[email protected] (Dave Williams)
fordnatics  31 Jan 1996
- After Sixto's balancing horror story, I fired up the angle grinder and cut 
  another few pounds of metal off my crank.  Five hours later...  this crank's 
  own mother wouldn't recognize it now. 
- Yesterday I hauled it down to a local (35 miles away) shop to have it 
  straightened.  Uh... I sort of bent it a little when I was trying to clamp it 
  to the mill table, and the bastard *still* kept trying to crawl out from 
  under.  The nodular iron Ford used in the Cleveland cranks is some righteous 
  hard stuff.  So when I chucked it back into the crank grinder I located it 
  on the center main, backed the clearance to .001, and spun it with my hand.  
  Ggggrawt.  Of course I'd set it up on the low side, not knowing it was bent, 
  and it dragged the wheel across the center main.  Fuck-fuck-fuck.  I guess I 
  won't have a standard/standard stroker crank any more.  Looks like the mains 
  will clear up at .010, but it's the sort of stupid action that makes you 
  wonder if you shouldn't have just stayed in bed that morning... 
- I should get the crank back in a day or two.  I *might* could have done it 
  myself, but as someone once said, "If you love law or sausage, stay away 
  from the origins of either."  That also applies to straightening cranks and 
  accurizing Colt .45 automatics. 
- John Moses Browning designed the .45 to pass the US Cavalry's test 
  procedures.  (yes, it's an old gun!)  One test was to tie it to a string and 
  drag it through dirt and sand.  It still had to function after the test.  
  The dirt test eliminated many designs.  Browning's layout used a sliding 
  dust cover that doubled as a recoil mass.  It interlocks with grooves on the 
  frame, but the fit is sort of... casual.  Remember, it had to function even 
  when full of dirt and sand.  So when you pick up a government spec .45, it 
  rattles and clanks like pieces are going to fall off.  The loose fit doesn't 
  really hurt much, accuracy-wise, but civilian models are made with less 
  clearance to give a less disturbing amoung of slop.  When you have a .45 
  accurized, one typical procedure is to reduce the clearance even more.  It's 
  done mainly as turd polishing -after dropping $500 for a job on a $750 gun, 
  the buyer expects a "quality" feel.  So the usual procedure is to put the 
  slide in a vise and collapse it a bit, then file it back out to a sliding 
  fit.  First time a budding shootist sees a gunsmith clamp part of his 
  expensive toy in a big vise and bend it, he usually craps down his leg. 
- Straightening crankshafts is similar.  First the machinist puts the crank on 
  V-blocks on a hydraulic press.  Then he rotates it to find a high spot, 
  slides the overhead jackscrew into position, and jacks the crank back into 
  alignment.  Then he takes a big, blunted chisel and a small sledge and beats 
  the shit out of the fillet area between the cheek and the journal, peening 
  the area to reduce springback.  Then he rotates the crank, checks for other 
  high spots...  needless to say, someone who just bought a $1500 stroker 
  crank wouldn't be amused. 
- Though it sounds horrible, straightening is actually no big thing.  If you 
  have a crank Tufftrided, straightening is part of the process, as the 
  Tufftride process causes warpage.  So do some of the other treating 
  processes.  Cranks cut from semifinished forgings, or offset ground or 
  seriously worked cranks like my stroker, also usually need straightening due 
  to the high wheel pressures used to remove massive amounts of metal. Of 
  course, I'd spent eight hours on the crank grinder taking off metal a few 
  thousandths at a time to avoid that...  
- Still, all in all, it's something I'd rather someone else did...