Long story short: I started rolling 18g copper between a textured
plate and a flat plate and the shear pin on the Pepe 188.00 shaft
broke again right away, leaving me with no choice but to get a
bigger/better mill. Durston explained that the extra thickness of my
‘sandwich’ was putting on extra stress I hadn’t been putting on
before.
I ended up with a Cavallin 120 mm flat, manual, no -gear-reduction
mill. Got it cheap on Ebay, since all spare funds are going towards
moving and fixing up. First impression : “HUGE !!!”. The thing
dwarfs the Pepe, and I figured the shear pins on this baby are 2.5
times as beefy, and it has a double-stacked gear system that is just
wicked. Right away it rolled the above sandwich no problem, using
only the manual crank.
The very nice folks at Durston explained about getting a
non-reduction mill because there are fewer small parts to potentially
destroy. Other sage words right from William Durston himself, that
imprinted and replayed in my head at just the right time : “get a
bigger one, like a 120mm, because the gears and keys are bigger and
stronger”. I’m sure glad I listened, and I have no doubt that when I
have my gearmotor hooked up to it, I will be able to (carefully,
nevertheless) do a teensy bit of steel-to-steel rolling , to make a
pair of 2nd generation bumpy plates. 1st generation peened plate
transfers it’s texture to two other plates in separate operations,
and these 2nd gen. bumpy plates will be rolling peened texture onto
both sides of a copper strip, AND keeping it flat for subsequent
EASY, FAST loading into pancake dies. HUGE !!!.
Dar www.sheltech.net