Rescuing an Old Friend

 Many of my readers are involved in my "real" life and know that just last Wednesday, I retired from Lancaster Church of the Brethren after 17 years as their Director of Music. For all of that time, and for some years before taking that job, I used my folding microphone stand to record various concerts and events, and it saw weekly duty during the pandemic while I recorded video and audio for our online services.

As I was cleaning out my office, I was folding up my old stand one last time to take it home, and the aluminum base that holds the folding legs shattered, dropping several pieces at my feet. It was almost as if it said, "If you're done, then I'm done too!"

But even though I've retired, I'm not done with music (no musician ever is) so I wanted to rescue my old friend. Today I visited the Make717 makerspace and found a nice slug of aluminum on the "free material" table, and brought it back to Grant Street. I started by cleaning up a bit more than an inch along the diameter.

Of course, the sawn face needed cleaning up too...

There was already a threaded hole in the center, but when I started enlarging it with drill bits, the big bits clearly wobbled - the hole wasn't concentric to the center. I made it big enough to slip in my boring tool, and bored the sides of the hole until they were straight:

Once that was done, it was easy to enlarge the hole to the required 7/8" diameter with no wobbles or problems.

Next up: cutting my workpiece from the raw stock. I started with a slender parting tool, but... my hobby machine wasn't all that interested in making that big cut without stalling.

I moved to the band saw, and held the work with a good woodworking clamp while sawing it in two. You can see that it's not all that straight. I'll take the blame for that... I cleaned up both my workpiece and the raw stock on the lathe, so the remaining stock would be ready to use later.

Removing the remaining legs from the mic stand, I could see that 20+ years of use had bent all 5 of them at the pivot hole that allows it to fold:

I used the lathe to trim off the bent part. Since they were all bent the same way, I was able to match the "new" length of all 5 legs.

I didn't take a picture, but while at the lathe I also prepared a mandrel to hold the round workpiece in my trusty spin indexer. I drilled five holes for the legs, plus one more that I tapped 1/4-20 for a lock screw to hold the stand.

The legs were a light tap fit into those holes. Putting it all together and locking the screw, I now have my old friend back in action, ready to record for another 20 years!