Member postings for Mark Rand

A milling machine can do a good job of being a drill press. A drill press normally cannot function as a milling machine. Others have mentioned the need for a drawbar and, indeed, many of the small hobby type milling machines have a Morse taper spindle with a drawbar.

The problem with not having a drawbar to retain the chuck/collet/cutter etc. is that even low side forces on the tool's taper will gradually cause it to walk out of the spindle's taper. This gets aided and abetted by the milling cutter's flutes tending to pull the cutter into the work. It doesn't take very much of this, at all, before the tool falls out of the spindle. The results can be quite frightening (and that was machining wood!!). On a Morse taper, the tension on the drawbar can be surprisingly low for it to do it's job, but without that tension, all bets are off.

The best bet is to keep using the drill press for drilling, for the time being, and plan for a milling machine to turn up this Christmas if at all possible.

Conversely I (at the other end of Andrew's trip) have now got some floor that I haven't seen for several years. Eat your heart out Sir John Stevenson.

I hope the bandsaw serves you as well as it did me.

As for the A14/M6/M1 junction. It works perfectly for the A14/M6 bit, but they seriously cheaped out connecting the M6 to the M1 Northbound and the M1 Southbound to the M6. Maybe in another 30 years there'll be another amendment and they'll get it right.

Edited By Mark Rand on 02/07/2017 21:00:07

Aha, you'll want Whitworth Hex bar.

The dns entries are down. Aha. looks like Adam's dns servers are down!

Edited By Mark Rand on 27/06/2017 17:50:25

You're going to be really upset next time you need to stir a cup of tea and can't find a length of silver steel to stir it with...

There are 14 at 2 1/2" internal height and two at 4" internal height.

I've just finished putting together a few photos about the bench that I converted from an office table. It might give a few ideas:-

**LINK**

Regards

Mark

Aha, someone who realises that the Bessel points are more appropriate than the Airy points. Congratulations Sir!

Be that as it may, just plonk it down where you're going to use it. It'll make bugger all difference for any work that doesn't need a UKAS certificate.

Hey, if it's a male thread, then you can turn it down from M2 to M1 with a bit of care.

It's nothing to get diacritical aboüt.

Sod that, I'm not going metric. I'll go metral instead

Edited By Mark Rand on 19/06/2017 16:17:55

Needed to chamfer some 42mm holes in 8mm steel prior to welding bits of pipe into the holes. Half round and rat tail files were slow and painful. mounted points were effective but very slow and wore out very fast. The carbide burrs I've got for the dremmeloid worked, but were were slow. Only had polishing points to use in the electric die grinder.

Decided that what I really needed was a decent burr to work in the die grinder. Started to look on the interweb to see what it'd cost, then had an idea...

When the MBAs decided that manufacturing would be better and cheaper in Mexico and Croatia than the UK Midlands (Wrong on both counts), I aquired a couple of hundred milling cutters from the heap that went to the skip. Amongst them were a number of 6mm, 6 tooth, fast helix carbide milling cutters.

Tried one of them in the die grinder. It's absolutely incredible! you can almost carve steel like it's wood. Made more progress in five minutes than I had in the two hours before. Half an hour later and 8 holes were chamfered. Not high precision, but the welds will cover that up. The only possible drawback is that much of the workshop is now covered in surgically sharp slivers of steel that are, however, quite simple to Hoover up. That'll give me an excuse for another tidy up, so another benefit.

Turned 8 lengths of 42mm galvanised tube down to 1 5/8" so I can weld them into the holes I've cut in the square columns for my shed's bridge crane to allow the cabling in the dado trunking to pass through.

Then did some machining on a ball bearing equipped curtain-string-tensioning-weight for Mother-in-Law.

Then did some work on fittings for some flexible conduit for SWMBO's workshop.

All this while the house was 30°C, the garage 32°C, the greenhouse 37°C, and the workshop was 19°C...

It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it.

Because the problem is due to slack between the quill rack and the pinion, one solution could be to determine the number of teeth and pitch (presumably metric module) of the pinion, then order an approptiate anti-backlash gear from the likes of HPC gears. Note that this is not a cheap option.

It may also be possible to fit a compression spring between the top of the quill and the bearing seat at the top of the head to pre-load the rack/pinion slightly. Hopefully there would be enough movement available in the quill return spring to be able to increase its tension to counteract the additional spring.

Apologies John S. I had got it in my mind to give you a call about your surplus steel, but Father in law was needing full time care (Then popped his clogs). The Lad bent the car on the way up to the Doncaster show, Then Mother in law needed help, yada yada yada.

What is irritating is that I spent all Saturday at Sawley village hall two weeks ago and could have popped in...

Trouble is that also it rusts at any provocation and dents/scratches if you look at it crossly...

Sorry, not the case. Why in Hades should I be assaulted by a mobile telephone interface on a 27" monitor?

I suffer this on my Win 2k12 server, but it hasn't been permitted on any of the 6 other Windows desktop or laptop machines in the household.

One should admit that one's tongue was quite firmly in one's cheek when one wrote that comment.

I also delight in annoying Microsoft's grammar checker. "Hi I'm clippy and it looks like you're British."

The passive voice should always be used in articles concerning the construction of tools and equipment, since they are factual works and not ladies' romances. Oxford commas may be used where appropriate, though.

Where's that beer I just put down?

For the main bearings, I went for:-

these

For the top bearing I went for:-

this

You might as well replace all the bearings at the same time. The cost is quite reasonable.

I had ended up replacing all the bearings in the motor, quill and head in the course of my rebuild, but my machine hadn't been treated kindly.

I've got two 10" blanks cut to make a pair of poly-V pulleys to replace the originals, where a previous owner used a crowbar to move the belt, but I haven't got around to that just yet.