The Home Machinist!

Harold and Bill-- Harold , thank you for the invaluable tips and guidance! Regarding my decision on undersizing the shank diameter . . . I mic'ed several 3/4" and 5/8" shanks on end mills. They all appeared to be half a thousandths undersized. (Maybe my mic is off that much.) So I was shoo...

All-- Thanks for all the help! I went with Plan X. Last night I logged into McMaster-Carr and looked at sticky tape. To be brief, the list wasn't brief. Most of it was foam-backed. I was thinking that was not what I wanted. I am sure some selections were what I wanted, but none of the descriptions s...

All--

My almost-no-name digital caliper served me faithfully for well over a decade. It bit the dust. I suspect cutting fluid killed it. I like to use a digital caliper for roughing in. For closer work I use manual mics.

I replaced it with this Mitutoyo.


I like it so far.

--Bill

Harold-- Re: " I'm at a loss to understand why you might want to use the plate, but I'm open to your thoughts. " Not a good idea on my part. Thanks for the sanity check. The piece with face milling marks is a piece that I face milled rather inexpertly years ago. I am going to use it as the...

(continued from above) First, I center-drilled my workpiece so I could use a live center in the tailstock for extra support. Then I started making chips. They were blue. I switched from Viper’s Venom cutting fluid to Rustlick cutting and tapping fluid. It seemed to work just as well and produced a l...

All— I needed a fly cutter better than the one I had, which holds the bit at a 45* angle. I don’t like it. I started off wanting to build it from 12L14, thinking I had a 3” diameter chunk of that material laying around. It turned out to be an inch. But, I found a 2.25” diameter piece of 1018. I deci...

Bill and Harold-- I like both ideas. Thank you very much! Regarding the sticky tape approach: Why not clean a flat piece of material sufficiently larger than my workpiece, then bolt it to the mill table and then sticky tape the workpiece to it? The surface of my workpiece has a face mill finish now....

All-- I've got a little piece of 3/8" x 4" x 5" aluminum that I need to hold for fly cutting. It has been chamfered, top and bottom on all four sides, so I only have 1/4" thickness to hold. My attempts to hold it in the Kurt so far have been less than optimal as when I tighten th...

Bill and All-- FALSE ALARM!!! I made an amateurish mistake. I'll explain . . . When I moved the machinery to its new home, I took pains to tram the head of the mill to the table. I got it to about 0" in the x axis and less than .001" in the y-axis. So, that made me happy. The other day, I ...

All-- [ALL IS GOOD NOW. I RECOVERED FROM MY STUPIDITY, as you can read in the following post.] My mill is nodding off. I have a Grizzly 3616 (Bill S. caught the error in model number) vertical mill. I can spin the head horizontally and vertically. Except to tram the head to the table in the x-axis, ...

Russell--

Thank you for all that! I will check out Fusion while I lose the green color of my envy concerning your skill!

--Bill

Tom-- I certainly did not think ill of you! Thank you for the help. The process you describe above is far, far beyond my abilities. I strained a bit making the simple cover for the box shown in the photo. However, it was faithful to the original, simple cover. I take a lot of pictures with my phone ...