Woody – Page 54 – Woody's Workshop

March 17, 2018March 22, 2018

Mill Turning on the Tormach PCNC440

I just dared to hit run on my first attempt at Mill Turning. I need to qualify this in that the first run I was cutting air above the set up. It looked OK so I put the real material in the spindle and I got a turned part as designed in Fusion 360. I didn’t part it off and you can see the result below.

Mill Turning is where you place the material you want to shape (usually a rod of some kind) in the mill spindle instead of a milling tool. The tools are mounted on the milling table (see above in the vice) and are completely stationary but move via the actions of the table in the X axis and the spindle in Z. The software is conned into thinking the material is really a milling tool and that the tools are the material.

It has taken me the best part of a week to work out how to model this in Fusion 360 and I have been helped enormously by watching Jason Hughes on YouTube. It involves allocating a different Work Coordinate for the location of each tool.

If I can get this more streamlined and get some better lathe tooling in place to support it, then I will be able to turn clock pillars. This was the last stumbling block in moving to CNC assisted clockmaking.

Tonight I am a very happy bunny. A glass or two of Merlot with dinner perhaps ?

Update – For a full write up on the process and how I got there go to my mill turning page and download the pdf.

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March 10, 2018May 31, 2018

Clickspring Therapy

Some days you walk into the workshop and while you know you have long term projects lurking, you just feel like having a distraction therapy day. For me this usually means adding some tooling in some way or other. Yesterday was one of those days.

While looking around I spotted one of my storage boxes with all the parts I had accumulated to make some table tooling grip nuts as shown by Chris at Clickspring. These are similar to a commercial item. As I now have a tooling plate on the Tormach with a matrix of M8 holes it seemed like a good ‘all in one day’ project and would satisfy my therapy distraction.

Chris did not give any dimensions in his write up but there is more detail in his Patreon video which is subscription only. One gem he passed on was using a piece of 1mm thick material to offset the three jaw chuck to create an eccentricity to the locking nuts.

I have created a page detailing my approach here.

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March 9, 2018March 10, 2018

Sherline Motor Assembly for clock wheel cutting

After completing the write up on the Sherline CNC Indexer for use on the Myford for clock wheel cutting, I realised that an important part of the process was the cutting mechanism itself.

I had adapted the Sherline headstock motor and spindle assembly to mount on the Myford vertical slide to act as a secondary cutting source. I use this for cutting clock teeth and for drilling holes ‘off centre’ to the lathe axis for such processes as arbor mounting holes.

The full write is available as a pdf on the associated page on this site.

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February 25, 2018February 25, 2018

Open Thinking when Solving a Problem

I think I have mentioned this before …. when you have different ways to solve a problem it is often easy to get locked off into a long winded but potentially elegant solution and miss the point.

3D printing has brought this home to me on a number of occasions.

An example – I have variable speed controllers on my Myford Lathe and Myford mill. The controllers are identical and each have an ON and OFF push button. The bezel around the ON button on one of these had cracked and come away leaving the switch floating in its mounting hole.

My first reaction was to replace the switch. I contacted the controller supplier to ask for a part number and distribution source to buy a new switch. They ignored my email which was fortunate as I would probably have ordered a complete new switch assembly. I would then have had all the grief of stripping down the controller case and wiring in the new switch. This would probably have invalidated any warranty etc etc.

Instead I stepped back and looked at the problem from a different angle. The bezel while broken still had enough of the ring and thread intact and simply needed gluing back together. However it would not have been strong long term. What it needed was an outer strengthening ring.

Fusion 360 called and the Sindoh 3D printer. A ring was designed and printed (20 minutes) and the bezel strengthened and made good. I also printed three more rings and put these around the remaining three switch bezels as a preventative action should they also weaken and crack.

A simple, low cost and effective solution with the added benefit of reduced downtime in the future. But the point is that it wasn’t the first solution I was considering correct though it might have been.

3D printing is such a useful resource to have available but you need to think outside of your normal approach to a problem to realise its potential.

Sorry that wasn’t mega interesting but I thought it worth sharing …

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February 24, 2018March 9, 2018

Sherline CNC Indexer on the Myford lathe

Some time ago I adapted a Sherline CNC Rotary Indexer to fit to my Myford Large Bore Super 7. A recent request for details of how I did this has lead me to produce a write up for others to download.

Follow this link to the introduction page and download link.

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