Woody's Workshop – Page 22 – Keeping the Grey Matter active

March 12, 2022March 12, 2022

Internet in France finally solved using SFR

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.

To say we are pleased is an understatement.

Similar or related subjects : –

March 2, 2022October 19, 2024

BK3 Burgess Bandsaw Fence Assembly

BK3 Table Fence

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.

Dimensioned drawing of the BK3 fence assembly

Here is the link to the Fence Assembly Drawing v4 which has both these views in better detail.

BK3 Angle Setting Fence

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. The three STEP files and the Fusion 360 file are in this ZIP file. A full listing of my BK3 modifications can be downloaded as a ZIP file here Similar or related subjects : –

February 27, 2022March 13, 2022

Quorn cutter grinder tool holder support

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.

quorn cutter grinder tool head support bar — 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 assembly

Quorn 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.

Similar or related subjects : –

February 19, 2022February 20, 2022

A 3D Printed Passive Demagnetiser using Neodymium magnets

I saw a recent post on the HomeMadeTools.net site from Tony Foale about using Neodymium magnets in a rotating holder to act as a demagnetiser.

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.

Screen shot of the demagnetiser fusion file — 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 ?

Similar or related subjects : –

February 16, 2022February 17, 2022

Using Raaco section boxes for fastener storage

I am a great lover of the Raaco 18 section storage boxes for my various sizes and ranges of nut and bolt fasteners. These boxes are not unduly expensive and are very durable with a sliding locking latch (assuming you don’t forget to slide it place – see below).

To date these boxes have been stowed stacked one of top of the other on the shelf above my office workbench. Come the need to get a particular size fastener for a job I can bet on the box I need to access being at the bottom of the stack. This can get frustrating and can also be risky because if I haven’t fastened the lid properly there is an ever present possibility of a lot of fasteners hitting the floor with some associated colourful expletives.

As you have probably gathered from the previous post, this has been woodwork week or at least MDF week if that counts as real woodworking. After finishing the storage box for my clock bushing gizzmo I still had MDF to spare. With some judicious juggling in Fusion 360, I came up with a design for a slide in storage rack for my Raaco box collection. In fact there was enough MDF left over to make two of these. I did have to buy in some 30mm x 2mm angle though. The design allows access to any fastener box without the need to shuffle the stack to get at the one I needed. Joy of joys.

The storage unit is 300mm high and has MDF sides and back board. I had to revert to a 1mm sheet of aluminium for the top and bottom surfaces to get the optimum number of boxes to fit between the workshop shelves. Each storage slot has an aperture of 250mm x 47mm (excluding the aluminium angle) and is 180mm deep.

The added bonus to the design is that the Raaco fastener slide is a very tactile grab handle to draw the wanted box out of the rack. The feel of the slide also acts as a warning flag that the slide might not be correctly locked in place.

Yes I know it is all a bit anal. Making things to make things etc but less frustration means more productivity … well that’s the theory.

Similar or related subjects : –