Milling Rite

[7milesup]

I haven't seen the TouchDRO

I'm walking on thin ice here again, but here I go... The Touch DRO looks great and has a ton of functions. My concern is the device's battery. Eventually, they will swell and, at some point, I believe, present a fire risk. The guy that owns Touch DRO has pointed out to me that gazillions of devices are in use, and they don't catch fire. The modifier to that argument is people usually don't leave their tablet or smartphone plugged in 24/7. If I were going to use Touch DRO, I would figure out how to eliminate the battery in the device.
That is all I will say about that.

 

[matthewsx]

I'm walking on thin ice here again, but here I go... The Touch DRO looks great and has a ton of functions. My concern is the device's battery. Eventually, they will swell and, at some point, I believe, present a fire risk. The guy that owns Touch DRO has pointed out to me that gazillions of devices are in use, and they don't catch fire. The modifier to that argument is people usually don't leave their tablet or smartphone plugged in 24/7. If I were going to use Touch DRO, I would figure out how to eliminate the battery in the device.
That is all I will say about that.

I guess that could be a concern.

Pretty much any electrical or electronic device has a potential to be a fire hazard if misused, or if you purchase items from unknown or disreputable vendors. I don't think the tablet used for display has to be plugged in 24/7, just charged sufficiently when you plan on using it. Since it connects wireless the only cable needed is for charging, so you could just unplug it and place it inside a sealed metal box when not in use.

I think most of us have accepted the risks posed by such devices long ago, and there's also no guarantee that an off brand, discount DRO display from PRC won't randomly catch fire either.

I understand folks who are involved with aviation are always looking for, and mitigating risks since the consequences are potentially catastrophic at 25000 feet. But, airline passengers use, and charge, Android tablets in flight every day all over the world. Yes, there were some phones which caught fire a few years back but the manufacturer has since addressed the problem, and you don't hear about it much these days.

I certainly have far more hazardous substances and equipment in my shop, I only wish the app was available for IOS.

John

 

[Dave Bonzo]

After thinking about it, I'm not too worried about batteries; I have a number of devices with them, and I've never had a problem with any of them, even after years of being constantly powered-up. I also don't mind things being somewhat interconnected, though I find the current trend towards it to be highly unnecessary...so when thinking about a DRO, I'm trying to think on exactly what I need/want, and what I don't. At the top of my list is simple, basic, reliable functionality. I don't need a billion bells and whistles; I just need something that works well and consistently without breaking the bank, and which will accurately communicate tool/object positioning. Anything beyond that is honestly just icing on the cake.

 

[Ischgl99]

I added a DRO to my Millrite, the knee casting is angled, so it takes some work to make a bracket to hold the scale correctly. I bought my Ditron D80 on Ebay, there is not much support I would expect to need with a DRO, so I decided against paying more by buying from DRO Pros.

You can search my posts and see how I installed the Y scale and the speed sensor. I like having a tach built into the DRO, one less device to worry about. The only change I might do is installing the speed sensor on the other side since I use the pulley lock pin when tightening and loosening collets and it gets in the way from time to time, but I would need to make sure nothing on the other side would cause problems as well.

 

[Larry$]

My lathe came with an Easson 2 axis. I bought an Eason 3 axis for the mill & installed it. I like them and do use some of the assorted functions often. Besides plain old measuring: having both absolute and incremental scales really helps, 1/2 function, inch/mm, bolt hole circle, hole spacing on a line that is not on X or Y........... I'd hate to be W/O DROs. I'd have to think more and that could be a hazard!

 

[Dave Bonzo]

Haven't made much progress in the last couple of days; we've had a holiday and there are a few other things on deck that are soaking up time...but I'm going to get around to picking up some of the tooling here in the next few days. Evidently, the guy that's selling it has almost any size one could possibly want, so I think I'm just going to get a large selection of whatever he has; the prices are decent and I have a workable set of collets, so I should be able to stock up.

One of the things that I'm not sure about are the slitting saws; that's something I've never really worked with...so I'm not sure about sizing them to a small machine. Other experience with saws and rotary tools tells me that a 3/4HP machine simply can't run a huge tool - at least, not very quickly - and that at a certain point, there's no slowing down the feed rate enough to account for the saw kerf. Any suggestions on this?

 

[pontiac428]

One of the things that I'm not sure about are the slitting saws; that's something I've never really worked with...so I'm not sure about sizing them to a small machine. Other experience with saws and rotary tools tells me that a 3/4HP machine simply can't run a huge tool - at least, not very quickly - and that at a certain point, there's no slowing down the feed rate enough to account for the saw kerf. Any suggestions on this?

Slitting is a fine operation, and slitting saws need to be handled gently. They have small teeth and very little room for chips, so base your engagement on that. Slitting is a useful capability to have and very precise. I mainly use .040 thick for utility purposes and don't see any need to run them very fast. Use the same approach as setting surface speed on a band saw given the tooth profile data and material. They don't take much power to cut at manual feeds and speeds, so no worries there.

