A Lathe for Lathing

[Vesper]

Frost 2nd, 4621

It was just another day in the coven. Deep beneath the bowels of the earth, metal raked on metal, and the machines clinked and clanked, clunking away at tasks of suspect import. Vesper sat utterly naked upon a round stool, hunched over a workbench, armed with time and the support of the coven.

A perk of working with the Brotherhood of Scaeva was operating free of restrictive clothing, Vesper supposed.

Requirements

There was a great need for a machine Vesper had seen only in the Badlands. Without it, his progress was severely limited... there were rusted old gadgets, even shattered and disassembled Chariots littering the halls of the Brotherhood workshops, but without this singular piece of equipment, he could not shape and machine the new parts necessary for his designs.

Design

The lathe was a machine for rubbing metal against metal or wood to grind it down. Vesper first concepted which parts would be necessary; the first part was an axle, for delivering torque. With a ruler, he inked a straight line across some gridded paper. From there, he utilized a compass to draw a circle with respect to depth, showing the wheel for the lathe. Every square on the grid was an inch apart, meant to represent a square foot, so he measured a half inch to set the clamping mechanisms not far away.

Lining up the base plates, Vesper had the core, minimum components of the machine fully concepted. Next came the little things; pedals, and a seat to work the metal from. Next came the problem of the lathe wheel itself, and he figured it needed to be quite thick and heavy to handle grinding into harder metals he might find. The lathe wheel also needed to be replaceable for several reasons - he couldn’t just Socket Bind it to the axle.

Expanding the primary lathe wheel, he ended up deciding to include multiple arms of that same concept, each with progressively smaller wheels for finer machining. He even gave one a drill - he had the borer, but sometimes he couldn’t fit it around a piece of metal in all the ways he hoped. With that drill head, he designed several types of metal bits for later creation.

To manipulate the arms, the cat concepted a ball design that could rotate and draw in each arm to pull it away from the project or swing relevant ones into place.

Next came power. Standard Artificed golems had a fairly limited drive - this limited Chariots - but he’d discovered ways through Engineering to preserve torque and transfer it as necessary through conventional Chariots. Concepting out three pistons, he lined out their movements against a crankshaft, giving it rotation. From this crankshaft, he then designed a transmission to transfer the torque to the axle. Just in case, he added a hand crank to the transmission to get it going if he really needed.

From here, he gave everything its relevant necessary sockets and screws, marking off where he would have to Socket Bind things. The wheels could be removed via a bracketing system that wouldn’t let them fall off, even if they could be unset and drawn back, eventually rotated out from a hook along the inside. He spent a lot of time refining his design, getting the measurements right and such.

Drawing little bubbles connecting places, the final step was annotating the necessary Runic Script. This machine was fairly simple, so he focused on alternating pull commands for the pistons, adding rotation to each component to preserve or amplify torque; this lathe would spin very, very extremely fast. All of this was hooked into a Nexus, with the axle a pipe to sense torque and strain from connected pieces. He threaded more mapped Lines through the design before going back and giving them purpose. The end result was a machine that could enact Pause if any component was damaged or else a command was given to a control switch he added by the chair.

“This is going to be a lot of work...” Vespasien Catineau sighed, lazy-eyed. He’d still do it, though. You bet he’d still do it.

Much of this process was slow; Vesper was not fast at concepting, and his drawings were crude in places. It was such a painful challenge for someone who struggled translating ideas into a three dimensional medium away from thoughtformes. In the end, however, he had a decent design. One that he knew he’d have to adapt and adjust over the years, or even as he constructed the machine.

So ended the first day.

Fabrication

The first task was acquiring suitable materials; Vesper made a checklist, taking a gander over what he had. Metal. Steel. Some of it rusted, some of it not. He needed a lot of it, but he made a pile by the forge. He gave himself well in excess of the cubic volume he’d planned for.

The second task was organizing the workshop. Vesper checked over his tools to make sure none were missing. Everything was in order, so he got to work.

The third task was just preparing the materials, getting every component for the design manufactured. First he fired up the crucible, melting down spare parts and changing over the metal to the forge. He had plenty of steel after several hours of grueling work hammering, but he knew this would all be worth the effort. Next, he hammered every necessary plate into shape, Socket Binding sheets of steel together into blocks in a similar manner to a pancake. He had his baseplates now, so he got to work on forging the axle... it wasn’t easy. The axle required that he rotate, hammer, rotate, and grind down the entire surface while pausing to hammer the metal over another metal spike to keep a tube throughout. He had to repeat this three times before he ran every pipe against a grind stone to get that final rounded shape, the steel gleaming at him.

By the time he was done with just these parts, the second day had passed, and he retired for the eve.

On the third day, Vesper returned to his workstation with fresh eyes. He consulted his design again before starting work on the orb, which he opted to form from a dome. Each ‘arm’ would slot in to the dome, and the Runic Script would pull or push the arm through as necessary for retraction. For this dome, he had to forge three more pipes for each arm to slot into, hooking each with a screw for the transmission, which outputted to a fixed point that the sphere rotated up against, triggering the -transmission- of torque.

With the dome hammered out, he thickened it with the Socket Binder to give it a bit more density, before slotting the arms through and attaching the entire setup to the baseplates. He had to make a cradle for the dome to sit and rotate in, and the whole device looked pretty crude at this point.

