The Home Machinist!

Y’know that brings up an interesting point, maybe I can drag it back into the Kozo category. Kozo’s books are so popular because they are complete instructionals: follow every step and you’ve learned how to machine while also producing an engine. They use common home shop tools to the point you cou...

If you try again in Solidworks, might I suggest using a traditional set of part and assembly files, rather than a single multibody part. Then all your problems down the road will go away. You could probably still do dynamic scaling with tables if you really wanted to. The main issue with that in pr...

Hi Ian, Thunderskunk is right. When you are designing machine tools, you design to minimize deflection, not for strength. That is why machine tools have heavy castings, etc. Cast iron is also used a lot because it won't gall and seize at all, it "self lubricates" because of graphite in th...

Sorry this a little of topic. Hi Richard, I was thinking of using epoxy composite for the frame. It would be great to have a thread on it! Ian Man, talk about gettin hijacked. I’m pretty confused, why would you want to use a composite to make a mill? I haven’t made my own CNC machine; I don’t have ...

A comment about Solidworks, if you are a veteran, they offer a very cheep license. $20 a year as I recall. As you found many of the programs also are cheep/free if you have an education email address. So I used that in 2018, and while it was less than ideal it did function for a hot minute. I tried...

My problem is definitely not with my CNC, haha. https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20200514/8c2e5cd22f3b91341ec25d5dfe9d8d76.jpg What I did was pick my favorite brands from working in the industry to use in my own shop; every investment from the machine control to the style burr knife was of considera...

So... it's been a crazy year. I tried doing my own business. It didn't work out, and I made just about... oh .002% progress on my G5C pacific project. Mainly made a nice pile of scrap in between a lot of other work and the not-so-occasional farmer with broken this and that (you'd think I'd get a bre...

A $2.99 small Golf Club bought at Good Will. Wife ask: what you gonna do, take up golfing? I ground it flat on two perpendicular faces and stuck several super-strong magnets from a e-bike motor. No more bending to pick up parts that fall on the floor. Too painful to bend my back. Each mechanic alwa...

First aid kit. See my avitar :lol: Also, the three-cornered scraper is great for taking the sharp edges off most anything, even when spinning in the lathe. The tweezers retrieve any small screws from the parts department that are smaller than about #6, and the 4-inch Starrett rule is much handier t...

A Tapping Stand. I made mine from offcuts from various sources. The base was a dumpster remnant of 1" structural steel plate, working surface 8"x10". The column is 1.25" diameter steel, copper lapped to within a 10th over its length (my first go at lapping.) The arm is built-up ...

My father always told me to have a pair of scissors in my tool box; most folks don’t have them in their own kits (usually box cutters or wire nippers instead), so the idea is people are always coming to you for the scissors. If they lose em, you can rest easy and say “don’t worry about it, they’re j...

As whateg0 said to keep from singing like a bell Something I learned the first time I took brake drum to true. The old days when we had drum brakes. Used to work in a roundhouse where they turned the wheels on the engine. You had to wear ear protection within a half mile radius, it was crazy. Never...