Tennsmith 22 ga rolls (hand now powered)

[aametalmaster]

I have had these 22 ga x 2' rolls since 2001 and they were hand powered. That sucked cranking the handle esp rolling my ceilingtrains tubing that is 70 some inches long, thats alot of cranks. So i bought a Boston 60:1 gearbox a cheap Grizzly 3/4 hp motor and a drum switch. I didn't have my lathes at the time or i would have done things a little different but i needed to mount the gearbox to the roller. I know the powered rolls have the gb on the other end but i didn't have a choice and since the movement of the bottom roll was limited by the cap of the machine it really didn't matter. So i mated up my Lovejoy couplings and got the motor gb mounted. I wanted to make a universal fit arrangement so i could use the gb/motor combo on some other projects. So to put it to this roll it just takes 2 bolts and its on. So move ahead 10 or 11 years i got a job in a plant that does some sheetmetal guard work and i am the new guard builder. They wrap the metal around big dia pipes which is fine for one or two parts but it gets old after weeks of them. So i told the boss i wanted to cut some metal and see if my rolls would make the job easier. He said why do you have rolls at home i said doesn't everybody So yesterday i rolled up the 16 1/2" wide 14 ga with no problems it was actually too easy. So maybe i can work out a deal rolling them at home...Bob

[Blondie_486]

Bob,

Looks great! Those arc sections came out nice. I especially like the way you mounted your gearbox to the rolls. We have a similar set of rolls at our shop but done very differently. Ours uses a chain and sprockets from the gearbox to the crank mount to power the rolls and a drum switch for forward and reverse. I like your design much better. When we try to roll 14 - 11 gauge in ours it puts a strain on the rolls to start the roll and the chain slaps the guard and we have stalled it before. Currently though we are back to hand cranking it because the old man thought he could roll 3/16 in it and burned the motor up.

[aametalmaster]

I didn't want to cut off the square section for the handle so i bought a 1" Lovejoy coupling and filled in the sq area with shims so it would slide into the round coupling thats why the extra setscrews. I can still hand crank it but the rolls need flipped around 180* so the handle clears the base frame. Here are a few more pics i found. And of course the coupling guards were removed for clarity of the pic..Bob