What did you do Today 2024

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Got told about a link broken in the forum migration.

I fixed it and thought I’d share, as it’s a nice project.

Neil

Free Plan: A Filing Rest

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Thanks, Neil … Two PDFs duly saved

Are you aware that the text contains your pre-MORTONS eMail address ?

MichaelG.

 

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Pondered Vee-blocks, with assorted key-ways, cross-drilling and such like looming.

I have two pairs of large-ish Vee-blocks of webbed form with holes through the webs, inviting spot-facing those and making matched tubular spacers to hold them together with studding.

Then though, why not a long Vee-Bar channelled to fit the tenons I made to locate the dividing-head and its tailstock along a Tee-slot on the milling-machine.

I’ve even a length of 44m square steel bar ideal for the purpose… and even succeeded in producing a drawing for it.

Though of course for anything more than about 5/8″ diameter is just as easy to use the Tee-slot as a “Vee-block” of sorts anyway.

Still, it was a useful drawing exercise (about 3 hours of brain-fading), it’s designed with versatility and rapid setting in mind and it can also be used as a long fence / angle-plate.

I have no idea what the material was, but I opted to keep the hole and the spigot, which is 30mm diameter. I’ve no idea what I might use the hole for but the spigot could hold a simple end-stop collar. The idea is to screw this to the table by 3 M8 T-nuts and cap-screws. The 5 pairs of M5 tapped holes are for simple bridge-clamps.

“Drilling” those M5 holes – shown just as 5mm holes – proved odd. I wanted them to go just through into the side channels but Alibre said “Shan’t” – in computerese – though let me put them right through. So that’s what I did, then twigged that might be useful for machining the thing – tap the lower ends of the holes as well, and then they can be used with suitable bars engaging the flanges of the Vee-blocks to hold the workpiece from below, allowing profiling right through. I wonder if the problem was that the holes are sectioned by the channel – I’d drawn the entire profile first – but it didn’t stop them extruding right through.

So I’d also made the mistake of adding the counterbored M8 holes with the “Y” – channel all done, and realised that might be as problematical digitally as in swarf-making. So, not sure if this would work, I gave the bar a temporary cover 2mm thick, generated the holes and counterbores from that, then stripped off the cover. It worked!

Making it in reality needs all of the holes first, then the profile cutting.

Size? The dimensions, all mm except the 5/8″ wide mortice, might not be readable here but the basic bar is just under 250mm long and 44mm square.

 

 

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

Have started making a piece to demonstrate the operations that a Centre lathe can perform, for display with the mini lathe, at local shows.

(Facing, plain turning, taper turning, drilling, thread cutting – Taps, Dies or Change gears, knurling and correcting or producing eccentricity)

Hopefully, it will generate some interest in the general public, or even attract new members to the Society!

A lot of swarf already!

Howard

[DalboyParticipant @dalboy]

I have spent the last few days trying to do the garden so no progress on the farm boy, so today I put aside some time to get back and turn the flywheels.

This did not go as planned flywheels too big for the two chucks so unpacked the faceplate which has been sitting under the lathe since I have had it/ And yet again this did not as planned as the 8 slots where to far out towards the outer edge, So having enough material I was able to drill 6 holes so as to be able to fix the flywheels to it.

Now I need to make some blocks to get them fixed. One job causing many other jobs to achieve the end results.

Wil try to get some machining onto the flywheels tomorrow.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

No workshop time today but the motor for my Stent T&C Grinder arrived on Friday, and I spent a couple of hours examining the drawings to see how to mount it. (It will probably be of a different size to that originally used, possibly a bit smaller.)

Re-drew a couple of small parts with two small changes, and decimal dimensions. One change to cope with an existing part made smaller than drawn – for once, not by me but by the person who started this particular specimen.

===

Happy to see the frog-spawn in my garden pond is hatching. Last year’s “tapioca” all died before any hatched.

[John HinkleyParticipant @johnhinkley26699]

Following several frustrating days waiting for a toothed belt to arrive, I finally took delivery yesterday and so, today, I have spent a fruitful couple of hours in the garage fitting the stepper motor and drive to my new mini lathe.  I hadn’t been totally idle during the waiting period, though, as I refined the design of the stepper motor mount to provide more stiffness and added a removable belt cover to the printing list.  See the results below, first without the belt cover:

Need to shorten the bolts and get some Nyloc nuts to tidy it up.

And then with:

It’s a bit truncated, as it will butt up against the original change gear cover, although that will require some surgery to clear the belts etc.  Probably the last thing to do for this modification.

On to the electronics enclosure tomorrow.

John

 

 

[DalboyParticipant @dalboy]

Shop vac decided to go bang, luckily it appears to be the switch (can’t find the multi meter, I know it is in the workshop) so stripped down and have now ordered a replacement. So the bench is a no-go area at the moment.

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Went to SADMES club meeting for a presentation about model rocketry. Great speaker. Came home and watched news – Japanese rocket exploding. Odd coincidence.

