with!
No.1 son rang up and asked if I would care to have a look at a broken drawer plate for him and see if there was anything I could do. It turns out this drawer plate was off an old dressing table which he had acquired from his cousin, who in turn had scrounged it from my parents house during the post funeral clear out some years ago. Since I remember using this thing at least 60 years ago in my bedroom, and I vaguely remember it being in my parents bedroom before they got a new bedroom suite, and my parents got married in 1943, ie during WWII, I suspect it may well be 70+ years old.
Anyway, this picture
shows the original plate in three bits and with a bit missing off one corner and the 2 new plates I made. Why did I make two? Answer because I thought it might look better with two plates rather than just one. I did it by cutting two approximate rectangles, wrapped each new plate in paper, then stacked them along with the old plate and sellotaped the lot together. Then I made two little T shaped ali pieces to go through two diagonally opposite corners, after drilling of course, along with a couple of little screws, the idea being to clamp the lot together. I then set to with hacksaw, drill, & files.
One thing I did discover that the original itself wasn't particularly well made - just look at the hole dead centre. The photo doesn't show it too well, but the hole was nowhere near dead centre. And that sort of poor workmanship was apparent elsewhere on close looking.
The reason why it had broken, apart from old age and brittleness, was because the pillars in which the handle located had been made with a spigot on them, said spigot then pushed through the plate and belted over. Fair enough I suppose, but it did mean that the corner screws immediately put the plate under bending tension due to the hidden lump behind.
This photo shows the handle and one pillar.
Also, when you look at the old pillar, you can see the filing marks across the face - poor workmanship again!
So the question now was, how on earth do I make these pillars. Close examination revealed that the pillar tops were rounded which suggested that they had been made from a ball and two opposing sides filed off. I've never done a ball before so a quick read-up and these ideas surfaced: build a ball making attachment for the lathe; use a bit of silver steel with a hollow in the end and a sharp circular edge and then hardened; or a cheating way which was to calculate the amount of infeed every so often and use the lathe to cut a series of steps. Then use a file to round off the steps. This was the one I used, except that rather than calculate the infeed, I drew it out using CAD and measured them using CAD which gave answers considerably more accurate than I could ever work to.
These three photos in turn show the blank before turning, the embryo ball after the steps have been made (sorry about the colour by the way), and the finished item.
One other problem I had was that there was a requirement to fasten the pillars through the drawer front rather than onto the plate and use the plate screws. This meant extending the pillars by a good 25mm backwards. Now the pillar diameter is 10.25mm and I thought that that would be rather excessive to go through the drawer. I eventually decided on 4 mm (actually I looked at a drawer at home!) but that meant wasting a lot of expensive brass so I decided to make the shaft out of steel and soft solder it into the back of the pillar. You can see that in the photos.
Once the balls had been made, I then mounted the combined shaft & ball in the vertical slide and milled down each side followed by drilling through, again in the lathe.
Final job was to get some dome headed nuts and some load spreading washers for use inside the drawer.
And that was that. An interesting job which required the use of a lot of skills I didn't know I had - it's the first time for a lot of this work - so I've learned a heck of a lot, not least of which is that I can do do these things. Ok, it took a long time, but so what, it's a hobby for heaven's sake.
Regards,
Peter G. Shaw
