Sometimes I’m amazed.

So one of our guys sells a couple lathes. The customer wants part catchers.

For the uninitiated, a part catcher is a mechanism inside a machine that “Catches” a part after manufacture automatically, so the part can be conveyed out of the machine without opening the door. Nost of them work like this

The part catchers will not be available until February. So the salesman promised we’d “Make something” in the interim. More to the point, that I would make something.

So I made something. I had a budget of “Anything you can find upstairs in the leftover parts bin”. So here’s the final product.

jeffro.jpg

It has a piece of PVC attached to the tailstock that comes into play at the last possible minute, and redirectes the falling part out of the lathe and into a bucket filled with coolant so the parts don’t bang into one another. This will last until the actual equipment arrives.

I calls it “Jeffroengineering”