The machining and fabricating thread (mills/lathes and more here)

[Sam-Q]

well I put a crappy video up on youtube:

[Tim.duncan]

Great video Sam!!

i hate to be a nit pick but i noticed you had gloves on with operating the lathe, This really is not a good idea.

i worked with a guy who was linishing and it was starting to get hot so he put gloves on, the glove then got caught in between the job and the linishing paper and bent his fingers backwards around the job and broke them!! he spent the next 2 months unable to work and another year having to do rehabilitation to get his full movement back.

I know you werent near the job but its just good practice to never use gloves or have loose clothing while machining.

looking forward to more vids

[Hachi_Tom]

Never noticed this thread before.

Im currently an apprentice fitter/turner, my work builds a shitload of raceparts for speedway cars. So i have access to 2 manual lathes, 2 cnc lathes and 2 cnc mills.
hoopefully when im a bit more experienced with machining/turning i can help some people out with some stuff if needed.
Massive learning curve on how to do stuff too.

Sam i too noticed you were wearing gloves :s
Anything thats loose and can get caught on a lathe is soo dangerous.
dont know if any1 has seen this before, if you have a weak stomach i strongly suggest you not to open this, i would classify it was NSFW too.

an apprentice in melbourne also died after his arm got caught in a lathe, they amputated it from elbow down, died from injurys..

ive had real close near hits, one could have ended up sending me to hospital, was turning 150mm dia. stainless and the swarft bird-nested up and spun round put like 150 cuts in my left arm.

my story rofl.

[Sam-Q]

yeah I knew someone would point out the gloves thing, I only wore them for when I was doing bulk outside cutting to protect myself from the hot chips and removed them immediately afterwards, but yes not a good habbit to get into.

ae_drift_86: unfortunetly there are very few members on here into machining. Which is a real pity really, it does sound like you have an awesome setup though.


Now time for an update as I showed earlier I had this crude digital readout on my lathe:



I found when I used my lathe it would jump about 0.03mm at a time. I took my cross-slide apart, cleaned it, re-lubed it and put it back together for it to only be the same. Doing something crazy I decided to could justify buying a proper professional DRO set for my machine. I also paid the extra money to have a 0.001mm scale instead of a 0.005 as per normal, however with the radius vs diameter compensation it moves in 0.002mm increments at a time. When installed it worked a dream and I could easily and predictable move it one incremement at a time. So this shows me that the scale itself wasn't faulty but my poor mounting was flexxing and causing it to 'hop' across. I will post some pics when I could be bothered.

[Frak]

Sweet vid sam.

[Sam-Q]

well thanks, I though it was kinda corny actually.

I succeded in what I wanted to achieve though: a machining video where your not kept waiting for something to happen. To give some idea this is over 10 hours work as a rough guess.

[ke70dave]

great video sam, enjoyed watching that.

damn i want a lathe!

[takai]

Sam: where do you source your tool blanks from? Local suppliers have jack all in 16mm square, as they reckon everyone has gone carbide. Im wanting to experiment with tool steel bits as well.

[Hachi_Tom]

Holy shit! 10 hours.
is that machining time or just a rough guess on how long you spent on doing that whole part?

[Sam-Q]

Chris: an ebay store called :

I suggest getting the largest size that fits your machine, that means less flex and they are long enough to use both sides. I actually used a slitting disk in my hand grinder to get the rough shape as it would of taken too long with a bench grinder.


ae_drift_86: a very rough guess on how long for everything, measuring, machining, setting up and so on. For example you can see that I have only used a 4 jaw chuck for higher accuracy every time. However this means when I take it out and put it back in I have to re-dial it up again to make it central.