The Home Machinist!

If you can build much of the stuff yourself, it shouldn't cost that much. I'm using steel flat bar "groovy track" on wood ties which I cut from scrap and router cut the grooves into them. I got a bunch of old oil based stains from family and friends for free and mixed them all together along with so...

Looks like fun Glenn! Definitely some wheel slippage there, indeed it might be time to play with a sander.

Ryan, just looked a photo of the part - enlarged view of the base. It’s not a lathe compound mount, as I first thought. Looks more like an old shaper vise base of some sort...very much doubt if it would work- no swiveling center post and the the beveled ring /grove is absent. Appears to be a Franke...

I have always found when machining castings that I was better off to have a fair amount of material to remove, otherwise any remaining sand/grit and the sometime hard crust on the castings wiped out the tool quickly. Being I am machining mine from laser cut plates, I leave myself at least 1/16th, or...

I do not, it's not a bolted connection, it has a diameter protruding out the bottom with a tapered groove in it. Special bolts with rounded tips are threaded in and allow the compound to spin 360*, and the taper pulls it down solid when the bolts are tightened. I figure it's size and depth is probab...

Train mountain and Kitsap both are 7.5" gage rails. They operate 1.5" scale (1/8 scale), and also narrow gage which is 2.5" scale on the same tracks. I am in the process of working on a 2" scale RR on 12" gage, to also "work" on my property taking the trash and recycling up a long driveway and trans...

The cold temperature the propane can reach can cause the seals to get hard and crack on the quick connect air fittings, my boss made a weed burner using what he had kicking around and all the sudden he had a fire at his quick connect.

What do you have to work with for tools and equipment? I've seen everything from wood frame bolt together kits to fully fabricated steel frames like Glenn and I have both built. Discover Live Steam's site also has a buy and sell section that has some flat car offerings as well as frames already buil...

It looks like the tool post is going to fit the compound pretty good, I was worried it was going to be too small.

As Richard says, you can get draft into the smoke box from the top of the stack! I just tested my exhaust out the stack and found 1/3rd of my stack drawing air INTO the smoke box (blower offset a little) on the port side of my engine. I used a long strip of paper. The exhaust sucked the paper into ...

I have a very heavy 48" x 24" bench I built years ago with 4ea 600# locking castors on it. It's got 6 4x4 columns, top and bottom surfaces are two layers of liquid nails laminated 3/4" plywood, 2x6 perimeter frames and it has some cross bracing on one end and one side. I built it to unload engines a...

When you crank the compound back, you can see the screw from underneath. It's stamped G110 is the only marks I could find. It has about a 2-5/8" diameter cylinder sticking out the bottom with a tapered ring cut into it so it can rotate 360*. The picture I posted has a $1 bill in it for scale. Its ab...