The components in the photo are (left to right); original gutted valve, cut down valve, lid from deodorant, tapered sleeve, and deodorant ball.
The valve was cut down with a hacksaw into a rough shape, before being placed in the Taig lathe and turned down to make the valve fit inside the cut down lid of a roll-on deodorant. I basically turned down the valve to make it round with a lip at the top for glue to key to. I then bored out a stepped bore for the shaft to seat on, and a sleeve nut to be engaged from the bottom. I flipped the valve in the lathe and turned away half of the threads from the original length so it did not take as many turns to install.
A old chair very similar to this one was being tossed out when I noticed the tapered legs. I quickly grabbed it and cut the legs off. Once the curved sections were cut out, the resulting pieces gave me 2 short narrow tapers, 2 short wider tapers, and 2 long tapers. These pieces are shown below...
Once the pieces were measured up, I was able to make the shaft for Bender's antenna from the 2 short narrow pieces once the curve was cut away. The rest has been chucked in the "useful junk" box/container/shed/yard (Maybe I have too much "useful junk"...)To turn the lid from a roll-on deodorant into the dome for Bender's antenna was pretty simple. I determined that the dome was to be a proper hemisphere, so I measured the diameter of the lid, and then marked the radius as my cutting point. I placed a washer inside the edge of the lid (force fit) to stop the lid collapsing in the lathe chuck, and then drilled/ bored out a clearance hole for the tapered shaft. In the photo below you can see a drill being left in place to capture the lid top as I part it off the rest of the lid.
Yes, my lathe needs a clean - Parting off the top of the lid was fairly easy and did not require any further operations other than deburring with a pocket knife.In the next part I'll discuss how the ball was secured, and how that then ties the entire assembly together.
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