Home made tools

Maybe this should be a new thread, but it does overlap here.

Seal drivers - and one that I need. I'm passing this by the knowledgeable folk to get their opinion on whether this will work.

On my DD, an F350 pickup, I need to replace one of the rear hub seals. It's a big seal at ~3.9" in diameter, but really doesn't have a very wide cross section so is kind of fragile for my usual way with a BF hammer and a piece of hard wood. What I want to do is to use a hole saw and cut a 4" or 4-1/4 disc out of 4/4 oak (yes, I do have some big hole saws) along with a possibly second one glued with the grain 90* from the first as a backer. Then add a piece of 1/4"steel as an additional backer. Next using a piece of 1/2" all thread and a piece of steel on the far side, draw that seal into place. Will this work or should I just continue with my BFH and a wood block.

The seal is the easy part. There is a new bearing going behind that seal - and about every bearing race driver set I've seen are too small by a good half - three quarters inch. Any suggestions for that beside that, again, my BFH and a drift? Our refrigerator isn't cold enough and I don't have access to a lathe and I can't heat the hub that much (wives and their stoves are sacred) :sweat:

Dave W

No bites - amazing. Oh well, I just went ahead and made up a couple tools and they work.

The bearing race (cup, or whatever you might call it) driver is a simple piece of 1/2" T6061 aluminum which I band sawed to an approximate dimension then filed to fit. It ended up a bit cruder then I really like, but it does work as I was able to put the old one back in place almost without effort.



The seal driver is a little more complicated (and that seal is over 2X the price of the bearing ). A screw up here can get expensive. I found an odd thickness piece of oak in my stash about 1-3/16" thick and used my circle cutter as my hole saws go from 4 to 5 inches. That circle cutter was used to make a relief for the raised portion of the seal as well and Forstner bits were used to drill the 1/2" center hole and then cut a 2" relief for the reinforcing washer. I then cut a piece of 1/4x1-1/2 bar stock and drilled for the center hole and for the attaching bolts to the hub. This contraption is then operated with a piece of 1/2" all thread. In trying it, the old removed seal was drawn back into place slickern' ...... (well you know the rest). That is a single piece of oak, but cut from both sides - and yep, the cutter tool bit did get hot!!











I have no clue how much I saved by doing this, but what I used was all stuff out of my "extras" and maybe worth $4-5 bucks.

Now, all I have to do is wait for my parts
Dave W

We found a coupling for plastic pipe that is just the right size for driving the axle seals. We set a block of wood on it, then drive it home with a mallet

Here's a couple of pics of an air dryer we built for our air compressor system. We were getting a lot of moisture in our air tank. And enough moisture in the compressed air that a sandblaster was just about useless becaus it would clog up. And we have hopes of spraying some paint eventually. So we got a couple of A/C condensers from the "U-Pull-It, built a rack to hold them, and placed a box fan behind each one. The copper tubing connects the compressor to the condensers, and acts as a "Pre-Cooler" because the air discharge from the compressor gets really HOT. Also added a solenoid valve to isolate the air pressure from the piping system when the compressor circuit is de-energized. The moisture ends up in the small cylinder between the air reservoir tanks, and has a drain valve to empty it out. We haven't used it much yet, but so far it seems to work pretty well.