The Home Machinist!

I bought a checkering file, and yes they are pricey. I had to part with forty dollar bill, to get mine. Paying for it though, is just half of the merry-go-round. You have to work slowly, deliberately and carefully, cleaning the file after every pass and never dragging it backwards. ( breaks off deli...

I recently tried out a tankless Kool-Mist system, and discovered that my end mills were doing a better job, and staying sharp longer. It won't take it long to pay for itself, at this rate. I'm not much for letting my enthusiasms get out of hand, but I have to admit that the Kool-Mist do-dad is a gre...

This is going to sound weird - but check out your local farmer's Co-Op for steel. - Especially if you live in a rural or remote area where industrial supply houses are few and far between. Farmers are always having to do on-the-spot repairs to their tractors, plows and other heavy equipment. For thi...

This is going to sound weird - but check out your local farmer's Co-Op for steel. - Especially if you live in a rural or remote area where industrial supply houses are few and far between... Farmers are always having to do on-the-spot repairs to their tractors, plows and other heavy equipment. For t...

I dunno about sales on indexers today... I bought mine six months or so ago, along with a few collets as I was wanting to make butterknife bolt handles from 5/8" diameter free-machining steel. I had made one handle using V-blocks in the milling vise, which worked OK for a one-off, but would be ...

I plan to jewel the bolt soon on a 98 Mauser I am working on. In a discussion forum I read about somebody using a 5c collet spin-indexer to jewel rifle bolts. I have spin-indexer, and know that it rotates 360 degrees in one degree increments. Here's the indexer I have, it cost me 29 bucks on sale. (...

I get best results with a very simple setup: * A gallon zip-lock baggie with a medium strong magnet inside. * A coffee can with diesel fuel * A rag * A 1" paintbrush I use the paintbrush to chase all of the chips into a pile, then I use the magnet in the baggie to pick them up. Once the chips a...

It made a dramatic difference on my particular gun. It went from averaging one or two smokestack jams per magazine to the point where I experienced one jam out of 250 rounds. The one that jammed was some ammo I normally only fire in my TC Contender, some un-plated, low power target stuff. ( Winchste...

My Ruger Mk III pistol was prone to stovepipe jams. It would get one and sometimes two of them in each magazine full of ammo. I kept asking around different forums until somebody told me that the magazine could be modified to fix this problem. There are two pairs of lips on the magazine, separated b...

Please forgive me for asking a trivial question. - I am curious about the the contents of large red plastic box that is placed across the ways in the second picture. Also: You mention that there is a center in the action. I am wondering what means you are using to give the lathe a good turning grip ...

I've had one of the big HF drill presses for a couple of years now. My only problem with it was that the monster chuck it came with would not grip smaller bits - so I ordered a new tapered stub and a smaller chuck from Grizzly so that I could quickly swap them out as needed. I had to consult the Mac...

If you look at the different brands of machinery manufactured in China, you will probably notice that they all tend to look very similar, leading one to suppose that perhaps the paint job and the labels are the only real differences there. That turns out not to be the case. The clone-like look comes...