More in the lifestyles of the poor and unknown.
Not sure who is reading this or what their skill levels are so I figured I'd make some basic points as I go.
1) Getting a lathe or mill or both is step (0)
2) You need stock to work with before you can do anything. Stock is the term used for raw material. In this case, rod or bar in various types of material.
3) You can't make shit without tools
4) Tools are fucking expensive.
5) You make your own tools unless you are a Walton and have a metal fetish.
6) The more tools you make, the easier it is to do things when they come up.
7) No matter what job comes up, you won't have the right tool.
8) Whatever tool you have for the job is useless without the right stock and you can only have one or the other. Never both at the same time unless you've been doing this for the last 1000 years or so, or your name comes with millions of dollars of disposable income and you like to torture yourself for no reason at all.
9) You can never know enough.
Having the basics down I can now give practical examples.
I got the lathe/mill cheap. It had issues, came with some basic stuff and no stock. To get any use out of it I had to make my own tools. If you ever wondered why there is a job called a "tool maker", now you know.
So here's how I started. I had a lathe/mill with a basic 3 jaw chuck and a 1/4 inch tool post, a drill chuck and a faceplate and lathe dog. With that set up you can build almost anything you need, but anything you need to build is hard work.
For a start, I had no clamps. So milling wasn't going to be easy. Milling requires you to clamp the work as the tool spins. A lathe spins the work and the tool is clamped via a tool post. That's as basic as I can get it. I had a tool post for the lathe but no clamps for the mill.
Since I had no clamps I had to make them before I could use the mill. Of course you can buy all this stuff but what you are doing is trading money for time. Depending on which you have the most of, you balance it in some meaningful way that sounds right good at the time but usually in hindsight was the worst possible decision you could have possibly made.
So here's my first clamps. ok, sure it's only one. The other was the same but I reused the metal as spacers. They were real garbage to be honest but enough to get the job done.
K7JP9850.JPG
Clearly that is a pos but it took much of the day to make without any clamps to begin with and as it was the first job I did I also had a lot of tweaking to do on the machine itself.
They enabled me to make a vise as shown earlier in the posts.
That vise allowed me to fix the car and make other tools.
One of those tools was the new clamps shown below. These are far more practical and look almost professional. They work extremely well in actual use as opposed to the first clamps that were made for one purpose and that was to make a vise to build better tools with.
K7JP9832.JPG
Another tool was a cut off saw arbor so I can cut the aluminium bar down to size. The saw is 60 thou in width and carbide toothed. It has 60 teeth over 7.5 inches so is pretty fine cutting too. I didn't make the saw blade. I made the thing that attaches it to the lathe spindle and stops it flying off under high rpm.
It makes very fine and straight cuts right through 2 inch aluminium bar effortlessly. The saw blades themselves are so cheap it makes sense to buy them and cut them up to make carbide tipped lathe tools. Many people do this as the lathe tools themselves cost significantly more. Supply and demand in action.
It makes me happy as it took hours with a hacksaw to cut the same bar stock and I never got a straight line like this gets.
Pic of it here:
K7JP9838.jpg
It's a close tolerance tool. About 1/1000th of an inch to fit a 3/8" milling bit holder that fits the lathe. When it's running at whatever speed, visually there is no deflection at the blade. It runs very true. The finish is almost like a fly cutter finish. I'm very happy with it in all respects other than I'd like it made out of tool steel instead of 6061 aluminium.
The latest tool to the collection is a kind of a Frankenstein tool. It's part boring tool. Much like the author. The other part is a fly cutter. It's not well suited to either role, but does both close enough for a lot of jobs. I'll be making dedicated boring bars and fly cutters later but for now I just need something that can do either job close enough for a few jobs I have to complete on the boat.
Here it is:
K7JP9848.JPG
A boring bar is kind of like an adjustable size drill bit. The main difference is that unlike a drill bit, the boring bar requires a hole already drilled that can fit the tool. The boring bar can then make the hole bigger. It cannot make a hole from nothing. In this tools case, the hole needs to be just over 3/8" in diameter or the bar won't even fit in. The advantage however is that I can make over 4 inch holes using a boring bar if I need to and the cost of a selection of drills in all the sizes to 4" is in excess of about $500 if you want anything decent. Of course you can get only the most popular drill sizes but then if you need an odd size you either need to buy it or make a boring bar. I figured why screw around and just make the bar. It gets more complex if you want metric and imperial and you want to drill holes for tapping later (putting an internal thread into the hole). All up you can be up for thousands or you do what I just did and which every self respecting machine shop does.
I'll be making a smaller bar that requires only a 1/4" hole later so any size between 1/4" and about 4" can be made. Considering the cost to make a boring bar is about $3 (for my 3/8"-4" bar) it's pretty clear you want to go down this path instead of dedicated drills. For the record, a boring bar with that range is very unstable. You want the bar to be close to the final diameter to give good stability and minimise deflections and vibrations. The above bar at full extension might be completely unusable with some materials. This is why machine shops have many different sizes of boring bars. It gets more complex than that so if you know what I wrote is not "quite" correct, don't bother to correct me. I know it too.
