What Did You Do Today 2019

A few years ago i was given most of a horizontal mill, I have the space for it so rather than see it go to the scrappy I gave it a home. The intention was to convert it in to a surface grinder, but after some thought a second mill would be far more useful, particularly a another vertical.

Eventually I acquired a suitable head to adapt to fit the machine, specifically one from a Chinese lathe/mill. This had a 3MT taper, I need 4MT so the tooling is interchangeable with the other mill, so made a new spindle with a 4MT.

But how to get the taper running absolutely true? I've done this in the past by finishing the taper on the mill by angling the head over at the right angle with a boring bar clamped vertical on the table , that is to say finishing the spindle off its own bearings.

Problem is that the head does not have the tilting facility. The attached photos show how I did the job. I borrowed a second fixed stead so I could "clamp" the quill to the lathe bed and used a cranked carrier to drive the spindle, (from a chuck jaw). I was pleasantly surprised at the rigidity of the setup.

John

Great exitement in the household today - well, MY half of it, anyway - because the surface grinder arrived by pallet courier and I've unpacked it to check if it has sustained any damage en route from the Orient. None, so far as I can see, so, engine hoist out tomorrow and wriggle it into what little room there is left in the garage/workshop.

Hopefully, I'll now be able to make high precision errors in my machining.

John

Fixed the donkey saw by adding weight to the hacksaw end - now it cuts rather than skates across the surface

Messed around with the WM180 banjo, 3D printed another to try out new geometry in the hope of adding a tumbler reverse gear, way to go yet, but it's promising - or I could wait until I can afford a half-decent lathe

Tried the mig welder which has been sat for a while - no joy, looks like the control board has a fault, intermittently feeding wire, motor is fine, another thing to fix

I was going to weld up a bracket to tension the shaper motor, but I'll have a G&T instead, slimline...

Made a new whistle spindle for the S160s - big WW2 American locos, of which our railway has 2.

There were 2 questions I had to ask the top loco fitter - was the 13 thou back taper on the shaft of the original meant to be there? and is that approx. 1" spherical radius on the valve seat surface critical, or can I just offhand-grind a form tool and finish with emery wet-and-dry?

Answers were that the taper's spurious, so I turned it parallel within about a thou, and the seat's supposed to be a 45 degree cone, so that's what I did. They'll soon let me know if there's an issue - but I've seen that loco fitter practically rebuild one of the S160s, and he's in the middle of an 8F now, so I'll not be arguing with him!

I can hear the S160s whistle from my house on a quiet day, so it'll be nice to hear it work as and when it's fitted.

Note: those are 150mm tiles

Finally got some time abusing metal after several weeks filled with house renovations. Managed to make a start on the loco buffers by turning up the shanks. Once they are done I can turn my attention to the housings and then the buffer faces. Just need to find a lump of 50mm dia steel bar which I can slice up with the bandsaw.

Once must be careful when starting a post with ' I Finally completed my XYZ thingy...'.!

Some post back I showed my 'finally' completed stepperised rotary table/Hobber and the electronic controller I made for it.

The controller did angle steps, division steps , continuous rotation and a hobbing mode. And that was done...

But, I had left out some very obvious requirements..The is no manual mode to rotate the table manually, as you would a none electronic table, and no way to jog the table to a set position to begin stepping from of hobbing from.

So..Here is the finally finished all new version...With a manual mode and the controls a little better consolidated.

Had to make a new housing for it - the last ( nice) plastic box was all used up and I could not find more..

Ready to bend..

And to paint..

And the new front panel engraved and routed.

Paul White ( also a fellow forummer) iis going to built one as well, but with some added features - he has two rotary tables , one small, one large, with different gear ratios, and a gear hobber with yet a different gear ratio and autofeed on the hob.

Also a few more controls..

So Paul's panel functions are so:

Joe

Decided that I needed a more robust fly cutter so dug out a bit of round bar and got to work. Ended up with a decent looking fly cutter which fits into a 19mm collet. The cross bar is 25mm diameter and drilled to accept a 12mm Hss bar. Now I need to learn to grind the Hss bit correctly and get some test cuts done.

After 11 months I have finished the i/c rockerblock engine,designed by Brian Rupnow.All that remains is to wait for the thread lock to set on the tank feed and tomorrow i'll try to start it.

Frank

What controller are you using Joseph? I'm sure you have mentioned that in the past, but I can't remember which family it was!

T'was the NUCLEO-446 - an ARM Cortex based STM 32 bit processor. The Nucleo board is an ARDUINO look-alike and costs around $8.00 US. Part of the board is a USB based Programmer to load the code - this part can be snapped of to leave just the main board. Base clock is 8MHz with an internal PLL that can multiply clock by up to 20X

I use this in all my machine applications; the Shaper NC update, both lathes ELS feed controllers, even in my Wife's Cheese curing chamber for temp and humidity control!

Joe

Spent nearly an hour setting up some 0.016 brass to drill a line of 1/32 holes and then found that the drill didn't reach the metal!

Oh well, I'll try again today.

Brian

Made two buffer housings today, machined from solid 25mm MS bar. Two more to go then i can start on the buffer heads, but tomorrow and Tuesday are both full up so will have to wait until Wednesday .

Yesterday finally got round to machining new pallet for my recreation of a Synchronome clock (see previous post on making the bob here.

Upper photo is the brass pallet and slotted collet. The pallet profile was cnc milled with code generated to form the "ideal" profile described in Frank Hope-Jones' book on Electric Clocks. All the calculations and g-code done in an Excel spreadsheet. Many hours of working out, about 5 minutes machining. The two M4 holes were to clamp the brass blank on to a composite backing clamped to the mill table, the big hole in the collet is 10 mm, the pallet made from 1/8" brass. Still need to do a bit of trimming and deburring, solder the pallet into the collet, and clean it up.

It's now tomorrow and I've managed the setup. Drilled about 200 holes, spaced using my DRO, without breaking a drill!

I've just caught the drill on the sleeve of my jumper and broken it!

Brian

Slight diversion today from the normal stuff this is an extra long poker for a friend who finds it difficult to bend down to poke his log burning stove. This should do the job! it's 1/2" square hot rolled mild steel, the handle is a piece of pine scrap sandwiched between two black Acetal end caps. Topped off with a brass finial and circular hook. Hope its not too heavy!

That made me laugh Brian! After 200 holes too

Ian

LO 1.0

LOL 2.0

I'm not alone in faffing up...

Made a flat screen guard I have been going to make for ages. I have had the spare mag base since leaving work and the piece of lexon so just a shaft and clamp and a hand knob I already had. Just a useful piece of kit when fly cutting etc.

David