 

[Larry$]

and that at a certain point, there's no slowing down the feed rate enough to account for the saw kerf. Any suggestions on this?

Hand feed and use lots of coolant, it's a slow process. I bought a saw arbor and hate it. Too much sticking below the blade. I've made a couple with minimal material below the blade, counter sunk screw with the washer fitting inside of the shank.

 

[RaisedByWolves]

One of the things that I'm not sure about are the slitting saws; that's something I've never really worked with...so I'm not sure about sizing them to a small machine. Other experience with saws and rotary tools tells me that a 3/4HP machine simply can't run a huge tool - at least, not very quickly - and that at a certain point, there's no slowing down the feed rate enough to account for the saw kerf. Any suggestions on this?

Put it away for a while until you gain skill and learn the quirks of your particular machine. Their great when used right, but one errant flick of your wrist or the bump of a handle and their usually toast. I like mist coolant on the outfeed side (Chip side) with them as it continually clears the chips out of the teeth.

I'm going with T-Dro and will likely leave it plugged in unless I'm going to be away from it for a few weeks or so. Leaving it plugged in is really no different than leaving your phone plugged in over night to charge.

Removing the battery is an interesting idea, but I wouldn't recommend going inside one of the devises if you don't have a high level of skill working on tiny delicate objects.

I have been inside two phones and was successful both times, but man are they jam packed inside and a ***** to work on. The last one I needed to go 5-6 layers deep into the thing and it took me 4hrs to finish the job.

 

[Dave Bonzo]

So let's dig this back up from the grave...

After months of life-craziness, I'm FINALLY getting things arranged in the garage workspace. I decided to sell my little shaper; it's been fun, but I'm not using it regularly and it was too nice (and too large) to hang onto...so I've been slowly working on cleaning up the Millrite...and Holy F-ing Moses, does it need cleaning. I honestly didn't realize how dirty and grease-caked it really was until I started digging into it.

Pictured: The Forbidden Nutella.




That's just a little section under the bed that I haven't reached, yet; the entire thing looked like that before I started swabbing it away.


Pictured: More horror.




Honestly, now that I look at these two pictures I can say that this isn't the worst of it, because the caked-on foulness shown here is still mostly petroleum-based; in the more exposed areas, it was mostly chip and shaving and swarf that was being held together by grease...so, basically a low-grade lapping compound. I'm sure that did wonders for the ways.

On that note: since @pontiac428 puts up with me bothering them via PM, I had mentioned the need to get this thing actually secured to the floor and trammed, which led to my discovering - via some very crude means, admittedly - that the table has a bit of...well, slope to it. When I traverse the X-axis, I've noticed that there's about a .007" difference showing up: the left side is high...and the weird thing is that it's not a linear difference. If I start with the table positioned at the extreme right and move it to the left, the first six or eight inches fall off rapidly...and then it's flat for the remaining 24" of movement. The wear on the top of the table doesn't indicate one side being worn more than the other, so the thought was that there could be a pile of grease and terribleness between the table and the saddle that's causing it to heave when in that position. Having looked underneath the table...yeah, that could definitely be the case. It's pretty cruddy under there, on both sides.

Pictured: Why is there grease here in the first place?



I guess the good news is that the ways can't be too worn if those scrapings are still so visible...but again: this this is really dirty. The pictures actually make it look cleaner, somehow...but the parts that I've cleaned up actually look pretty decent.

Pictured: Less-awful.




I didn't know this thing was actually a nice shade of light grey underneath all of that neglect...but I did know that the floor underneath the machine was also made of neglect, in that it was terribly out of level and uneven: I could literally rock the top of the mill back and forth by a couple of inches. So, I decided to build some spacers/isolators and anchor it...and that was eye-opening.

Pictured: Uhhhh....




...yeah. About that.

So, the Millrite has a mounting pattern of 18" by 24", and the shortest of those hockey pucks - < ahem > "spacers"... - is 5/16" thick; the tallest is a full inch. Thus, in somewhere around two feet of run, my garage floor slopes by 11/16"...and that explains why things randomly roll around, and by "things" I mean "entire toolboxes." Here's a clearer shot of the height differences.

Pictured: Four of these things are not like the others.




Side Note: the drill press isn't level, either, but that's a project for another day.

So, yeah, I had to cut and shorten those to make them work and get the mill halfway level; I know they're not the greatest solution, but they're inexpensive and they did the job. Same goes for the anchors: I sank a 2"-deep hole under each mounting hole in the machine base - thankfully the 5/8" SDS bit slipped right through - and used a drop-in flush anchor in the concrete; those got hammer-set, and then a 1/2-13" grade 5 was put through a thick washer and snugged down. It's surprisingly movement-resistant, now.

Pictured: Mo-betta.




Sooooooo... I guess today's project is to keep cleaning and figure out how to get the table off the saddle. The only instruction manual I have doesn't tell me how to do that, so I'm going to do some Googling and then probably just jump in and break something from being impatient to see this thing up and running correctly.

More to come; stay tuned.