Holy molten metal, BabbitMan - pouring Babbit bearings
Posted: Mon Oct 14, 2019 1:52 am
I Just crawled into bed after another Marathon weekend at the Rumble Seat garage with Erik (and dad) Barrett and Robert Weitzel. Exhausted, stiff and sore, but happy as a clam. I had no idea just how much complexity there is to fabricating Babbitt bearings. The videos online make it look waaay to easy. It's not. Holy bajesus, it's just never ending. Step after painstaking step.
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Pouring the molten Babbitt is only one brief little step of dozens of intricate steps, each one capable of potentially ruining all the prior work and causing a do-over. Boring, decking and prepping the block, the caps, the crank. Line-Boring the bearings, fitting, scraping, grinding, fitting, scraping, did I mention fitting and scraping? The guys that do this artwork certainly earn their keep for sure. It really is a labor of love.
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And when melted, the molten lead and tin is explosive at worst, hazardous at best. At one point, one of the team members accidentally dropped a wet bearing cap into a boiling caldron of solder that was going to be used as a tinning vessel for all the main bearing caps. The result was a loud, explosive molten solder shower bath that shot into the air at high velocity and came raining down everywhere. Luckily we all ducked for cover and narrowly avoided becoming tin men.
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It was all a fascinating education to behold. Not only did we get my main bearings completed and the crank perfectly fitted, we even completely rebushed and assembled the transmission with Dan's ultra cool needle-bearing triple gears, fitted the new oversized rods, reamed oversized valve guides, cut and dressed all the he valve seats, spray welded (that was cool) and repaired a huge hole i discovered in my cast iron Ricardo head, and did all this in in a day and a half. There's still a lot of assembly work to do but I suspect I'll be done and back on the road by the end of the week.
A huge thank you goes out to Erik, his dad and Robert. You guys rock!
AdminJeff
.
Pouring the molten Babbitt is only one brief little step of dozens of intricate steps, each one capable of potentially ruining all the prior work and causing a do-over. Boring, decking and prepping the block, the caps, the crank. Line-Boring the bearings, fitting, scraping, grinding, fitting, scraping, did I mention fitting and scraping? The guys that do this artwork certainly earn their keep for sure. It really is a labor of love.
.
And when melted, the molten lead and tin is explosive at worst, hazardous at best. At one point, one of the team members accidentally dropped a wet bearing cap into a boiling caldron of solder that was going to be used as a tinning vessel for all the main bearing caps. The result was a loud, explosive molten solder shower bath that shot into the air at high velocity and came raining down everywhere. Luckily we all ducked for cover and narrowly avoided becoming tin men.
.
It was all a fascinating education to behold. Not only did we get my main bearings completed and the crank perfectly fitted, we even completely rebushed and assembled the transmission with Dan's ultra cool needle-bearing triple gears, fitted the new oversized rods, reamed oversized valve guides, cut and dressed all the he valve seats, spray welded (that was cool) and repaired a huge hole i discovered in my cast iron Ricardo head, and did all this in in a day and a half. There's still a lot of assembly work to do but I suspect I'll be done and back on the road by the end of the week.
A huge thank you goes out to Erik, his dad and Robert. You guys rock!
AdminJeff
that stuff is a no-no for T babbitt.