Spacer Cadet

I screwed up on the Rapido project. When the grandson and I started working on it we found that the speedo drive wasn't working. It had locked up and bent the tab that fits into the hole on the front wheel. I looked on eBay and there was a pair of them on there so I figured they weren't in high demand. I wanted to see if I could fix ours before buying a new one but by the time I got around to deciding I need a new one, I could no longer find one for sale. I wanted to get the front wheel back on so I machined up a bushing and just wrote the speedo drive off for now. I'll keep looking for a replacement though.

I'm sure most of you have seen the Bloomberg interview where he insults farmers and machinists saying they don't have enough gray matter to be a computer whiz. He said to be a machinist all you have to do is put the part in the lathe and then just turn the handle in the direction of the arrow.

I've known and been around machinists and farmers most all of my life, so I've got a pretty good idea what's necessary to be successful in both of those fields. While I consider myself a welder rather than a machinist, I do quite a bit of machine work. In order to make the simple bushing above I first had to measure the original part and add the proper dimension to the length to make up for the lack of the speedo drive, measure the outside of the part and the axle diameter to arrive at the proper bore size.

Once I had things measured up, I cut a piece of stock, put it in a collet, faced it, turned the OD, center drilled, drilled the bore and parted it off to length. Then reassembled the front end of the bike. Not all that difficult but a little more than turning the handle in the direction of the arrow. Especially when holding tolerances of .001".

President Trump said in the State of the Union he was going to get vocational/technical education back in every high school in the nation. Bloomberg essentially calls everyone taking those classes a doofus. We've really have got to stop voting for people who insult us. If we do, it just proves their point that we're not real bright. Or deplorable. Or a bitter clinger.