Nasher kindly lent me his external jaws from his Clarke lathe since mine is missing them. The challenge then was can I avoid turning a 3kg chunk of billet aluminium into scrap and instead turn it into 500g of something useful.
The idea is twofold. To switch the throttle body on my V8 from the back of the inlet manifold to the front, AND to ditch the large, heavy and complex mechanical throttle body and replace it with a really slick & elegant DBW throttle body.
This is "as was":
And I wanted to remove & blank off the throttle body on the LHS of that pic and mount a new one of the other end of the inlet manifold.
It took forever! By that I mean it's taken me most of 2 days to make this, by hand using only a 5" lathe, pillar drill, hacksaw along with various files etc.
The first challenge is that my lathe only opens up to 5", but this is a 5.5" diameter chunk:
So I carefully drilled ahole in the middle and threaded it to M14 x 1.5, popped a bolt in and used that for the initial bit of machining. Fortunately got away with it and managed to turn the 5.5" bit down so it'd fit the lathe (don't need 5.5", it's just the smallest size that was big enough!)
I was originally going to have a spindle support in the middle:
But the complexity of doing it in one piece was a bit much - so ditched that idea and will "if required" do a centre spindle as a bolt in piece in the future. For now, it's just a nice "trumpet".
It took properly forever to machine out both the external and internal bits, including a nice taper between the 2 diameters, leaving the mounting flanges "to do":
The further in I got, the more it looked like this could work, but the more time would be wasted if I screwed up!
Spent most of day 2 finalising the internal diameter, tapering the outer and then cutting & finishing all the flanges:
But overall, I think it came out pretty well. Not perfect, there's too many witness marks where I was, for example, manually cutting the flanges out with a hacksaw, but I think it'll do well enough. The 84mm DBW throttle body is lovely and much much cleaner/simpler than the old mechanical setup!
BLACK PIG
Piglet
