Home made ring roller, ongoing.

[AdrianH]

I made a garden fence at home just using bought in basic twists, cages etc, it would have been nice to add a few more items such as rings with inlays, make my own shapes et al. So I looked at a ring roller, now there are several out there one can buy, typically with everything in a frame where you pull the middle roller out to remove the completed ring, or another style with the rollers on the outside of the frame. This is the style I went for as I thought it could be more versatile.

So I looked around on the Internet and looked at various designs, all generally based on Pyramid rolls, I checked what unused materials I had around in the garage and settles on a design using 100 x 100 x 4 mm wall box section.

Without any drawings I just cut up the metal as shown below.



Cut at an angle of 28 degrees, basically because that angle still allowed me to get the box in the vice and cut on the band-saw. Then welded to make the two sections and then the bases milled flat so it should sit flat and level.

I had some CDS tube left over from the kit car build this has an internal diameter hole very slightly over 25mm, so as accurately as I could used the milling machine and 24 operations later had holes through the sides to fit the CDS tubes snugly into.




I had to spend money now and buy some EN8 25mm bar from a online metal shop, £14 for 1 metre. I was also looking at bearings for the rollers. I originally looked at some needle roller bearings, 25mm internal with internal sleeves and 32mm external diameter, but with prices it would cost quite a bit to get four of them I thought I would need, so I settled on budget rollers and picked up 10 bearings 25mm internal, 47mm external diameters for £10.


I visited an Engineering shop in Leyland and managed to get a length of 90 mm diameter EN3 bar for £10, and after some time on the lathe had my two idle rollers, they are 56mm wide.