The Home Machinist!

Just to clarify, leadscrews and ballscrews (and thus ballnuts) are very different things. I'm going to assume you mean the latter. They can be had from various vendors, in various accuracies, at a variety of costs per foot. Never having had to buy a ballscrew, I can't say what those prices are. They...

I am not trying to be a big confrontational asshat here, but this is my experience so far in a production shop. Take this for what it is. I find soft jaws have superior clamping on out of round parts and scale. When one crushes the part with hard jaws, it releases some of the clamping pressure from ...

There've been some interesting posts on PM and articles in the industry magazines lately from manufacturing folks in China, both mainland and Taiwan. The same message comes out. They can build much, much more accurate and better designed machines than we think they can. They build these for their ow...

Google does not want you printing anything not in public domain, so there isn't going to be an "easy" way to get the pages. Copyright and all that. However, I do know several of my friends have used the following to grab stuff for school projects (which falls under fair use): http://www.co...

I'd like to second the "don't set it and forget it." Sit around and read a magazine, or get on your laptop (my personal favorite), but be by the machine. There are shops that can, and do, set it and forget it. But they spend a lot more than 2500 bucks to get that capability. There are heis...

.0000116 is one band of helium.

Spin indexers only lock in every 15 degrees or so. No free spinning, so no endmill sharpening/etc. The rotary table is far more versatile overall, and can do everything the 5c can do but slower. I prefer working with a spin indexer if possible, just for the speed. However, if I had to only have one,...

Hm! That A word is nice to know, nobody uses it around here (and thus my faulty information). We don't do a whole lot of threading, so that's probably why.

Thanks, Mark.

True. CNC lathes do not infeed on an angle for threading, nor do they care about the compound slide in the first place. My recommendation is to remove the compound entirely and replace it with a solid platform for a toolholder or turret. Add rigidity and remove a source of positioning error in one f...

Foundation requirements for most machines are not insane. What a person has to keep an eye on is level. As you put a heavy machine tool in place, over the next few weeks the owner will need to check and re-level the base as everything settles. Even after the majority of the settling has completed, i...

I would disagree that modern american made machine tools are the best, and I'd like to justify that by talking out in left field for a couple paragraphs. Old american iron is good, new american iron is.. pretty good? But I don't believe the best. The japaneese currently manufacture the best all-purp...

Boring bar. Reamers and double drilling work great - provided you can test the process on a blank first in identical conditions. For critical stuff, I never, ever just do it if I'm going to be using a reamer. My experience so far has been that even an expensive, high quality reamer can vary as much ...