The Home Machinist!

5/8" would be rock bottom minimum; for a machine like that I'd go bigger. I made 16mm [5/8"] feet for my workbench. It's a heavy bench, but featherweight compared to your mill. The rod only extends an inch or less. As you can see from the pictures, I threaded 30mm square stock for a solid attachment...

As you will have a center hole, and presuming you have sheet material, a holesaw is fast and efficient. 25 years ago when I didn't even have a lathe to call my own, I made a tool for this; a short piece of 40mm rod to clamp in the lathe with a threaded hole, and a matching part with a hole to bolt t...

Humbling

I think I'll go to the flea market next week.

I concur; People say this one or that one really works, but I stopped believing any claims of penetrating oils long ago. If you can get it to move, however slightly, the stuff will work in fairly quickly. I took out some mild steel porthole bolts that had been installed 100 years earlier. They came ...

The first power miter saw I bought couldn't cut a straight line in heavy stock; fitting floorboards was a disaster. The rods would just bend from the load during cutting. Better ones came out [expensive], so I used to just grab the thing in the shop and see if it would deflect with a little arm pres...

We don't have HF in the EU, but I did buy a pair of heavy "5 ton" noname mystery jackstands, probably about the same thing. They're just lumps of steel; there's little to fail in them. I set my 4 ton tractor on them without a worry. When I was a pro mechanic I bought expensive tools, but I didn't ha...

Injured while asleep in bed; that just isn't fair!
But the chainsaw blade story... WOW. Ron, you're lucky something really bad didn't happen.

I've just ruined my good clothes with ammonia solution , but after you guys told your tales I'm proud to go around town with my bleached spots.

It's dead easy to build a bracket to hold a long travel indicator. While my Graziano has a calibrated dial on the carriage feed, I still use such a setup. It's far more reliable, and lightning fast to adjust to the desired location. My setup allows for the use of longer than 1" travel indicators, t...

Thanks; I didn't have the guts to spray diesel around before traveling. That stuff STINKS. But when I get home I'll do it.
The cutting oil looks and smells like a petroleum based product; clear and yellowish. Could be hygroscopic... I guess that would do it.

the first emblem was probably a more accurate illustration of government 'innovation'; machine locked in place.

I have no way to measure carriage movement; so I keep the compound at zero so I can use the dial to measure the length of a cut or bore. Since it won't be very accurate, I use the carriage for cutting once the dimension is established. this gets me to within +- 0.2mm quickly, which is usually close ...