Fixing a Harbor Freight style Arbour Press.

[marksbug]

Teflon, brass, bronze etc. would all work in place of the steel. Teflon would not need any grease, although the rear part on which the rack teeth slide would still need greasing but I suspect that many users would not grease anywhere.

Teflon could be adjusted to be a bit of a tighter fit but teflon flows or creeps and I suspect that over time it would flow away in the region of the screw pressure and hence loosen that initial tighter fit. Maybe a thinner piece of teflon backed up with a steel plate would work well. On a practical side, my scrap box had a few pieces of steel plate but no teflon.

I have a funny story about that. Back in the 1960s I built a rotary disc inlet valve 2 stroke engine. I had just heard about this wonder material "TEFLON" and I thought that it would be the ideal material for the valve because of its low friction. I realised that it might grow due to centrifugal effects at high RPM so I inserted what amounted to a small knife in the lower part of the housing to trim the teflon to the size that it wanted to be. It worked too well. The teflon grew and the knife trimmed it, then the teflon grew and the knife trimmed it, then the teflon grew and the knife trimmed it.......................
I then replaced the teflon with thin steel, hard chromed. That worked well. Here is a pic of the steel version, I have none of the teflon.

Click image for full size.

we had a kawsaki 100 with the 10 speed trans(high low) it had the rotery valve. the jug was dead.we also had a suzuki 125 I think it was probably tm or ts, the trans was dead. so we put the suzuki cylinder,piston&head on the kawasaiki...reed valve + rotery valve. that sum bitch would fly. it used both carbs. and the sound wasent kaw or suzy... we did a lot of off the wall **** back in the early 70s' living in okinawa japan there were lots of that stuff to mess with after the GI's got done effing it up. I think thats where I learned that brands dont matter, it's what you do with them. hell my bug always got parked with the vipers&vettes at cars&coffie, one day a vette guy asked my why I was parking it there I told him it cant read it thinks it's a viper. and those vetted wish they were......but in reallity the vettes dont know that they arnt vw's.