The "real deal"

Standard BPT r8 vs. NMBT50...pictures of the mill that accepts this tooling to come

Velocity stack pt.2

 

Thank God for the collet chuck! With out it I would have never been able to get the cross slide close enough to the spindle as I needed to. This chuck by nature moves the work out about 3" past standard scroll type chucks. I made the "boring bar" insert holder today and finished up the rest of the stack. The inside was much more difficult to get a smooth finish on because the bar has flex by nature and causes chatter, so I braced it up some with my hand and got a decent finish. Ill take the small inconsistencies out with some emery tomorrow. 

"The Tool"

I have been working on this tool for a while now off and on, but I have some stuff in my head that requires the tool so it was time to finish it up. It gets bolted to the cross slide of my lathe and is manually operated. The first picture it the bearing assembly I came up with so that it would be sturdy and smooth, too smooth I could use some more friction...oh well. This is an example of what I can make with it. It looks too much like Saturn but for a mess around test of performance it works.

XS650 Re-Phase

When re phasing XS you need to rotate crank 3 splines but when you do there is no opening for the key to index itself. Being hardened there was no way to make the slot, so I rigged up a grinding stone in the slitting saw arbiter and made the cut. It worked very well and only took about 5 minutes

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Shoulder Bolt

I needed a shoulder bolt with a certain size shoulder today for a tool I'm making, so I decided to manufacture it rather than open the McMaster catalog, spend a half hour searching through the thousands of different sizes, calling them up and then waiting a day with nothing to do and no tool to make new parts with. Here it is from raw form to finished bolt. 

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.

My new toy...

Picked this gorgeous Brown & Sharpe universal dividing head today from a local machine shop! I'm finding it difficult to explain how well built this unit is...impossible to beat old U.S. mfg. Especially B&S. Can't wait to make some parts with it!

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Vice Jaws

The mill came with a nice old Kurt vise but it was missing the jaws. Instead of buying some and waiting a week for them to come in I decided to make them.

Had some 3/4" plate kicking around the shop that happened to be 6" wide 

Roughing the torch cut ends in.

Finish Pass.

I have a 2" stone in the surface grinder to speed things up.

Left end.

Right end, I'd say its square.

After the holes were marked via a set of transfer screws I made on the lathe quick, it was center drilled, then drilled for a 1/2" bolt and counter bored.

I used the quill as a sort of press to keep the jaw tight to the vice while it was bolted in.

Finished up, 3 hrs or 1 week?

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Loaded up

4 Hours and a lot of tactful picing, winching, prying and rolling and the grinder is on the truck. We ended up being a bit under prepared thinking the unit weighed around 500lbs but it turns out it was closer to 1000.

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Grinding

Were having a 5' piece of steel ground for a frame table. This is one of 10 machines that will be doing the work, and its on the small side!

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Quill feed handle

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Oldie but Goodie

Still working to get the mill back to factory spec, but while we are waiting for parts to arrive I figured since its all apart anyways why not paint 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.