2015 POTD Thread Archive

Round in circles said:
Great White many thanks for the reply and the links ...I've just spent three video clips worth of my life looking at them.
It is an interesting and useful tool to aim for.

I note that Tubal found slight variations on the alignment graduations protractor .
On my lathe I've discovered the same on the compound slides protractor . It's just under the thickness of the 90 degree graduation line. .
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The only thing about the milling attachment is they don't go very cheap. I got lucky and got one from ulmadoc for a great price. Pretty much gave it away. He was feeling generous and (I guess) wanted to "pay it forward". I am eternally grateful as I've gotten a lot of use out of it. It's by no means perfect and I don't think you could do high precision work with it, but does a good enough job for what I need it for (motorcycle parts).

EBay usually wants a fair bit for them. Usually in the 300-500 dollar range.

Shop wisely and look often and I'd say you might be able to snag one for couple hundred or so.

Cheers
 
I finally got my CNC knee-Z axis to work, I had to make a pair of gears with a 3:1 reduction to lift the table (plus 500lbs) without missing any steps. Then I attempted to install my VFD but realized that the instruction manual was burned with the shipping packaging; after much hair pulling, name calling, and time wasting, I came here and created a user account. :)
 
ogberi said:
Bodged this up today in the shop. Scrap of steel, and some 5/8" rod from the junk bin. Was going to braze it up, but ran out of MAPP gas. :( Ended up welding them with the little Lincoln flux-core wire welder.
View attachment 105735

Welded it, cleaned it up a little, and drilled 2 more holes in it, cut off the extra. Ended up with this.

View attachment 105736

As you may be able to recognize, it's mounted on top of the headstock of my Atlas MFC mill, via the overarm lock bores. It's a motor mount, for this:
View attachment 105737

Yeah. It's a kludge from hell. It's the original quick-n-dirty vertical head mount I made a decade ago, but never got around to using much. Today, I had a couple of holes to drill in a workpiece for a buddy. They had to be accurately located, and the shape of the part precluded holding it to drill horizontally. After a bit of head scratching, I drug out that old mount, jimmied up the motor mount plate, and slapped the headstock off the Taig lathe on there. A bit of fiddling, and he had his half dozen holes drilled in the right places, accurately. Sorry, no pics of the job.
View attachment 105738
There's only about 5-6" from the spindle nose to the table as-is. I'm looking at making a pattern to cast an aluminum spindle housing for a much beefier, stable vertical head, using an old Taig spindle I have on-hand. This is light-duty as heck, but it worked, worked well, and netted me a 6 pack of beer. Gotta love it when a 'don't even have a doodle, I'm just winging this as I go along' project actually works on the first shot.
Click to expand...
ogberi said:
Bodged this up today in the shop. Scrap of steel, and some 5/8" rod from the junk bin. Was going to braze it up, but ran out of MAPP gas. :( Ended up welding them with the little Lincoln flux-core wire welder.
View attachment 105735

Welded it, cleaned it up a little, and drilled 2 more holes in it, cut off the extra. Ended up with this.

View attachment 105736

As you may be able to recognize, it's mounted on top of the headstock of my Atlas MFC mill, via the overarm lock bores. It's a motor mount, for this:
View attachment 105737

Yeah. It's a kludge from hell. It's the original quick-n-dirty vertical head mount I made a decade ago, but never got around to using much. Today, I had a couple of holes to drill in a workpiece for a buddy. They had to be accurately located, and the shape of the part precluded holding it to drill horizontally. After a bit of head scratching, I drug out that old mount, jimmied up the motor mount plate, and slapped the headstock off the Taig lathe on there. A bit of fiddling, and he had his half dozen holes drilled in the right places, accurately. Sorry, no pics of the job.
View attachment 105738
There's only about 5-6" from the spindle nose to the table as-is. I'm looking at making a pattern to cast an aluminum spindle housing for a much beefier, stable vertical head, using an old Taig spindle I have on-hand. This is light-duty as heck, but it worked, worked well, and netted me a 6 pack of beer. Gotta love it when a 'don't even have a doodle, I'm just winging this as I go along' project actually works on the first shot.
Click to expand...
My kind of a job,Make it quick, make it work, dont spend extra wasted time on making it pretty
John
 
With some polishing you could get those aluminum end caps to shine bright like the chrome. Buffing wheel easiest but Never Dull or similar product will also shine them up. Mother's buffing wheel like you might use for your wheels would work too. Then a shot of clear paint to keep them bright.
 
I'm making a Witness light out of scrap /dustbin stuff , so that I easily see if any of the three 240 volt power circuit trips to my caravan has tripped out unknown to me ...

This has happened twice and as a result the battery discharged whilst I was in hospital a year ago to totally flat @ 1.2 volts .
My wife reset the trip a few months ago as we were preparing to go away for a long weekend , the dead short battery blew the on board charger big time ( unknown to me. ) Total cost to sort out around £ 300 ( $ 450 USD ) .
Then again whilst I was in hospital this last time in April we had a power cut during the night . I didn't know neither could I do anything about it if I did , again this led to a totally flat unchargeable battery situation .. I had to buy another 12 volt 110 ampere hour jobby for £75 ( $ 100 USD )

The base is made from some scrap plastic Delrin plastic from a commercial engineering unit not far from here , the lamp base & shade is a empty washed out & dried " Horlicks Lite " container. The cable is one year old , off a dead pond water fountain pump. The 3 mm threaded studs are some left over precision studding from my pond vacuum's sensitive flap valve project.
Those " Tube nuts " drove me nuts as I had to hold my breath far too many times as I bored a 2.5 mm tapping hole down a 2 mm bore in some 4.5 mm O/D pipe .
Cutting the slot in the top end of each tube nut was also done with bated breath , as it was mainly guess work .
I had to make tube nuts because there was no way you could put normal hexagonal nuts on the stud threads as there just wasn't the side clearance in the ceramic bulb holder. The lathe and my collets set certainly came in to their own in making the tube nuts , I'd never have got nice square ends without them , nor would I have managed the tapping diameter bore easily on the drill press .

I had a recycled power plug that came off a dead toaster several years ago . Found a 1 amp cartridge fuse for it in my bits & bobs sets of drawers .

I did cheat and buy the G9 ceramic bulb holder as well as a 2 watt LED " Corn bulb " for a total cost of £3.00 ( $4.50 USD )

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had to change bearing on something today so used it as excuse to practice angles on lathe.
my boy tay did the straight cutting his first go at ali, then i did angle after using biggest crowbar i could find to get tay off lathe.
tell you its good job i got 2 lathes cos soon wont be able to use one as tay will be on it.
bear.jpg bear.jpg
 
Sounds like Tay is off to a good start! How old is he?
 
7 and autistic so can be difficult keeping him interested in thing's at time.
but he love's making thing's.
 
Hey all , have not been around in awhile been busy finding a new job.
now that I have one its busy there.
I have had some shop time but nothing to really post.
wow, some nice work going on since I have been absent.
Keep up the projects !
 
Whoo hoo! cast my first bit of brass today.
All old plumbing bits and pieces.
I cannot believe how much heat it took and how much scrap rendered down to almost nothing or so it felt.
Heres the chunk, it was a lost foam pour but in greensand.
Awful surface finish which surprised me because I wrapped the foam in masking tape but as it must be machined down I'm not particularly worried.
Whats more important is the metal where I've cut the runner off, it looks perfect, no inclusions or porosity.
Its a fair bit larger than required because I was unsure how it would turn out.
brass 3.jpg
 
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