Stjohn's RV-7

A side note on the Burraway. What happened originally was that I snapped the blade in half trying to mess with the tension bolt in the end of the tool. So then I had to change out the blade. If you recall, there is a pin that goes through the shank of the tool that holds the blade in place, and it’s one of those tension pins that’s basically a metal tube split down the length so as to put tension on the hole it’s inserted in and to hold the blade in place. You find them more often in things like watches. Well, when I drove this thing out to replace the blade, I didn’t really have the type of precision tool to do this correctly, so I raided my wife’s sewing gear (her craft room rivals my airplane factory in complexity and scope) and used a big sewing needle to push the pin out. This was all dandy, except with the new blade in, I couldn’t compress the tube-pin and get it back in the hole. Enter the needlenose pliers. Small ones, but not small enough. I managed to mangle the pin quite nicely before trying to shove it back in there. Of course, now I was hosed. 2 spare blades, no way to secure them to the Burraway’s shank. Actually, Cogsdill Tool recommends replacing the entire fitting and keeping the arbor, which is where the tension spring and pin are. Unfortunately for both Cogsdill and me, MSC carries either the blade or the whole tool, but not just the shank-blade part in assembled form.
It’s amazing how the monkeybrain works sometimes. I was standing there in the garage, when the idea hit me like a 1x4x9 monolith. The sewing needle I used to push the tension pin out of the shank was about to get repurposed. With the needle through the blade and the shank, I put the whole tool back together and it worked, since the spring tension on the blade was enough to hold it steady in the hole and let the blade work properly. Woohoo! Success. Except now I had two great lengths of needle sticking out to either side, which probably would have been all right if I was careful enough, but a sewing needle spinning at 3000 rpm somewhere near where I’m putting my hand to hold work steady wasn’t totally cool with me. Enter the wire cutters. With these, I cut off the needle as close to the shank as I could, but there was still a little bit sticking out, which went away with a little bit of Dremel work. I was ready to go. I tightened everything back down, but something must have come loose, causing the pin to fall out and the blade to go pinging across the garage, never to be seen again. It looks like a metal shaving, so lotsa luck finding it. No matter. I had another spare blade. Repeated the above process, and this time it worked great! My Burraway was back online. The idea with this thing is to keep it from carving away too much metal, and you want to put just enough tension on the blade so that it compresses after it’s removed the burrs and made the chamfer. Too much tension and it makes a #30 hole out of a #40. Not enough and you still got burrs. Too much tension also has the effect of snapping the blade in half, as we learned earlier, which is exactly what happened. But now I was out of blades. I will defy any dockside brawler to match the swearing that came out of the garage at that moment. Back to the computer. I wasn’t about to fork out another fifty bucks for a new Burraway, but I could spend that on 5 replacement blades and not feel too bad about it. That was a week ago. Now, knowing what I know, the Burraway is once again earning its keep.