Member postings for old mart

Now we will all be checking our vee blocks. We have at least a dozen at the museum, donated over the years, about 3 pairs and the rest singles. What matters is that a perfectly cylindrical workpiece is held parallel to the base of the vee.

The 2-4-6 blocks that I bought some time ago and assumed to be good turned out to be parallelograms and are awaiting a skim on a big surface grinder. It doesn't matter what size they are but they should match and have square sides.

6mm is a good size for solid carbide for a machine like that and can use the speed.

It is always better to prepare carefully than to regret what you did later. When I made the R8 conversion for the museum's light vertical, I spent ten times as much time setting everything up to be perfect and better than my normal work. There was no second chance to get things exactly right and to my great relief, the results were even better than expected.

You could move the work between cuts, if the length of cut is too long. Careful re aligning should work fine.

When we had only the drill mill at the museum, I found that the slot in the bed which was used by the vice keys was not very good when the vices were used as a pair spaced out. The X movement is 500mm, and the bed is about 120mm longer, so getting the slot running true to the ways was not easy. The head had to be swung at about 40 degrees either way to mill the entire edge of the slot. Now the slot is within 0.001" of true which is an improvement on the 0.007" before. Before any cutting, the entire length was mapped and because the worst error was positive, most of the cutting was only 0.001" deep to clean up.

Thats a lot of overhanging weight straining the knee, is there any way you could use a weight and pulley to assist the balance?

I went to Exeter on Friday, and returned to WSM via Barnstable, Ilfracombe and the A39, so I passed Minehead about 5pm. I have a diesel car with a dpf, so a decent drive occasionally is good for it.

Have you found the Lathes UK site?

**LINK**

I bought a bench grinder last year from Lidl, the type with one end geared down to about 120rpm with a large wet wheel for wood chisels and plane blades. That is too slow to be dangerous except for trapping fingers. The full speed wheel at the other end was removed and binned and a mandrel for a 100mm electroplated diamond wheel. This is made from aluminium and cannot shatter. The grinder has been mounted on an aluminium base with an adjustable rest for the diamond. These diamonds can be used for HSS, but as steel will cause chemical decomposition of the diamond, the life will be reduced. For limited home use, it probably wouldn't matter much.

For grinding wet, the rule always to be observed is that you must turn off the coolant before the wheel. This ensures the wheel is pretty much dry before it stops turning. If the wheel is stopped while wet, the coolant will end up at the bottom of the wheel as it slowly drains away, and the wheel will be very out of balance when starting up.

Welcome, Paul, you have certainly picked a good spread of interests to keep our experts happy for a long time. Also, the Boxford lathe people are only outnumbered by the Myford fans.

Your measurement may be correct, the thread is probably a special which could be unique to that particular Honda.

I seem to remember that the few Japanese manufacturers of bikes with disc valve motors had floating discs on some kind of spline.

YET ANOTHER DOUBLED POST

Edited By old mart on 28/06/2020 14:35:02

I found that W8 and 8.1 were quite different from W7 and not popular. But I have followed the upgrade route from 8 to 10 without noticing much difference. If you are thoroughly fed up with Microsoft products, then try Ubuntu, it is rather good.

You may be able to get a led lamp which runs on a plug in transformer. Actually, I may be right in thinking that led lights do not run at mains frequency, so a led tube and starter which fit in a normal flourescent light fitting may solve the problem.

Doubled post

Edited By old mart on 28/06/2020 14:18:45

It is an adjustable reamer which is slightly different from the common type as it has helically cut blades. This is to reduce the chatter common with straight bladed reamers. The maximum and minimum sizes it can span should be stamped on the shaft.

When I drilled and tapped some holes in the lathe cross slide to fix the rear toolpost, I made some screw in plugs to keep the dirt from getting inside when the toolpost wasn't fitted. You might need some if extra holes are drilled.

We have a pair of vices at the museum, if they were both modified like yours, we could hold long thin material up to 3 1/2" wide.

Edited By old mart on 27/06/2020 22:25:16

The flashing P is "preset" , you have to set the zero, or the start length if the mic is 25-50 or bigger. I sold the three I had bought back in 1990, so I don't have the instructions any more to help.

Glad you have had offers of help. There is a way which I got away with many years ago, I needed a 1/8" hole in the head of a 5/16" bolt, and there was no way my cheap pillar drill could do it. However I tried putting the bolt in the chuck and holding the drill in the vice. I had to drill a dimple for a centre first, but it stayed straight over the inch of depth I needed.

I've never been so unlucky to encounter carbide in steel, but I did have to machine about an inch off the diameter of a so called continuously cast billet that I made into a backplate. There would have been tears if I didn't have carbide to machine it. The hard bit was about 3/4" x 1/4" by 3/16" deep on the outside edge. It was like an interrupted cut, and fortunately was gone before I reached the required diameter.

As the top of the moving jaw is machined flat, you could drill and tap some extra holes for the Mite-E-Bites further back to hold larger plates. You would have to remember to avoid drilling the vice by mistake.