Member postings for David Taylor

Made a dummy brake cylinder. Nothing here you all haven't done a 1000 times before but an enjoyable, non-precise, non-working, decorative shiny thing.

David.

Got the rear brakes on. The pullrods were done on the CNC mill and I also used it to do one particular cut on the brakeshoes.

Now onto make the handbrake parts and dummy airbrake components.

Regards, David.

I just came across this page from a LBSC/CAD fellow traveller. http://ibls.org/mediawiki/index.php?title=LBSC%27s_Virginia

Nice hinge. A new cutter is always nice, even the cheap ones I get off eBay. One day I'll find a proper supplier and buy a good one and it will no doubt be even better, but it hardly seems worth it with my ramshackle set-ups and out of tram machines.

Really nice Brian - I can well imagine the stress of making that appear from a solid block but you've done it!

I spent a lot of the non-work week planning and making these brake shoes. They still need their inside edges rounding off the clear the flange root and the hanger slots probably need to be deeper but I might just do that with a file as I don't have a suitable endmill or slitting saw.

Regards, David.

I have a Tormach superfly that uses carbide inserts. I used it recently on cast iron with the inserts recommended for aluminium and it gave the best finish I've ever achieved at a speed easily within the capability of a manual mill. I'm planning on using it on my RF-45 clone in future. It has a 19mm shank.

I'm sure there are clones of this cutter if you don't want to pay the Tormach price.

I set the stepover at 0.25mm and used both vertical and horizontal passes. I think the horizontal ones were unnecessary.

Even so it only took about 8 or 10 minutes for each setup I think. Pretty quick and easy.

There is some weird faceting where to two radii meet on the corners but nothing a bit of sandpaper doesn't fix.

All up I was very pleased with the result. I'll be honest and say I don't fully comprehend the settings I used in the toolpath setup dialog. I basically told it to not touch any face near the fillet, do anything between 0-90 degrees, give it the fillet radius, set the step over, and clicked the 'also do horizontal passes' checkbox. I just kept fiddling until I was happy with the toolpath in the simulation. Then I did a short trial run in the air, took a deep breath and let it go on the part.

Over the last few days I got that piece of wood on the bottom of the toolbox, made the front and mid brake hanger pedestals and bottom cross bars, and rounded over the corners of the sandboxes. The photo of the sandboxes shows one straight off the machine and the other one after about 10 mins with the sandpaper. The ends of the sandboxes look rough because they were done with a roughing end mill.

The rounding over was done with a 12mm end mill as I don't have any corner rounding end mills.

David.

I have just finished this exercise. I reused the slab of the existing double garage so about 6x7m. I would like to have gone bigger but didn't want to extend the slab.

The new workshop is brick, with double-glazed windows, big barn doors so I can get big things in and out, and the next owners can get their car in if they like. Heaps of windows for light. One wall just has high windows to leave most of the wall space free for storage. There is as much insulation as I could fit in the walls and a lot in the ceiling.

I have the bench along the wall and a new milling machine takes about 1/4 of the floorspace. The lathe is between the two because I couldn't find a good place along a wall for it and if that floor space was left blank it would probably get filled with junk anyway. That leaves a corridor of about a meter either side of the lathe, which seems plenty.

I've only just got the machines back up and running and no proper storage yet so it is still a mess.

The double-glazing and insulation are excellent. It gets cold enough for sleet and a bit of snow (not enough to settle) so the winters are cold. I don't have a heater in it yet and by afternoon on a sunny day it is perfectly comfortable. A dull day is different.

I wouldn't go any smaller.

I guess long and thin gives you plenty of wall to put things against.

Have a look in my photo album for an idea of the size, layout, and natural light available.

I feel for you Mark. It's always a shame breaking a larger cutter. As long as the job's not ruined things could be worse.

I did two things today. I cut some new nameplates for my freelance 5" gauge 0-4-0 because the ones I did before looked far too big when I went to put them on. Should have printed them out for a trial but I didn't have to loco home until last weekend.

The new nameplates gave me a chance to try holding the brass down on the MDF with masking tape and superglue. It worked well and held the brass flat. The superglue let go in a few places allowing a small amount of lift. On one plate this wasn't significant because it was off the end of the job and on the other I noticed it before I started so flooded some more glue in there and weighed it down for about 20 mins. I noticed a small unmachined fragment in the lower void of the 'E' after a coat of black paint so that needs cutting down manually later once the paint dries.

