Finished KMG Clone Build

T

Themilkman

Joined
Dec 1, 2014
Messages
49
Hi All,

I am pleased to say I finished my KMG clone! Aluminum was bought from Xometry, and they have great prices. Aluminum wheels from Ameribrade are awesome, with 7” for the drive. The motor is a single speed 1.5HP, and it does what I want it to do for now. Down the road I’ll probably upgrade to a VFD. Also put a 40 pound shock from McCaster as the tensioner. I am very happy with how it turned out, and it was a great learning experience to hone some fabrication skills. I made some minor errors as I went, but with a bit of thinking, I was able to find a work around! One thing that helped me drastically with the build was a set of transfer punches. Never knew they existed, but they are such a handy tool to have. I’ll attach some pictures later on in the day.

One issue; the belt tracks about 1/4” to the right on all the wheels. I can get it straight, but have to turn the tracking wheel pretty high to do so. I noticed that with less tension, the belt shifts to the left more. Not sure if it has to do with the not level angle of the tracking arm. Other than that, the belt tracks awesome with little runout. Any ideas on how to fix this issue? The drive and tracking wheel are square with each other. However, I am unsure if they are square with the idlers since the idlers are 2” and the tracking/drive are 2.5”.
 
0AuMkfOveUEDx6yDaZuaSk0kw
 
Pics don't work... Where are you hosting them?
 
One thing I noticed with my BJansen build, it was tracking too far left (drive wheel and tracking are crowned) so I moved the drive wheel slightly to the right and it fixed the problem.
 
Milkman, you did good on your build, but bet it won't be long before you're adding the 2nd tooling arm slot for a workrest. BUT - good job. Isn't that a single speed motor? I hope it's 1800 rpm?
 
kdnolin said:
One thing I noticed with my BJansen build, it was tracking too far left (drive wheel and tracking are crowned) so I moved the drive wheel slightly to the right and it fixed the problem.
Click to expand...

Thanks, thats exactly what I was thinking to do tommorrow. His build was fantastic by the way, and helped me greatly in mine.
 
Ken H> said:
Milkman, you did good on your build, but bet it won't be long before you're adding the 2nd tooling arm slot for a workrest. BUT - good job. Isn't that a single speed motor? I hope it's 1800 rpm?
Click to expand...

Thanks man! Yes, its a single speed from my last grinder. Last grinder was a pulley setup, but I wasn't happy with the "complexity" and vibration caused by the pulley system. It is a 1425 rpm motor, giving about 2600 SFPM. By no means the quickest, but works just fine for what I do. I forge my blades pretty close to shape, so it cleans bevels up fine, and is slow enough to refine bevels and rough out wood.

As far as the tooling arm options go, I was going to add a second slot. However, I generally free hand, so never really found a use for a work rest. I am going to make a work rest that attaches to the platen arm, like in a regular KMG. I see many use a work rest for bevels and other purposes, so using one is something I really want to experiment with more.
 
When you are in your Imgur account, click on the image. A window should pop up with your image and a bunch of links down the right side. Next to where it says "BB Code" click the "Copy" button. Then come back here and paste in your post.
 
if you can raise the tracking arm bracket or get a shorter gas shock, you want the tracking wheel to pivot left to right, the top of tracking wheel bracket being parallel to tool arm, at an angle like in the picture it will never track quite right. I beat my head against the wall on my own build with that exact same problem.

Looks good, great build =D
 
Ken H> said:
Milkman, you did good on your build, but bet it won't be long before you're adding the 2nd tooling arm slot for a workrest. BUT - good job. Isn't that a single speed motor? I hope it's 1800 rpm?
Click to expand...

First up, very nice job. I built the DCKnives grinder and it was pretty exciting to turn it on the first time and know it was going to work. Over time I have played with the tracking a lot and gotten things close but not perfect perfect. It just takes a bit of time and you will sort it out.

VFD and motor. It is amazing how nice it is to have the variable speed. I watched craigs for a couple months and found a couple motors for under $100cdn (put one on my lathe and might put another one on my bandsaw). I also found a vfd for close to $100. If I did it again I would watch craigs for the motor and buy one of these cheap chinese vfds on ebay. You could even sell the single phase motor on craigs and be pretty close to $100 total to upgrade to vfd set up.

Finally, I have been looking at another build...it was fun. I was wondering how you would go about adding a second tooling arm slot now? Would you have to rebuild the tooling arm slot section?
 
Randydb said:
First up, very nice job. I built the DCKnives grinder and it was pretty exciting to turn it on the first time and know it was going to work. Over time I have played with the tracking a lot and gotten things close but not perfect perfect. It just takes a bit of time and you will sort it out.

VFD and motor. It is amazing how nice it is to have the variable speed. I watched craigs for a couple months and found a couple motors for under $100cdn (put one on my lathe and might put another one on my bandsaw). I also found a vfd for close to $100. If I did it again I would watch craigs for the motor and buy one of these cheap chinese vfds on ebay. You could even sell the single phase motor on craigs and be pretty close to $100 total to upgrade to vfd set up.

Finally, I have been looking at another build...it was fun. I was wondering how you would go about adding a second tooling arm slot now? Would you have to rebuild the tooling arm slot section?
Click to expand...

Good tip with the vfd and motor. If I wanted to add a second tool slot, I could simply just build another cube section to mount on the bottom of the current one. Kinda hard to explain in text, but I would need to just make 3 sides (using the bottom of the current as the top of the new) and use longer bolts to connect to the main uprights. With this build, I wasn't planning on needing the use of a second slot, so went with the original KMG plans. If I intended on having a second slot, I would have definetly followed bjansen's plans that he posted a while back on here.
 
I made my second Belt grinder just as you described - a double decker kmg clone. Worked great and very easy to add on later just as you noted.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top