Harold Hall

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A number of viewers have said that they could see no reason for the variable stroke mechanism particularly as some commercial machines do not provide the feature.

For me, I added it initially as I had no experience with filing machines and decided that it would be good to experiment with differing stroke lengths. My early experience with the machine made me question whether the feature did serve a purpose.

However, when eventually I was making a skeleton clock with the frames and gear spokes needing a lot of finishing on their edges, I found that a shorter stroke length was beneficial for the task.

If  you feel though, that with your need for the machine  a fixed stroke would be adequate it is not that difficult to incorporate it into the design, it will certainly save quite a bit of work and time in making the machine

Whilst I have intended producing drawings for the version, as yet the time for the task has not surfaced. However the modification is not difficult to explain.

Make the Body (51) as a plain disk, that is without the dovetails, but still including holes A and B for screw H55 which fits it to the drive spindle. Also drill and counterbore a single hole to take the ball race using the bush (55) and washer (54) as was done for fitting it to the Bearing Carrier using holes C and D

It would be easy to drill a number of these holes at differing distances from the centre of the body so that you had some control over the stroke length. Hope this helps.  

The Variable Stroke Mechanism starts on the next page

Fixed Stroke Assembly