[OldironParticipant @oldiron]

Not workshop related. Went out and bought new to me Mercedes 4×4 for towing the caravan and hauling around our mechanical calculator display.  With huge regret now have to sell my beloved 1996 Nissan Patrol Y60 2.8 turbo diesel. 🙁

[Harry WilkesParticipant @harrywilkes58467]

Did some trepanning on my Myford S7 for the first time 🙂

H

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Made a few small parts for the Stent T&C Grinder I acquired unfinished a few years ago, also for a Hemingway Kits slotting-attachment (keyway cutter).

Among these are Tee-bolts, two of them (for the Stent) with 3-inch long shanks. Making those from solid seemed very wasteful of material so I’ve made the heads as separate parts screwed tightly on with a dab of ‘Loctite’. Those are curing before I trim the end faces and mill the flats.

The Slotting-Attachment needs 2 Tee-bolts and I did machine these from solid. Luckily I’ve a reasonable stock of steel… The shorter one is fine and just right at 0.374″ diameter shank. It made its longer companion first too short (added two dimensions wrongly), made the replacement and found that 0.371″ dia. and tapered. It’s meant to act as a pivot pin so needs be right!

I’ll not throw the faulty ones away, but put them with the rest of the Myford Tee-bolts.

Tempted to make V.3 two-part with close-diameter stock, perhaps stainless-steel, as shank.

I’ll have to test the lathe. I had turned two long tapers by the offset-tailstock method and might not have re-set it as closely as I’d thought.

…..

Coming back into the house after dark, a quick look by torch-light showed a total of five frogs peeping out of the water in their two ponds; as well as lots of little wrigglings around the bundle of spawn. Good signs!

They spend a lot of time just below the surface with their faces above it, but whether in daylight or nocturnally seems a choice I’ve not yet worked out.   In warm weather they seem to come up for air in the sunshine, but at the moment they appear only at night.

The larger pond has an additional layer of lining overhanging the rim and dipping a few inches below the water. The frogs like to hide in the overlap: they can’t see me so obviously I can’t see their two back legs exposed below the material.

[DalboyParticipant @dalboy]

Compared to most my days seem very mild in comparison. Managed to fit the new switch to the shop vac which is now up and running. Also received in the post some O rings for the piston and either end of the piston bore for the farm boy so should be able to start assembly once the paint has cured. In addition, some mundane work in the greenhouse getting ready for the growing season.

 

 

[Speedy Builder5Participant @speedybuilder5]

loaded the trailer with 1/2 ton of donkey manure and brought it back to the garden to rot down a bit more! – Not really engineering related though!

Bob

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

I carried out a very quick, very simple modification to my Myford lathe’s screw-cutting gearbox to make swapping between threads and feeds easier and less fraught!

This is the early type gearbox, which I bought second-hand, and fitted a couple of years ago to my ML7.

To change between modes, you slide out the central idler-wheel pair from the gearbox’s input banjo, turn it end-for-end and slide it back in. So far so good.

Those wheels are retained by a steel strip notched to engage a groove on the idlers’ static axle. This retainer is itself retained by a hole in the other end fitting a spigot on another component, and held there by a very short 2BA socket-head screw and washer.

Only, the link’s square end mean it would not swing clear of the larger wheel, so you had to take it off completely, risking dropping a screw small enough for it to enter that parallel universe inhabited by tiny dropped components.

My modification? I simply filed the end round, using a large washer as a template!

So now the retainer stays in place, needing just swinging round to remove and refit the gears.

…..

Then set to, to exploit this feat of engineering, to try yet again to make a Tee-bolt. This time successfully (ish, if an unwanted taper of nearly two “thou” over an inch or so doesn’t matter). Fourth time lucky.

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

Spent the day trying to draw a couple of projects in Alibre. Went up a slightly blind ally with data driven design with a slightly clunky interface between LibreOffice Calc and Alibre (don’t use M$ Excell), then dug in and learned about the built in Equation Editor, which does everything I was trying to do with a spreadsheet. Got a drawing done fof pipe temperature sensors for the three diameters of central heating pipe with only one number needing to be changed for each diameter. Then started working on a drawing for a 3D printable tiny Stevenson Screen for monitoring temperature and humidity in the shed, garden and greenhouses. Being able to name dimensions, link them to other dimensions and change them without hacking the drawing is a major benefit. Still got to learn how to make all of the title block fields editable for 2D drawings!

 

 

 

Change three variables and that gets changed to this:-

Much easier to firtle with designs 😀

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Assembled a small manual rotary table broadly to GHT/HH design ‘from the scrapbox’ – I’d had the 4″ cast base for years, arrived in a ‘score’ from some flea market. The Alu billet was to be some fixture whose earmarked use either became redundant or possibly, forgotten..

It struck me that it’s a bit tedious swapping vice for R/T when 90% of the time all one wants to do is some simple ’rounding’ – hopefully this can sit on the table full time.

