Alcosa Blower Crank Removal

[Ystervuis]

Greetings all, as this is my first post ever I thought I'd introduce myself.

My name Is Hanrich and I am from Pretoria, South Africa. I am relatively new to the world of forging and have recently acquired a small Alcosa hand crank blower mounted to a portable forge as all my previous attempts to induce air to my fire have failed.

I am currently in the process of cleaning out and oiling all the necessary parts as it is quite dirty on the inside as can be seen in the photograph.

My question is if anyone out there has an idea of how to remove the hand crank from the gear shaft as this specific model doesn't have a set screw as I have seen on other blowers. I'm not sure whether the shaft is screwed or pressed into the crank handle. The main reason i would like to take it off, apart from cleaning out the grease from behind the gear, is to see if I can get rid of the axial play that exists between the handle and blower body ( unless there is some reason there should be a bit of slack that I am unaware of).

I can clearly see that the gear is pressed on the shaft with a little key pin but unsure about the other end where the handle attaches. My thoughts are that it could possibly be screwed in as the handle was simply screwed into the crank with a right hand threaded bolt. If indeed it is screwed in I would think that it should be left hand threads as the arrow of rotation on the gear enclosure indicates rotation of the crank to be in an anticlockwise direction when used.

Any thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.  

Regards H. Zeelie

[Ystervuis]

Update: I managed to remove it.

Turns out that it is indeed screwed on with left handed threads.

Regards

H. Zeelie

 

[Daswulf]

Thanks for sharing. I'm sure that will help someone out in the future.