Shop Made / Homemade Tools

I have made jigs, but no tools, at least none worth bragging about...

This guy has cool free plans for just about everything....

http://www.green-trust.org/junkyardprojects/FreeHomeWorkshopPlans.html

When I was a kid, I made a plywood frame for mounting a hand-held circular saw, so as to become a table saw. About the first thing I sawed out was a chunk of fingernail.

Another time I made a horizontal hydraulic press about a foot wide and ten feet long, for inserting/removing bearings on a long pump shaft.

When working on a conveyor belt assembly that had hex socket (Allen) screws with only about 3/16" (4.5mm) of space behinf the screw head, I welded a short piece of Allen wrench into a scrap of thin material. (And now I can't find it.)

If you want to press "push-on" hose onto a barbed hose fitting, you can put a piece of threaded rod through the fitting, clamp the hose to the rod, and use a nut to force the fitting into the hose.

Sorry, no pix.

Do not have any pictures (sorry) but have made several benders for tubing where commercial units would not give "R" needed. Have made several wrench's to fit in the tight confines of a Brantley B2B tail rotor section and other areas on A/C where normal tooling would not fit.

While begining my working careerer I worked with a man who was a black smith from the old country. He was in his late 60's at the time and was to retire soon. All of his hand tools were hand made by himself. It seemed this was the test that was given to achieve his masters in Black Smithing. What a set of tools. You could not buy anything near the quality of those units anywhere. Sorry I only got to work with the man a short time. But, in a short time I learned allot about steel.

im about to build a 4ft by 4ft compound vise table..... a grinder with two wheels and 4 inch wide sanding belt..... a spline cutting jig(inside and outside)....

rigid tap holder like this one but larger

I made a socket wrench out of a socket, needle-nose pliers and a screw driver.

Well what else was I going to do, I was on site at the time and had to improvise.

No I did not hum the 'MacGyver' theme tune but I blew the mind of our sales manager who was with me at the time.