Valve Tool for inflatable paddle board

Maybe this project doesn’t have the biggest “cool” factor but it involved some machining I seldom do. Further it provides an opportunity to showcase some of the machines I have built. A request came to my son (a CNC machinist) to make a metal version of the tool shown in the photo, which he passed on to me; it’s made of plastic and the owner is sure it will get broken. Likely.


My son recommended the tool not have a long arm on it, so a screw driver type tool was designed. I didn’t take any pics of the lathe work, but it’s just a cup-shaped cylinder with a stub to attach a handle. In the photo below the teeth are being cut with my shop-built micro controlled rotary table on my shop-built horizontal mill. The mill is a revised Phoenix Mill shown in an early issue of Home Shop Machinist. More on the machines later.

The tool with the teeth complete
The walls of the cup are quite thin so I was very cautious cutting the teeth; a shallow cut for all the teeth then increasing the cut depth and cutting all the teeth and so on. After some trimming and attaching a handle with epoxy the finished tool is shown below along with plastic tool.

I went real “plain Jane” with the handle. The hole to release excess epoxy can be seen. It should work fine.
The photo below shows DC Servo driven rotary table.

The servo motor is repurposed (from a printer likely). It had a velocity encoder originally but I needed a position encoder for the intelligent motion controller (LM628). The salvaged encoder is a “through hole” version that required a mount. A 3D printed tether mount was built and can be seen between the motor and encoder.
The front panel of the box containing the micro and intelligent motion controller is shown in the photo below.

The control box provides a significant menu structure to allow most of the features you might want in such a tool as can be seen in the main menu. There is a complete article about this tool in Digital Machinist magazine.
The photo below shows my Phoenix horizontal mill; it differs considerably from the original design. The head assembly was cast by one of my buddies. We shared machining tasks on the head. The section with the link belts is my design. The original used multiple stages of step pulleys and jack shafts taking up too much bench space. There are no step pulleys here. The DC motor seen at the top was salvaged from a centrifuge and is speed controlled by a standard KBC DC Motor Speed Controller.

Below is the speed controller open showing the tachometer circuit added.

This motor may have had a tachometer originally; not sure what I did with it. But now it needed an electronic tach and the picture below shows the interrupter and disc.

The modifications to the Phoenix Mill are discussed in more detail in my article in Digital Machinist.

Maybe I should admit here that this is the first legitimate job this rotary table has done. Sometimes I build tools just because it’s a challenge and fun.

3 Likes

This is SUPER cool. Thank you so much for sharing.

I’m right there with Eric, that is really nice! Out of curiosity, what material is the end of that driving tool made from? Is it a tool steel, a stainless or some other alloy?
BTW: I enjoy seeing all of the projects, big / small, complex or other. It would be great if we could get more people to share like you are doing! :slight_smile:

Thanks to both Eric and Kenneth for the kind words!
Honestly, I was reluctant to post this since no AVID CNC was used. The front panel of the control box was done with my earlier Galil controller CNC however.
Since there was a positive response to this post, I have some other projects I’ll likely post in future.

1 Like

super fun…i also have my version of the avid 48x96 (mines actually ten feet long , so actually 48x120) …i also mill things by hand on a traditional mill…which is soon going to be converted to cnc…great build and thinking.

Thanks for the kudos Daniel! I have considered converting my manual mill to CNC but have opted not to. The dovetail ways just seem wrong for CNC.

To answer Ken’s question: this was just mild steel from the scrap stock. It was a length of what appeared to be thick walled tubing with a stub bolt welded to the end. The stub bolt was already there but don’t know what the piece came from. Convenient for attaching the handle. Then some polishing with emery to make it “smooth and shiny”, which my son would expect.