The desktop computer in France was running on Win7 and Fusion 360 needs Win10 or above. I brought the machine back with us to the UK and decided to upgrade it to Win10. I’m not yet prepared to step up to Win11.
As part of the upgrade I took out all the existing drives and fitted a 500GB SSD. I loaded Win10 which went to plan and used the same email address and PIN entries for the user ID as I use on my UK machines.
Win10 came up with the usual generic blue opening screen and I then sat and began to plan what programs I needed to load for use in France. After about 15 minutes the blue Microsoft desktop screen disappeared and was replaced with the same desktop image that I use on my UK screens.
So tell me how does the new SSD and Microsoft know that this is my go to image for a desktop ? It can only be registered in the Microsoft cloud storage against my account details. Which is slightly worrying.
As a regular reader of my blog you may recollect my frustrations last year trying to get reconnected to the internet in our house in France. This followed failures by Orange and Free to deliver on promises.
We called in at a SFR boutique on Wednesday afternoon and somewhat apprehensively signed up with them on a new contract.
On Friday evening we were told our line had been activated and that our router would be ready for collection on Saturday morning. By midday on Saturday we were back on line. Our previous router delivered around 9MB/s download and the new router is peaking around 15MB/s across the same infrastructure. Full connectivity is now restored to all our devices in France and back into the UK.
Having mentioned the BK3 fence in the Quorn bracket post I realised that I had not posted the details of my fence design for the BK3. The fence and the two sets of bearing based guides make the BK3 a very accurate and dramatically more useful tool for the workshop.
The fence as supplied with the BK3 was tending towards a chocolate fireguard in its usefulness. Here is a Fusion 360 pictorial of my design together with a dimensioned drawing. Both can be downloaded by clicking on the associated PDF file link.
Fusion 360 view of the BK3 fence designDimensioned drawing of the BK3 fence assembly
This is a further addition to the BK3 in the form of an angular setting fence. This uses an inset protractor scale liberated from one of the readily available workshop protractors as shown below. These are roughly 92mm diameter.
The body is made from three separately printed 3D parts, the sliding bar, the protractor holder and the pointer block.
The sliding bar has been tweaked in dimensions to snuggly fit the slot in the BK3 table. It has printed nut retaining cavities on the lower surface. For this reason it should be printed upside down. Likewise the pointer block has two locating ribs on the lower surface and debatably should also be printed upside down. This does distort the pointer a little and so might need a clean up post printing. Customise all the retaining screw lengths to ensure they do not protrude below the lower surface of the bar. The rotational locking screw could be made a bit more elegant by making a knurled knob item.
I am slowly getting to understand how to manipulate and use my recently purchased Quorn tool cutter grinder. One frustration that kept cropping up was the workhead assembly slip rotating on the bed bar. This usually happens when there is a need to slide the tool holder head back after a referencing action. This messes up the reference setting.
I chanced upon a thread on the MEW forum where a John P had solved this problem with a parallel support bar assembly. This utilised the 1/4″unused hole in the toolholder side wall. There are a number of ways to fabricate this fixture but the important aspects are that it should be robust and must ensure a parallel motion along the support rod.
The cutter grinder tool head support bar mounted on my Quorn
I opted to model the bracket in Fusion 360. As there will be little stress on the bracket in use I opted to mill it from 15mm cast aluminium to give a 12mm finishing depth. Here is the pictorial view from the Fusion desktop.
Fusion 360 model of the Quorn cutter grinder tool head bracket. The bracket measures around 90mm end to end.
The bracket has a 5/8″ hole to match the Quorn table slider rod and a 10mm hole for the new parallel support rod (sorry about the mixed dimensions but my Quorn is an Imperial model and most of my stock is metric).
Side #1 CAM operations are to clean up skim the stock top surface followed by profiling the two holes and the outside shape. Side #2 is to invert the model and deck the excess material. The clamping slots, the flat adjacent to the 5/8″ hole and the M4 tapped holes are all supressed in the CAM and manually cut post CNC operations.
The model has two tabs adjacent to the 10mm hole. These have no relevance to the use of the bracket but are there to make the width of the model equal. This negates the need to use soft jaws to hold the model when undertaking side 2 operations to deck off the excess stock material. The decking brings the model to 10mm finishing depth. These two tabs could be ground off afterwards if desired.
I did consider grub screw clamping of both bars but there was a danger of deforming the associated bars. It was easier and more elegant to design slot clamps into the Fusion model. The clamping slits were cut post CNC machining on my BK3 bandsaw. (Try cutting straight slots on a BK3 without a decent fence and support bearings.) The parallel nature of the finished model width as mentioned above makes this a simple process against the bandsaw fence.
The two M4 clamping screw holes are drilled prior to the slots being cut. The holes are drilled 3.3mm through and then M4 through threaded. After the slots are cut one half of each hole is clearance drilled to M4.
The flat adjacent to the 5/8″ hole is the last ‘after CNC’ machining operation. This flat gives the clearance needed to allow the bracket to slide under the Quorn toolholder referencing dial.
The gliding bar is mounted in the spare hole in the tool holder side wall. This hole in my Quorn had been drilled 1/4″. The rod profile was turned with a centre from 10mm silver steel to have the 1/4″ section and then a short section threaded M6. Note that I also made a brass washer profiled to match the rear face of the through hole in the body. Like most of the Quorn casting holes this had a step segmented surface aimed at stopping bolt head rotations.
Fusion 360 pictorial view of the assemblyQuorn cutter grinder tool head support components – this shows the bracket with support bar in place, supporting rod and profiled washer.
Mounted on the Quorn, the assembly sat nicely parallel, is very solid and stable and does an excellent job of stopping the head drooping. My frustrations over this aspect of the Quorn are eased for the time being.
If any readers want the Fusion file or dimensioned drawings then add a comment below.
UPDATE : – The bracket should be rigid enough when 3D printed instead of machined from solid. Here is a ZIP file containing the support bar clamp version v5 as a STEP file. All the other parts are straightforward lathe operations.
Tony made the holder from aluminium but from my point of view with Fusion and 3D printing facilities the idea lent itself to be run as a 3D print. The finished device can be held in a lathe or drill press chuck using the central boss. The boss does not have to be rigidly clamped as the magnets will grab and locate the assembly up to the chuck. The magnets are very strong so be very careful as you bring the object to be demagnetised up to the lower surface or it will also get ‘grabbed’.
Attached is a ZIP file containing the Fusion 360 file. This is designed to take 10mm diameter magnets which will be a tight push into the mounting holes. I used 10mm long magnets but smaller ones will probably work just as well. The magnet mounting holes have a 1mm thickness bottom surface. The magnets need to be inserted with the alternating orientation as shown. Tony made a circular ‘keeper’ for the bottom surface from a steel disc. This reduces the attraction to swarf. The ZIP file also contains a simple lid to fit over the top side to protect the holes from accumulating magnetic swarf.
Pictorial screenshot view from Fusion 360 of the demagnetiser 3D model
ZIP file download is on the link below and contains the body and lid as a Fusion file and as separate STEP files – demagnetiser disc body and lid
A closing thought (which I haven’t tried …) but if all the magnets were in the disc the same way round would this act as a magnetiser to save having to stroke the item with a magnet ?