I’ll drill holes in the top when I figure out where they are needed.

Rather pleased with it, whether it will turn out to be of brilliantly useful, or fiddly and tiresome, only time will tell.

 

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

That looks like a tidy and useful bit of work.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Thanks, that’s kind – so much of my tooling tends to be for ‘my eyes only’ and is usually built ‘cos I need it in a hurry to finish something else.

..maybe ‘finishing’ (and the will to do it) marks some new watershed in my ME career…

[Dave WoottonParticipant @davewootton]

Nice Job on the little rotary table Diogenes, I’ve got one made years ago and it is one of my favourite workshop tools, as you say great for little rounding off jobs, perfect for loco valve gear components. Mine originally had rows of concentric 2BA tapped holes in it ( I’d use metric now), but later in a slack time at work, I made the T slotted one as in GHT’s book and did all the graduations around the edge. Something I regret as it was much more versatile in clamping than the T slots and have never needed the graduations, sadly the old table was left behind on a window ledge when we were all made redundant, now under a housing estate! Over the years have amassed quite a selection of stepped adaptors for the centre hole so use is very speedy. Now mounted on a cast iron block so it can clamp easily on a big mill table or be held in machine vice, I’m sure you will find it more useful than fiddly and tiresome!

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Thanks, Dave.. ..now I don’t feel so bad about not graduating it!

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

Scrounged the daughter’s resin printing machine to see what the Stevenson screen came out like (using my resin). Had to put in a vent and drain in the top section and the base to let the resin drain out, since they’re hollow. Removing all the supports that the slicing program generated is less than easy, will try editing some of them out. probably print it bigger as well, next time.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Had a rest from fettling elderly machine-tools by fettling the garden instead.

Planted 3 fruit bushes, 3 Ali-summat-or-others (I’m going out into the dark and cold at this time of night just to read a plant label) and 2 baby rhubarbs.

The rhubarbs were sold singly as rhizomes (I think – a root-like thing about half-inch diameter by 4 long?) with sprouts, in compost that looked like hardboard sawdust mixed with instant coffee, in sealed polythene bags. Well, one had a broken sprout, another intact but a bit feeble, and a third just sprouting. So hope for that one. The other seemed as DOA as that infamous ‘Norwegian Blue’ parrot. Just the root thingummy with no sprouts and one end suspiciously black, in completely dry coffee sawdust. I planted both and just have to hope.

I put the plants’ information labels on the kitchen shelf appointed for tea-bags, paint-brushes and plant-labels, wrote their entries in my episodic “Garden Book” (diary), and examined the separate price labels. These are of thin plastic so obvious shim material… a useful 0.016″ / 0.4mm thick, but waste-not-want-not. Expired bank-cards provide good shim and protective-slip material too.

Oh – I’d bought the plants in my local garden-centre that actually is a garden centre! Walk in and the first things you see are bird-seeds, garden tools and plant feeds; away to your left are plant-pots and trellises; straight on are plants! They do sell Other Stuff / Indoor Clutter but at smaller scale and more discreetly – and have a good cafeteria.

‘

It made a break from chasing “thous” around a well-worn old lathe.

[Matt TParticipant @mattt]

Today I finally got back out in the workshop. It took booking a day off work to do it but I spent most of the day hard at work achieving what feels like very little.

I milled on my mini lathe today for the first time. It was quite scary and I think I was accidentally climb milling (which I’m lead to believe is the “wrong” way although this debated). I discovered I could no longer do without a carriage lock so I’ve been on a quest to add one. Up until now I’ve been engaging the lead screw to hold the carriage during facing cuts, which is fine when the force is acting constantly in 1 direction but when milling turning the cross slide handwheel exposes the play in the mechanism and lead to about 2 thou of deviation when milling. A proper carriage locking mechanism should fix this. It’s nearly done, except for buying the wrong bolts from Screwfix (doh!)

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Matt –

Climb milling is not “wrong” on a milling-machine that can handle it, and done with due care of feeds and speeds; but our lightweight machines are not likely to do so safely. I use it occasionally on my Myford VMC, but only for very light finishing-cuts, never for bulk metal removal. Even then it sometimes finds the worn areas in the machine.

…..

Today…. I didn’t manage to get in the workshop!

No Volts….

Power-cut from about half-past eleven this morning just as as I was preparing to make a beef casserole (My gas oven won’t light even with a separate lighter, due to the flame-failure device).

Walked to the shop – my usual constitutional – for a paper and a tin of stew. The hob works, with a lighter or match.

Spent the afternoon erecting a plastic shelf kit in the spare room. I’d bought the kit only last year (or year afore?), so a power-cut seemed a good opportunity to put it together.

The power did not come back until some time around 5.

Ah well. I have some engine parts drawings I want to copy translated from sixty-fourths to decimal format and angles, to use in the workshop. So that can be this evening’s model-engineering “project”.

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