Making an electric melting furnace

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1940's Love

The shaper. A mezmerizing symphony of mechanical sex. Does it get any better?

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Another new toy

The Hardinge HC turret lathe. I have been dreaming of having two lathes and fantasizing that it could be a Hardinge. Well, a ton of work in my off time calling and driving around I finally found it. Of corse I had some help from my friend Brian. I pulled this beauty out of a 40ft storage container tucked away from sight. It's amazing what people have stashed away! I will definitely be making a video of the machine in use.

Stickers

Spark it

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I'm Back

With a new machine to boot. Our buddy Scott hooked us up with this mill yesterday and we started striping it down and fixing it up last night. We took the Y and Z tables off and found some obvious issues with the screw nuts so they are getting replaced with either new bronze nuts or ball screws. I'm leaning towards ball screws as I'm thinking of doing a CNC conversion on the machine over the winter. We were able to fix the quill auto feed (someone totally butchered it, had it spaced about an inch out and left it for dead). The machine runs but it's not getting hooked up until we I'm happy with it's performance. Gotta put a call in to a  friend of mine who used to scrape ways for a living as well as fix/replace some small missing parts and add a coolant res. Here are some pics of what we have so far.

Where ya Been?

I have a lot of people asking what I'm up to, what I'm building etc. The truth is, one I got back from Sturgis I felt like putting everything on hold to sort of re-group. I wanted to mess with some new things, branch out and expand on some skills and tap into new avenues. I have also been working with my brother to make the shop more efficient, economically and to work in. It's taking a long time but coming out nicely. I have also made some new tools for my lathe that will allow me to do really trick things.

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Shop Talk

One thing I love checking out on different websites are pictures of peoples shops. What tools they are using, how it's set up and what kind of personality does it have. I figure I can't be alone in my curiosity so when I get the chance to photograph a new shop I will. These photos were taken at my friend Mike's shop MPH Fabrications which I made reference to before in a post titled Nice Joint. Here are some pictures of current chassis projects he is working on as well as some interesting aspects you might not notice at first glance.

Midievil

1917 Peter Wright anvil rescued from a barn on my property and some homemade dollies.