2015 POTD Thread Archive

Just piddled around the shop today.

Made a pair of widgets for a neighbor out of a scrap of metal he brought me.
And yes, I know the jaws on my vice are deplorable. Replacements will be made. From the leftover stock the neighbor gave me.


Mystery steel.... Always a crapshoot. The file test was no problem, didn't seem overly nasty. The sawzall cut through it with a 24tpi bimetal blade with no trouble.

But cleaning it up? Whaaaaat? Ended up using a brazed carbide tool in the fly cutter to do the nasty work. Had to touch it up a time or two, because carbide and interrupted cuts.....


But it came out nicely. Unfortunately, the fly cutter loves to throw nuclear-hot chips everywhere. And there's no power feed on my mill yet......
Ouch, ouch, ouch, hot, hot, ouch, ouch. That's after brushing most of 'em off. Little burns all over.
Not too bad when it's on the arms, but when one lands on my shaved head...... that'll bring a tear to your eye.
..

Non shop related, here's 8 days worth of eggs....


I also made a thinga-majig for the vice... I have a handful of old mild steel balls, so I grabbed a few and milled a flat on them. Saw Adam Booth using one
on one of his projects. I had never thought to put a flat on one side, I'd just cram one in between the vice jaw and the workpiece and go.





Other than that, I cleaned up my mess, organized some stuff, shot a rat under the chicken coop, had a beer and watched some YouTube machining videos.
All in all, a productive day. (actually, weekend)

Gotta love fresh eggs. We get them from are neighbor, sooo much better than store bought. Mike

BillWood said:

Became terribly frustrated. Stopped all work. Cleaned lathe. Cleaned Mill. Cleaned workshop. Tidied all tools. Stopped trying to take shortcuts - went back to Go didnt collect $200

Started making a lathe depth stop in order to to make a pot chuck, to make an accurate washer, to use in a slitting saw holder to make decent clamps for dti and dial gauge to check tramming on mill to ensure accuracy of final finish current rotary jig which will initially be used to make a sharpening jig so that I can better control angles to sharpen tools on the grinding wheel.

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Bill, I hear ya. I just started this as a hobby after I retired. It seemed to me that I spent the first two years looking for and buying tools and machines, fixing tools and machines, reorganizing my little space to fit everything, and making tools and machine parts.

At one point I felt like you're probably feeling now. So I came up with an idea. I stopped my haphazard efforts and decided to behave in a rational manner for a change. So I designed a simple product made of three parts and made a run of five of them. It required cutting, grinding, drilling, turning, milling, tapping, external threading, knurling, and finishing in a repeatable manner. I did all five at once using the repetition to refine techniques and tooling as I went. This required learning, buying, and making new things. It took me about a month.

At the end of that time however many of my processes were going much more smoothly and I had increased confidence in the abilities of my equipment and myself.

I'm just saying.

ogberi, when I run into the flycutter shower problem, I just find a piece of cardboard to hold in the path of the exiting ships. Slant it down and most of the chips stay under control. Otherwise, it's part of the game to get covered with little red spots

I've been known to block chips with a piece of cardboard, even when they aren't hot just to keep from getting covered with them. Chips seem to be especially exuberant when using the facing end mill and the fly cutter.

This isn't a 'today' project but the posting is, as I just got a capable camera.

I have this Craftsman (Dumore) TP grinder that I wanted to use for grinding bores. So I started by making an extension which fit the (weird) taper in the spindle and used a Dremel chuck. Dremel chucks mount using an interesting BTW. That worked OK for very small bores but at certain speeds could become resonant. Scared me a little.

So then I decided to make up a stout extension and a new spindle. This worked out great. It turns out, the original spindle used a compression sleeve between the bearings. It was bored off center and was the reason for the instability of the first extension. So, now that works better too.

These pictures should be pretty self explanatory. I have drawings and details if anyone is interested.
Original grinder, spindle extension

Taper measurement tool
New and old spindles, Spindle support. The knurling was added just to cover some galling that my steady rest munged up.

Dremel Chuck & Modified Jacobs 1/4" chuck to fit .270 (7.1mm) 40tpi Dremel arbor thread.

I needed something to bore two different diameters for a flanged bearing.
Having played with the drive shaft chunk I thought of a use for it.
I turned down the first bit 12mm to fit the existing hole then to fit the bearing dia.
Then an angle grinder to roughly add some teeth.
One end for the bearing the other end for the flange diameters.
Pretty scrappy but it worked remarkably well and produced a clean hole.

Not having a mill I held the tool in the chuck, pressed the face of my tail stock drill chuck against the aluminium side plate to keep it square and allowed the side arm to spin until it hit the cross slide and spin no more


Heres the fit, the screws dont quite touch the flange.

NIce, looks like the it did a good job on the hole. you must have done good with the disk grinder on making the teeth.

kvt said:

NIce, looks like the it did a good job on the hole. you must have done good with the disk grinder on making the teeth.

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No one is more suprised than myself, I expected heaps of squeals and judder instead it went through like a hot knife through butter leaving a very smooth finish.
Mind you I dont think it would have had a chance in steel.

savarin said:

squeals and judder

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"squeals and judder"?........I like that!....is it too late to change my user name?
-brino