The Home Machinist!

If you clamp 30 different dowel pins in a drill chuck, you should get the same (or near the same) runout for each pin. That is, in 3 different drill chucks with .003 of runout, holding the same #50 drill, you will get .003 on your indicator. The runout should not be greatly affected by the diameter ...

I've never done anything with farm equipment, but since folks are talking about full-featured horizontal milling machines: Used, single-pallet horizontal CNC mills are not expensive when you're looking at making money off them. The envelopes are good, and the horsepower is excellent. The single tabl...

I decided that most of the stuff I had taken pictures of has pretty much zero relevence to a home shop type environment, so I gave it up. Those were all less than 640x480. I think it was 585x480, or something similar, because 640x480 didn't fit the aspect ratio of the picture.

Jose, just like on professional websites displaying exactly what you are saying you want to display, the image should be linked, not shown. The only difference being that professional webpages host the images locally while on chaski, that means dropping it on one of the free image hosting services a...

If you go elsewhere on the web, almost all professional websites laid out in a tabular style (column driven layout, with row cells of text) restrict images on the page to LESS than 800 x 600. 640 x 480 is the most common. That should speak for itself. Large images are unwieldy even with 4000" m...

Harold_V wrote: I am of the opinion that your cutter is high on one tooth. That means that, for all practical purposes (where finish is concerned), you are using a single toothed cutter, not a multi-toothed cutter. Only the highest tooth defines the finish.

agree

You guys are my heroes.

Glenn-- Is it correct to say that by lowering the feed rate I EFFECTIVELY increased the spindle RPM? Still, a higher spindle RPM would allow me to increase the feed rate . . . which would be very desireable. --Bill No. You decreased the chip load per tooth, that's all. The speed at the perhipery of...

Yeah, that tool looks just fine for the job. When working manually, I freehand hole chamfers on the milling machine or drill press (multiflute cutters only). Set the machine to the lowest speed, and put up a post on the table in case the part spins. I set a stop on the machine head for a depth refer...

Mostly because I've seen the threads on PM on the various tracer tricks. Some jobs I've just really needed one form cut in pre-existing parts, or copying some existing part form, using gages/etc. "Good" cnc equipment (edit: this is specific to lathes, not mills), in my opinion, usually doe...

I work with CNC all day long and wish we had a tracer lathe.

Get the tracer.

Edit:

There have been threads over on PM about using random stuff as templates for tracers and it working out very well. Radius gages, angle gages, other parts, etc.

I just want to point out two image editing programs that people here may be interested in. Both these are open source (free), and very good. ImageMagick - http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php ImageMagick is a command-line program that will do all kinds of crazy things to a directory of images...