Well, we've had about a month long hiatus as I've been in VA for the day job. This also required some fabrication work, so I'll show a bit of that before we get back to the regularly scheduled program.
Part of our work involved repair of a safety rail up a ramp that was loose from the wall and has been moved around far too many times to find a fresh bolting location on the steel studs. I'm not much on lag bolts into steel studs, and this mess we found was the poster child. In order to bolt this solid, a once and for all repair, some brackets were made using 10 gauge steel and 3/8-16 machine nuts welded to the back side. Four holes allowed us to bolt to the steel studs and have a solid anchoring system for the hand rail before finishing off the wall covering.
On the lower ends the rail did not match up on the wall stud, so we made some brackets of 14 gauge steel that would span two studs and still have our machine screw threads for proper anchoring.
Next, the same lag bolt philosophy was used to attach the mounting brackets to the bottom of the safety rail (made of aluminum tubing), and most of these were loose as well. I had some riv-nuts we could install but they would not seat well to the round profile of the hand rail. We needed a counterbore, and did not have any local vendors that could fill the immediate need. So I found a new cutting tool to adapt to the Aloris tool holder on the Southbend, and we made a counterbore out of a 1/2" drill bit. After turning the pilot, the cutting edge was slightly backfaced to improve material feed.
Functional test of our new counterbore...
Lastly, we had a ceiling mounted PTZ camera to install that needed to be centered on the wall behind it in order to quell my OCD. This would require mounting on a ceiling grid rather than through a ceiling tile, as it had been done previously. A stainless bracket was fabricated out of 18 gauge in order to attach the factory mount to the ceiling, using press studs for less ceiling tile interference/allow attachment from the bottom side, and a hole up top for safety wire.
Finished version:
......and that should catch us up so we can get back to car stuff!
