Member postings for mick

Just tell them your deaf as a post and you can't wear hearing aids for any length of time.

babolts.co.uk

I did bring my experiences to the attention of the editor of ME at the time and for several months their banner didn't appear in shopping partners, but alas it found its way back a couple of years ago. Best to avoid.

I had the same problem several years ago, it took three months to deliver my order and then some pieces were the wrong grade, haven't used them since. There are plenty of commercial stock holders on line who will fill small orders with a couple of days turn around. Try Metal4u or cliclmetal.

If your starting out don't touch retro fitted machines. A manual machine was designed to be just that. There are plenty of training machines about, but I would recommend the Seig KX1 or KX3. I've had a KX1 for over ten years and wouldn't be without it. Once commissioned (you need some IT skills) the conversational programming is easy to master and you can stitch any number of different operations together to build very complex programs.

The old style 'English' type tool holder did put the tip of the cutter directly under the clapper box fulcrum, but this was superseded many moons ago by the now universal American lantern type tool holder, which puts the tip in front of the fulcrum point. Swan neck ( English) and Goose neck ( American ) tooling is designed to avoid tool tip dig in.

Hi. Bo'sun.

Its the action of the clapper box that drags the tool back along the work piece which has a tendency to dull the cutting edge of a carbide tool. A simple lifting rig with a roller mounted just behind the cutter and clamped in the tool post will , on the back stroke contact the work first lifting the tool clear of the work piece. Your welcome.

Regards.

Mick

Unless you can lift the tool clear on the return stroke the tip will rub against the work piece and dull the cutting edge. Modern carbide should be able to withstand the initial impact.

The cutter is way too far out of the collet. The collets look like pin chuck collets and would allow sideways movement. Can you fit a small ER collet to the spindle, you might have better results.

I've had my little Seig KX1 for ten years and now wouldn't be without it. I constantly use small diameter solid carbide cutters ranging from 1mm up to 6mm dia. The Mach3 control has excellent conversational programming, where you select the material, tool type and diameter and it calculates speed and chip load (feed) In my experience its the depth of cut that snaps small diameter cutters rather than the feed rate. Write a simple sub routine and vary the cutter depths and see how you get on.

There was a tip in MEW a bit back about using the hardened stainless steel calibrated slide of a digital caliper or machine table readout. These are indeed very accurately ground and can be cut to length using a parting disc on a small angle grinder. When your caliper packs up recycle it as a set of parallels.

Aldi Lime scale remover, works a treat!

An old turners trick from an old turner. If your using hard jaws to produce several identicial parts and you need to remove the parts from the chuck for different operations like roughing all the parts and then finishing, simply select a jaw say No.1 and draw two lines on the part either side of the jaw. If the back face of the part is tight against the face of the chuck they should all go back as near as dammit.

They're chip breakers, depending on the material and depth of cut they were positioned close or away from the cutting edge using the racks. I can remember when they were state of the art but nobody really knew how to use them to the best advantage as the lathes had speed ranges of 1000 rpm tops as they were designed for HSS

I need a computer with a parallel printer port to run the ports and pins on my Mach3 control for my mill. Also my laptop which runs Windows7 is the only computer that will support the control for my Denford lathe.

Hi.

FC1 Free cutting. These days for general stock items I use Amazon or Type in 'off cuts' on eBay.

Hi David. I should have said that I was getting the same situation when the sketch is, to what I think, is closed. In the heal box it says that it doesn't conform to the 0.01mm tolerance, but the sketch had snap to grid ticked and so I would assume each line would be closed.

Hi. Jason, its been far too quiet of late! I've been trying all the methods you've demonstrated but I can't get the results in your screen shots. My screen shots are in reverse order ( can't even get that right!) With the sketch I've produced I get the warning that the sketch isn't closed when I exit sketching. The sketch will only rotate when the Y axis is selected, screen shot two, if I select either X or Z I get the result shown in screen shot 3 and that's before I click the okay tab. When I click okay on the rotated sketch I get the result shown in screen shot 3

Thanks Jason, that will keep me quiet for a bit!!