The Home Machinist!

I'm not $1300 worth of interested, but for occasional jobs on a lathe an air mist system would save a lot of hassle. Even though I have the pump for oil, I still need to cut a hole in the chip tray, make an oil tank, and buy several gallons of expensive cutting oil. Since most of the bits came out o...

I need to drill some rifle barrels in the relatively near future, and I'm accumulating pieces-parts to do it in my lathe. While looking for oil pump volume and pressure figures, I noticed Sterling is now selling their "Spraymist" system, which uses 100 PSI shop air and some kind of pump th...

I was tidying up my toolboxes earlier this week, found the sine bar I'd never used, and realized I'd never ordered any gage blocks to use with it. Oooh, shiny!... I was looking at prices online, and then started wondering exactly what I'd use them for. Gage pins I use all the time, blocks... I'm goi...

I used to ship stuff to Canada. So long ago it was on floppy disks... I sent stuff all over the world - African countries I'd never heard of, the USSR, East Germany, Egypt... the *only* packages that never made it were the ones that went to Canada; about one in four simply vanished after they left t...

I used to be in the engine rebuilding business. I can't even guess how many times I had a Woodruff key tilt when trying to install a harmonic balancer. Since many balancers are a press fit as well as keyed, sometimes you don't know there's a problem (the key is behind the timing cover) until the bal...

A fresh wheel - like the one a couple of days ago - has no visible runout, and I didn't feel any pulsing when I held the diamond dresser to it when I first spun it up.

I bought a 6" Black & Decker bench grinder back, oh, maybe 1992. I used the wheel it came with until it was maybe 3" around, replaced it with a wheel from Wal-Mart, then one from Lowes, then in the last couple of years, various wheels from Harbor Freight, "Forney" brand from ...

So, what's the next project?

Slightly off-topic, if you ever get a good deal on drills you don't need, snag them. Someone gave me a box of assorted Nachi drills a few years ago. They were mostly letter sizes, and odd ones at that - the ones in my drill index were still virgins. But hey, free tooling... Over the years I've put t...

I have an engine block out in the shop, about 3-1/2" bore, that was die cast aluminum over iron liners. The liners have wavy ridges on the outsides so they can't shift if the engine overheats.

SteveHGraham wrote:You can get a USA-made Rocky Mountain Twist Drill index for about $234 at Suncoast Precision Tools.

My 2x4 of spare drills doesn't look nearly as ghetto as it did a moment ago...

While we're talking about dressing, is it best to do it with coolant on or coolant off?