Titanium Ring

Hi Folks!

A few of you were curious to see pictures about my titanium-ring adventure.

I figured I'd post pictures here to spare the poor bits tasked with storing attachments across multiple inboxes

Some of these pictures were made by Norm. Thanks Norm!

The source material:

Just faced the outside! Ready for drilling!

Drilling! This gets hot!

Using the boring bar! It's worth noting that Titanium CAN catch fire in a lathe!! It's like magnesium. Thus, it's essential to keep things cool with the coolant and to clear the titanium hair.

My big time-waster was not finding a way to shorten the stock before starting my adventure. Everytime I did something, runout would build into the spin. (from 0.005" to a millimeter it seems) This would lead to an inconsistent loading on the tool, and perhaps the impacts of the tool leaving and hitting the titanium were hardening it and causing the chatter to build.

I ended up figuring out a strategy though! If I advanced the tool position (radius of the ring) while the boring bar is inside the ring cavity prior to coring everything out, then I can advance to the next depth without introducing more chatter. It seems the act of going into the material with the next depth already set causes the runout to multiply.

Thus, I could proceed. 0.002" at a time!!!

Here's the product fresh off the lathe!

So, at this point, I got the ring. Put it on.

OWWWWWWW

It was too small, and I hadn't deburred it. Someone wise said something important about patience once, but I didn't stick around to hear it!

My parting tool had left a small ledge too. (oops! Hadn't sharpened it quite square!)

Fortunately, Sen was around and advised soap as a means to remove the ring. (Is there anything Sen doesn't know?)

So, I need to expand my ring. How is that done?

This is how: [[File::WideningTheRing.jpg]]

I heated it up with the Propane torch, let it slide down the mandrel, tapped it a few times, bingo!!

I needed to flatten out the edges. Did that with varying grits of sandpaper.

This is how lazy people polish rings: [[File::PolishingTheRing.jpg]]

That's a piece of foam I shoved the ring on. Then stuffed it into a drill bit. Then held some high-grit sandpaper to the spinning deely.