There was one exciting moment when I went to profile around the outside of the plate and forgot to change Cut2D's default feed units of mm/sec to mm/min! I'm assuming the table moved at it's max rate but the 2mm cutter didn't break... I was equally relieved and impressed. The finish was rubbish though.

The other thing I did was move the lathe off the wooden blocks and further away from the mill to re-open the passage between the two so I can get around them easily. The move went without incident this time. The lathe is still a bit unsteady at the tailstock end so that part of the stand is obviously not much good. When it was on the blocks I could just move one of the two tailstock end blocks by hand with no resistance.

I think some adjustable feet might be a project in the near future unless the batch of brake parts I make on it soon come out ok, in which case I'll leave it alone. I really hate working on the machines or tooling rather than the project or loco I'm trying to build.

That was actually all yesterday. Today I am going to fix that little unmachined bit on the nameplates, fix a piece of plywood to the bottom of a tool cabinet that is of such appalling quality the castors screws simply pulled out while moving it around (don't but tool cabinets via eBay!), and perhaps making a start on the CAM for the weight reduction pocketing of the sandboxes I made last week. It would be quicker to do it manually but I need to learn to use my new machine for something other than faux-cast plaques.

David.

I just looked through your album - wow! What a beauty.

Impressive!

I finally got this house number plaque done. I'd been poking at it in F360 for about a week and couldn't get the rest machining to cover everything. I found Cut2D did it with a lot less hassle, given this is what it is designed for. I still did a lot of manual jogging around on the machine with the cutter at full depth to clean up. I missed a few bits where I was too shy to manually move the cutter so close to some features, might get some riffler files to finish them up.

The size is 200 x 125mm, using 8, 6, & 2mm cutters.

Bad bowing on the stock might account for some of the roughness but a sea of paint should hide a lot of sins.

Regards, David.

I've been looking at the code from Fusion, PP conversational, and Cut2D. I think the problem is that the Cut2D post-processor turns off tool length compensation (G49), then travels to Z20.320 which the post-processor is calling the home Z position. But when there is a tool sticking 70mm out this means it will plunge 50mm into the material! Only after this does it do the G30 like the others. It makes no sense to me, even if I had an empty spindle it is just an unnecessary Z move which will be undone by the G30 so I can put the tool in.

G0 G17 G21 G90 G40 G49 G64 P0.03
G80
G0 Z20.320 <--- Waste of time?
G0 X0.000 Y0.000
G30
T8M6
(End Mill {8 mm})
G43H8

The G0s between G80 and G30 are not required - PP and Fusion don't do them.

Put the rivets in the plate in front of the smokebox and spotted, drilled, and tapped holes in the smokebox sides (below the footplates) so the smokebox is now attached properly.

It's about 2mm too far back because the exhaust manifold turned out that way. I'll live with it!

I moved the milling machine. Couldn't find a better place for it so I'll try this.

Thanks Perko. It wobbles at the moment so needs shimming under the cabinets. But it also needs to move towards the camera in the photo below now the milling machine has been placed. The bench needs to come towards the camera too, the vice is barely usable now and I'm left-handed.

I also did some work on the 5" mogul and tried an example file in Cut2D. The Tormach post-processor has something nasty in the preamble code that plunged my slot drill right through my workpiece, which luckily was thick wood, hanging off the end of the vice! I copied the preamble from a Fusion generated file and things got better. I still didn't get to the E-stop in time, even though I was expecting trouble and had slowed the machine moves down... I think the problem is you don't want to wait forever so set the moving height to say 20mm, but that doesn't give you enough time to kill it if it continues to rapid move down.

Following many clubmates before me I turned the tires on the iron castings and once they wear out I'll turn them down flat and fit steel tyres.

My running loco has steel tyres fixed with loctite. One of them came loose once but that's not bad in about 8 years. I doubt it was the super strong loctite.

With the help of a club member who used to be a rigger we got the lathe back on its feet and onto the stand. I'd still like an opinion on the hardwood under the stand - will the lathe just fall off?

I brought the 5" mogul back from the father-in-law's workshop where it has been resting while my new workshop was built.

Also trying to make a house number faux cast sign. I can't get the rest machining operation to remove all the bits left over from the previous pocket operation. Plan B is to make the 2nd operation a normal pocket cutting mostly air and let it run for hours.

David.