Forging the disks of each size, the drill, an the bits, Vesper ended his day in the wee hours of the night, eyes sagging before he curled up in his room, dreaming of roaring engines and the grating of metal.

Awakening with a start, Vesper yawned and stretched before shambling his way back to the workshop. He picked up his hammer and got back to work.

Building out the frame for the pistons wasn’t too hard. A lot of the process involved bending and twisting the metal through various cold forging techniques. Next, he set about creating each of the three pistons. These were metal rods, and metal rods always took a long time to shape without a lathe; Vesper -really- needed that lathe.

Each rod needed a metal cylinder, which Vesper Socket Bound to the metal rods. Reforging the frame around each piston, he set aside the finished piston framework and started twisting the metal for the crankshaft, building it out and connecting each section to a separate end of the piston. When he was done, he spun it to see the pistons rotate through their slots. It warmed his cold, numb heart to see the fruits of his labor starting to take shape.

The final component, the transmission, Vesper knew would be the most complicated and troublesome. Instead of building one out himself, he broke down an existing transmission from a rusted Chariot the Brotherhood had brought in, setting apart all the cogs and gears... none of these were to taste.

Vesper shook his head, mumbling at the craftsmanship. “These aren’t even straight, where’s the gear selector fork? The teeth on this one are the wrong depth for the connecting gears! Who built this thing, a sand rat?”

Getting to work, Vesper set about painstakingly forging and cutting out every gear from metal sheets, Socket Binding them together for thickness as necessary. He forged the Layshaft, the Collar gear, and he even opted to create idling gears along the way to help cover his bases. It was a manual transmission, with three gears: off, normal, and fast. The pedal could alternate the speed up and up, but letting go would bring it towards a baseline speed. All in all these components alone took him three entire days to fashion, even with references. At least these were made with steel, and not brass like many of the components provided.

Creating the connecting mechanism for the gears, he set up pedals and breaks to slow down the transmission or else speed it up, along with a three-stage switch. Then, he created a casing for all of these components to hide them behind a metal box in case it all blew up. Altogether these steps took another day.

Assembly

Assembly was relatively simple. Setting out each of the base plates, the cat Socket Bound each of the base plates to create the flooring of the machine. Then he set up a metal plate to affix his pistons to, Socket Binding each - he’d be using the Socket Binder a lot here - before affixing more metal blocks to the frame to hold each aspect of the machine in place.

Piece by piece, he affixed the gears to the shafts for the Transmission, making sure each worked well. When it was done, he twisted it at one side, making sure every gear was turning just right; this was a lot better than the mess from that Chariot. It was a bit mesmerizing, really.

Next came the dome, which Vesper set into its cradle over each of the arms, connecting it to the transmission at a fixed point. He turned the dome to make sure each would rub up against that specific gear. Satisfied, Vesper stood up and started slotting in each of the three disks and the drill components. The entire machine looked rather alien and unsettling, like some kind of odd torture device.

Taking some red paint, Vesper scrawled NOT FOR SEX on each side of the casing. This was a workshop belonging to the Brotherhood of Scaeva, after all.

Runic Script

The Runic Script was a little complicated this time, but Vesper was confident it would all come together. Pushing the bounds of his knowledge, he picked up his Author’s Crucible and dipped the Writer’s Quill into it, setting the tip to the various spots he’d left exposed. Dawdling Push-Pull and Rotate commands all over the machine in against the Mapped Lines, he followed the logic of the gear setups across each assembly within his machine. He made sure each would respond to Pause commands given by neighboring components through the Lines, meaning he could tell the whole setup to adjust its speed by putting a Pause on certain gears, or else the entire thing entirely, all at the flip of a switch.

When he was done, Vesper used his Socket Binder to affix the casing plates to their respective locations, and did so once more to affix a leather Chariot seat to the metal block set aside for that purpose. He was done... and his eyes stared suspiciously at that three-layer switch.

Knowing better, Vesper put on plenty of safety equipment, even holding a metal plate against his arm before he cautiously flipped the switch to the first gear.

Hummmmmmmm-whr-whr-whr-whr-whr.

Oh, sweet music of the Badlands!

Vesper pressed the pedal, and the smaller lathe began to spin with a soft whine. It was fast enough to do what it needed to do. Satisfied, he pushed on the rotator switch for the dome. Crrrk! The gears ground together, but the arm for the smaller lathe pulled back and swapped out, the middle-sized one pushing in and slotting with the transmission. Pressing on the pedal, Vesper saw that this one, too, was working just fine. He did the same for the largest lathe wheel before he meowed a breath of satisfaction.

A lathe for lathing.

[Obsequies]

A Lathe for Lathing

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Points awarded:

• +5 Artificing Experience

Lores:

• 
  Artificing: Runic Script - Integrating Script Between Parts

• Artificing: Runic Script - Alternating Push-Pull

• Artificing: Runic Script - Encoding An Interlocking Motion

• Artificing: Runic Script - Rotating At High Speeds

• Artificing: Runic Script - Creating a Start-Stop Program

• Engineering: Constructing a Lathe

Loot:

• Shiny new Brotherhood of Scaeva Workshop Lathe!

Injuries:

• N/A

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Notes:
Vesper sure worked hard on his lil lathe! Enjoy the fruits of his labors! :3c

Overall really enjoyable to read him scurrying about the workshop!