Table saw - couple of steps forward, one back!

I had another go at the table saw last weekend.

Now at least all the components for making the saw and the driveshaft had turned up, and so had a few more tools, so I was ready to crack on.

I'm making an arrangement to clamp the blade to the shaft. Basically, I'm turning a sleeve of brass, with a 30mm register that will hold the blade, bored to 20mm for the shaft. I'll bore into that at 90deg and tap it for a pair of grub screws. The clamp itself will be held against the blade by an M20 nut, which I'll have to cut a thread for on the shaft. I need to learn to cut threads on the lathe, but for now I'll just use a die and die wrench. Because I need to cut a thread, I can't hold the thread cut end in a pillow bearing, so I bought a 18.5mm pillow bearing and turned the driveshaft down to mate with it. The threaded part will be next to the turned down part.

Here are some pics to illustrate:

You can see that the bright steel  bar that is my driveshaft for the saw goes all the way through the headstock - a cool feature of the lathe. Here you can see that I've turned down the shaft.

I'm learning all the time. Doing this, I learnt that you need to spin bright steel fast to machine it. I broke my parting tool finding that out.

I fitted it to the pillow bearings just to see: 

The one nearest the camera is the small dia one (obviously!).

Next I wanted to make the pulley for the drive shaft. This is going to be a bit problematic because I don't have a keyway in the shaft, so I need to use a grub screw again. I'll need to make a dimple in the driveshaft for the grub screw to go into so that there's a positive lock, or the motor will just spin the pulley on the shaft (I think). Trouble is, you can't get a small pulley with a large diameter bore and  a grub screw. My plan is to bore out the pulley's centre, and then make an insert out of brass to an interference fit to the bored out pulley. Then bore out the insert to the diameter of the shaft.

So first, bore out the pulley:

The pulley started with a 15mm dia bore. First I bored it to 19.5mm, then to 29.5mm, then reamed it to 30mm.

All good so far.

Now make the insert:

Then put the insert in the freezer, and the pulley on the barbecue. Then pop the insert into the pulley, and away we go:

Oops. That wasn't supposed to happen.

I was a little annoyed at that point, so I wasn't so snap happy with the photos, but I started to make the saw blade clamp.

You can see that it's sitting on the lump of brass from the previous post, but now there's a register that's poking through the hole in the saw. The other side of the clamp is off to the left. It's slightly conical, because of the broken parting-off tool, I couldn't make a straight cut. Anyway, it looks fine like that.

Here's the assembly as a complete clamp:

There you go. Slow progress, but progress none the less. I've ordered a new pulley, so that should be the next thing. And a new parting off tool, so I can complete the clamp.

One thing I was surprised at was how poor the bearings are. They work OK, but 2 of the three bearings had the bearings pressed into the cases off-square, and of the two identical bearings, one has a shorter pedestal height than the other. I'll work around this, but although I didn't buy expensive ones, I didn't expect that at all.