Drills of course are far easier and quicker to use but next to impossible to have the right size and sharp on hand.
A fly cutter is very much like a boring bar except that the cutting tool isn't usually at a right angle to the tool length. It's purpose is not to cut holes but to make an uneven surface flat. As it rotates it cuts a strip in the same plane each pass. If the tool is moved across the surface (using a mill) then the surface becomes very flat. Not as flat as surface grinding but acceptable for many applications.
If you observe the picture of my boring bar you'll see it's at not at an angle of 90 degrees. So it's more like a fly cutter than a boring bar. The difference is that fly cutters usually have a larger diameter end to hold the tool, they have milled channels and are retained at minimum by two set screws. Mine is basically as rigid as a boring bar (not as rigid as a fly cutter) and can be used as a fly cutter on softer metals or lighter cuts. Heavy cuts or harder metal will cause deflection and it won't perform that well. Since I intend to cut aluminium with it, it should present no problems. That's the theory anyway.
I also made a dedicated cut off tool post. The one I had was ok but it could only cut just over an inch in diameter. The one I made today can cut off well past the swing of the lathe even after I make risers for it. So it's future proof. For the record, cut off tool posts are a bit of a bitch to make right. It's way easier to make a standard tool post.
There's a few more tools I need to make before I'm ready to really start to get serious on the boat stuff. A bigger vise that's more practical. Some raisers so I can have over 5 inches of swing on the lathe bed. Right now the lathe is very limited in diameter of the work piece (1.7" over the cross slide and 3.5" over the bed). I have a one job I that need more than the swing I currently have.
I also need to make a 3/8 to 1/4 high precision reducer so I can use my 1/4 inch center/edge finder on the mill. I found the center/edge finder cheap a long time ago and figured if I get the 1/4", making a reducer for it is far easier than making a tool to go up in diameter. We'll see how that planning went later when I try to make it.
I should really make a rotary table but those things are a pita to make. Maybe once I'm in Florida. In the mean time I'll most likely make an indexer which can give me 1 degree rotations over a 360 degree turn. I have devised a plan to make an indexer for 0.1 degree steps which makes it almost as accurate as a rotary table with a little more setup time. Far easier to use on the boat so I might go down that path. It is a lot more effort than the 1 degree step indexer.
Before I do that I'll probably build a qctp (quick change tool post). Not because I have a need for quick changes but rather on a boat swapping small tool bits is not easy. Adjusting them is harder. They are very easy to lose etc. A qctp allows me to have certain tools already mounted and adjusted and swapping them out takes seconds. It's large so it isn't easily lost. The other thing is that when I make the risers the tool posts that I have become redundant as they will be too low. I can make the qctp holder higher so it can be used with the current setup or any future setup. It's also not that hard to make if you have a dove tail cutter. Which I couldn't justify buying so I'll be making. Not that it's terribly expensive being about $12-20, but if I bought every single tool I need every single time I'd run into thousands of dollars. So if it's a one off job, I make the tool. If I need it regularly, depending on the price, I might by it.
I bought 3/8" tool steel (oil hardening) that was specifically purchased for making HSS cutting tools and the dove tail will be one. The boring bar above was the first. I have a special 3/8" precision tool holder with run out about 1/10th of a thou (as measured) so everything I use I try to base on 3/8 which is a very popular size in the industry and with that sort of precision it makes sense to do so. I have a 3 jaw chuck but it's only good for a couple of thou. Close for some stuff but for close tolerance work it's useless. I need to make a 4 jaw independent chuck asap.
Ever seen the price of reamers? Holy crap they are expensive. It's not that hard to make one with the tool steel and the tool steel is dirt cheap (like $2 a foot of 3/8"). Most tools are a couple of inches long so it's well under a dollar to make them. If you need larger diameter you need to get different stock. See what I mean about needing stock. Since I need a couple of metric reamers I'll be making them instead of buying. I can make the things faster than it takes to buy or ship them in.
In other news, I'm dismantling the 3D printer as it has wooden ply framing. The milling setup I have has all the degrees of movement I need for a 3D printer and all I need to do is make stepper motor couplers to the handles. It's not that hard to do. In return I get a 3D printer with greater accuracy but smaller work space. The reality is if I need more space I can make up a frame if/when I need it. This leaves me more space to store stuff and I also then have a CNC lathe/mill. Not that I particularly care about that as the lathe/mill is teaching me patience. Everything has to be done right and all the way to the end. As they say, if you are cutting a 100 tooth gear, you can't mess up the last tooth and say you did most of it right. It has to be right from start to finish and concentrating so long on really boring (pun intended) stuff is one hell of an exercise in patience. You need almost as much patience as those of you who read this whole damned thing! The wife just shuts off when I talk machining. I see it in the glazed look of her eyes. As does the mil. I'm very thankful I have cats that will listen to me. I always get a slow blink of approval from them as I tell them what I am doing.
Anyway, I'm drinking scotch and rambling.
Probably more for my sake so I can come back to this thread and remember what I need to do.
Posted: Sat Sep 10, 2016 10:36 pm
