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- 8,140
- Location
- The Gorge Area, Oregon
This project will be ongoing for a while... My dad had an old Apple crusher made by "Fleury Sons of Aurora Ontario" (apparently quite famous for making plows back in the day) that he gave me when I went up to visit this spring. I've somewhat definitively dated it to somewhere between 1880 (J Fleury is renamed Fleur Sons) and 1937 (Fleury Sons is bought out and the name changed again) but haven't managed to narrow it down further. As I got it its a bit of a rotted out rust bucket so there will be a bit of creative re-interpretation on the woodwork pieces. I kept as much of the wood as was there as rough guidelines/templates/ideas for the rebuild.
The spray catcher/flapper on the bottom with the name highlighted nicely.
Yep its a pile of parts! The wood looks yellow because I cut the end of that side off so it'd fit in the rig. The metal portion probably weighs a good 60-75 lbs and is about 20-24" long and the rollers are a good 10" wide plus 3-4 inches on each side so its substantial.
One of the mounting brackets was cracked off and fell apart once I released the bolt (the bolt was probably over tightened but there was some innovative shimming in that region and the casting looked like it wasn't perhaps as solid as it should have been there, looked like a bit of a bum pour). The handle is also unfortunately broken. A friend has a friend who's a good brazer so I'll probably try to get him to stick it back together and maybe re-enforce around a few of the weak spots. My brazing skills (and tooling) leave a bit to be desired so I think I'll have to outsource that. This piece can definitely be brazed not as sure on the handle as it has more stress on it, we'll give it a try and see I suppose (figuring some re-enforcing rods brazed in/ground flat). Worst case I'll make a wooden mold copy of the handle and send it out to be re-cast (would be another first ). There is already a fair bit of brazing on the one leg support where it broke at some point - whoever fixed it sure knew what they were doing real clean job.
Finally got it mostly apart after a first pass soak in a tub of Citric Acid mix (you can see a bit of flash rust here, but I wasn't to worried about that at this juncture). The Citric acid did a bang up job of knocking the first layer of rust off (even if the boss rolled her eyes a little when the 10lbs of citric acid from ebay showed up - that's enough for years and years of de-rusting ). I took it mostly apart tonight and put back into the bath with a few more sprinkles of the acid crystals to freshen the bath and take (hopefully) the rest of the rust off. You'll notice my small nut splitter there there was one recalcitrant bolt that I had a bear of a time getting the nut off of- no success with the splitter, I ended up drilling that bolt head out - just couldn't get enough of the splitter on it. The rest luckily came undone without much struggle.
I also found out the original wooden trough was painted red on the outside once I split the remaining scrap of board off.. So I have one color down
The spray catcher/flapper on the bottom with the name highlighted nicely.
Yep its a pile of parts! The wood looks yellow because I cut the end of that side off so it'd fit in the rig. The metal portion probably weighs a good 60-75 lbs and is about 20-24" long and the rollers are a good 10" wide plus 3-4 inches on each side so its substantial.
One of the mounting brackets was cracked off and fell apart once I released the bolt (the bolt was probably over tightened but there was some innovative shimming in that region and the casting looked like it wasn't perhaps as solid as it should have been there, looked like a bit of a bum pour). The handle is also unfortunately broken. A friend has a friend who's a good brazer so I'll probably try to get him to stick it back together and maybe re-enforce around a few of the weak spots. My brazing skills (and tooling) leave a bit to be desired so I think I'll have to outsource that. This piece can definitely be brazed not as sure on the handle as it has more stress on it, we'll give it a try and see I suppose (figuring some re-enforcing rods brazed in/ground flat). Worst case I'll make a wooden mold copy of the handle and send it out to be re-cast (would be another first ). There is already a fair bit of brazing on the one leg support where it broke at some point - whoever fixed it sure knew what they were doing real clean job.
Finally got it mostly apart after a first pass soak in a tub of Citric Acid mix (you can see a bit of flash rust here, but I wasn't to worried about that at this juncture). The Citric acid did a bang up job of knocking the first layer of rust off (even if the boss rolled her eyes a little when the 10lbs of citric acid from ebay showed up - that's enough for years and years of de-rusting ). I took it mostly apart tonight and put back into the bath with a few more sprinkles of the acid crystals to freshen the bath and take (hopefully) the rest of the rust off. You'll notice my small nut splitter there there was one recalcitrant bolt that I had a bear of a time getting the nut off of- no success with the splitter, I ended up drilling that bolt head out - just couldn't get enough of the splitter on it. The rest luckily came undone without much struggle.
I also found out the original wooden trough was painted red on the outside once I split the remaining scrap of board off.. So I have one color down