Splitting firewood manually using an ax or a cleaver takes a lot of physical strength, so craftsmen created many designs of mechanized wood choppers with a working body in the form of a carrot - a cone with a slight slope, on which a deep oblique thread is applied.
Below we will consider the sequence of manufacturing "carrots" in garage conditions on a homemade lathe. Moreover, as a workpiece, you can use a suitable diameter and length of unusable steel shaft.
At the same time, it will have to perform three different types of turning operations:
- from one end, drill and bore a blind hole to the required size for installing a “carrot” on the drive shaft of a mechanized splitter;
- at the other end of the workpiece, pierce a cone of a certain length and diameter of the base;
- cut a deep oblique thread over the entire surface of the cone.
Making wood splitting carrots on a lathe
From theory to practice. The first operation begins with drilling a blind hole to the required depth with a drill, the diameter of which allows a turning tool to freely enter the bottom of the blind hole.
Using a turning tool, the hole obtained after drilling is bored to the required size, periodically controlling its diameter with a caliper, and the taper along the length with a caliper. If necessary, some places of the hole can be sanded with sandpaper wound on a round wooden rod.
Then the workpiece is rearranged in the cartridge by the other side and the outer cone with the specified parameters along the length and diameter of the base is made. This operation on a homemade lathe is quite difficult to perform, since the cutting tool is supplied manually, which requires certain skills and dexterity.
The third operation - cutting deep threads on the surface of the cone will require some modernization of the lathe. In the tool holder, the cutter is replaced with a chuck, which is needed to hold the conical billet during its further processing.
Instead of a "carrot", a holder is installed in the main chuck of the machine, in which a cutter for threading on the surface of the cone is radially fixed using a bolt screwed into the end face.
The complexity of this operation is due to the fact that the conical billet has to be adjusted in the transverse direction relative to the thread-cutting tool and at the same time rotated manually. The required depth of threading is achieved in several passes.
Result
The finished log splitter is ready.
