The Home Machinist!

Greg, I’ve decided to stay away from All Rustoleum paint. I’ve found that it chips badly at the slightest impact with any metal object. Frustrating how easily it chips, and how big the flakes are that pop off the surface. No more for me! Alternatantly, when I refinished my Ottaway, couple years ago...

So my only experience with a Sunnen is professional; we’d drill and bore aluminum parts then hone just about every single hole, from .080 to 3” diameter. For the most part setting up the boring bar was more work than it was worth, and our mills were pushing 35 years old, so the honing was more to ma...

Just kidding: was window shopping and “accidentally” hit the buy now button. Oh well.

Man I suck at budgeting.

I think I’ve crossed paths with your build thread a few times here; that’s one sharp looking engine! Great choice and fine modeling.

Speaking of, I’m pretty sure I bought my Kozo A3 book straight off DLS. Now it’s all on amazon and the only one available is “used good” for $150? $150??? What is going on here...

I looked it up on Village press, and they still have it at $50. Life on earth can continue. I was getting worried.

Y’know that brings up an interesting point, maybe I can drag it back into the Kozo category. Kozo’s books are so popular because they are complete instructionals: follow every step and you’ve learned how to machine while also producing an engine. They use common home shop tools to the point you cou...

If you try again in Solidworks, might I suggest using a traditional set of part and assembly files, rather than a single multibody part. Then all your problems down the road will go away. You could probably still do dynamic scaling with tables if you really wanted to. The main issue with that in pr...

Hi Ian, Thunderskunk is right. When you are designing machine tools, you design to minimize deflection, not for strength. That is why machine tools have heavy castings, etc. Cast iron is also used a lot because it won't gall and seize at all, it "self lubricates" because of graphite in the grain st...

Sorry this a little of topic. Hi Richard, I was thinking of using epoxy composite for the frame. It would be great to have a thread on it! Ian Man, talk about gettin hijacked. I’m pretty confused, why would you want to use a composite to make a mill? I haven’t made my own CNC machine; I don’t have ...

A comment about Solidworks, if you are a veteran, they offer a very cheep license. $20 a year as I recall. As you found many of the programs also are cheep/free if you have an education email address. So I used that in 2018, and while it was less than ideal it did function for a hot minute. I tried...

My problem is definitely not with my CNC, haha. https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20200514/8c2e5cd22f3b91341ec25d5dfe9d8d76.jpg What I did was pick my favorite brands from working in the industry to use in my own shop; every investment from the machine control to the style burr knife was of considera...

So... it's been a crazy year. I tried doing my own business. It didn't work out, and I made just about... oh .002% progress on my G5C pacific project. Mainly made a nice pile of scrap in between a lot of other work and the not-so-occasional farmer with broken this and that (you'd think I'd get a bre...