speech

What is this you may ask? Well these pieces of metal in front of me come together to make a gear stick knob. This gear stick knob is made out of metal plates that are shaped to give it  finned design that consist of such metals of brass and aluminium plates that are 3mm thick and other pieces that are from aluminium bar.Though gear sticks are becoming obsolete in modern cars they can still be something that many of you can make. I chose to present this speech to you because it is one of many personal customizations you can do to your car.

This gear stick knob is a design I followed in metal work to make the design. It is made up of 2 metals that i chose as they are both metals that don’t oxidize when exposed to oil from the human hand which are Brass and Aluminium. The tools that I used to make this gear stick 

knob were lathe, drill press, file, verniers, milling machine and sandpaper. These tools help me create the odd shapes of this piece such as the egg shaped fins that create the different looking shape that the knob is. The lathe was a big part to create the circular spacers in the middle of the knob, but the lathe was also used to get the shapes of the top and bottom piece with the angles.

Using the tools I listed above which are a lathe, drill press, file, verniers, milling machine and sandpaper. These tools helped me make each of the pieces that I used. I used the verniers for all of the pieces that make up this knob as i needed exact measurements for all of the pieces. The lathe was a critical part in making the circular spacers, clamp and top by making them a perfect circle and give the top and clamp their angles. Milling machine was used for the most complicated part of the design by cutting half way into the clamp to then drill 2 holes so when you put the knob in your car you can tighten it without changing the rotation of the knob. But I used the file and sandpaper for shaping the fins by using the file to give the fins a rough shape than I used sandpaper to get a nice finnish before i took them to the polishing machine.    

To piece this together you need to get the main bolt that holds %90 of the piece together. Make sure that you line up the hole for the pin to go through between the pieces, start by grabbing the top plate and sliding it onto the main bolt. Put one of the aluminium spacers with the hole in the same position then put the other fins on according to size from biggest to smallest while putting an aluminium spacer in between them. After you have put the center pin in screw in the bottom of the piece make sure to line up the center pin with the hole in the clamp then use a alin key to do up the bolt. After you have done up the main bolt into the clamp get the top plate and get the m4 screw and put it into the hole on the bottom side. After putting the m4 screw into the top plate, set the top plate on top of the piece( make sure to line up the holes). Get the remaking m3 screws and skew them into the piece making sure you don’t do them up to tight that you strip the top of the screw. Once the top plate is secure get the final piece the cap and screw it onto the m4 screw. 

To recap, we went over the reasons to make a gear stick knob, the technical s of the reasons to decisions i made regarding the metals, tools i used to make some of the pieces for the gear stick knob. We also went over how to piece together the gear stick knob in detail. Thank you for listening, I hope you learned something from this presentation. 

I hope you see that this project opens up a lot of new skills along the way with teaching you how to design and personalize things such as this project. It may also give you personal ideas for customizing other parts of your car, giving you the feeling of “its mine and i made this”.