More Tool Blogging

First some CNC lathe:

Roughing cuts

Getting closer

Almost looks like a chess pawn...

We went to yard sales today. Just hit two, one was at the same place I scored the Dumore high speed drill press.

This bunch of hand tools cost me $15.00 The 4 wrenches in the center are nice and thin...Everything is made in the USA. The oil cans are for Kent. I love the tiny Craftsman pipe wrench. I needed another Automatic Center Punch (just under the 4 wrenches), you can never have too many laying around.

Henry cranks the insane rotary table stack of chucks I bought for $110.00
I know you are saying to yourself, "Nick, isn't $110.00 a lot of money for some boring old steel chunks?", and I would have to disagree.

The rotary table alone is worth 4 times that, new. It is a Yuasa 6" rotary table, insanely smooth in action (seems like almost no backlash.) The chucks are just icing on the cake. The 3 jaw chuck looks a lot like the Bison 5" I have on my Jet lathe, with two part jaws. The 4 jaw looks like it's a Craftsman. The point is, I love this rotary table.

The graduations on the dial are 1 degree broken up into 60 minutes (notice the "30" on either side if the dial picture)...The vernier at the top oof the picture divides one minute of a degree into 20 seconds of a degree increments.

This week in child behaviour

Henry and Max at the sand table.

Max has yet to learn the self defeating nature of flinging sand.

Moments in good parenting #127:
Henry eating Cocoa Puffs (the whole grain ones) while in his bee costume.

Bought a simple HO train at a yard sale today.

Henry really gets into his trains...

Felice just found an egg from the Easter egg hunt behind the piano.
I wonder if it is still edible?

Tool blogging

Well I thought I should do a little tool blogging....

This is the state my shop was in this morning before I started cleaning it up. This is after doing about 4 or 5 projects over the last week.


My new Sherline CNC lathe. I know I'm a bit of a traitor (as I should probably be promoting Taig machines) but it's the only CNC ready lathe on the market today. I have been learning a lot of new ways a CNC machine can commit suicide.


Inside the Xylotex controller I put together for the CNC lathe. I bought his "ready" kit which meant I only had to hook up the wires and mount the components in a box. Just setting up the box generated much of the mess you see in the first picture at the top.


A good yard sale find, a Dumore sensitive high speed drill press. For drilling small holes (small as in .032-.010" diameter) at high speeds. $30.00 was a good deal...


Kent and I went to an auction in Portland yesterday but the prices were high so this is all I bought. A Compac .0001" test indicator, 2 Doall 8" x 12" surface plates, and a fixture. One of the surface plates has some chipping on the surface but the other one is perfect. Flat to .0002". I have wanted a compac indicator for some time and was happy to buy this one for less than half of the new price. Still the economy must be good going by the prices that were being paid for the stuff at this auction.


On the way back we stopped off at Tool Shed out on Powell near the 205. Bought a .0001" thickness gage (tool on the right), a cased Lufkin/Starret backplunger indicator set (which needs some work but it was cheap) and a nice magnetic base with fine adjust. So I ended up with some more tools.

Spud's Altoids Continuity Checker

We went over to our neighbor's house today for a visit. Checking out Chris "Spud" Miller's shop, I noticed his Audible Continuity Checker that he built in an Altoids tin.

He uses it to check the mags for his business.

He likes the audible tone as it changes pitch rather than being simply on and off like a light.

I vist the 1970's and George's Derailleur

Last Sunday we visited Issac, Hannah and Kiko for Hannah's baby shower (she had us all bring compost). They live in a cob house (mud hut) way off in the hills. The oven on the right was busy baking pizzas.


To my jaded eyes it was just like a page out of the Whole Earth Catalog

Henry and Max, cute.

Henry and Max, serious.

I brought the camera over to Kent's open shop night. George brought his latest project, an aluminum and titanium hand crafted derailleur. The only parts he didn't make were the sprockets. All the screws and pins are titanium. He roughed it out with a mill and lathe and did the rest with files and a jewelers sawframe.

George is a retired machinist who works on all sorts of fun projects: an electric trike, a stirling engine that runs on ice, and a rifle are his latest. I should really go to his house and take some more pics...He knows how to make anything as far as I can tell. I basically channeled him when doing my dishwasher handle.

Notice the style...

The hex holes were broached with a sharpened allen wrench and the bench vise.
I should bring my camera every night.

Fun and Food

I pump 60 psi into a 2 litre bottle filled halfway with water

I pull the trigger, you can just make out a column of water streaming down from the bottle as it flies into the sky.
Yes, water rockets! They went at least 60 feet up, and flew all over the property due to lack of fins and a strong wind. One is in the middle of a patch of poison oak, where I left it....Henry loved it, Max was a bit frightened.

Henry amused, Max confused.

Two in jammies, but I'm the most tired.

Our friend Yodit delivered several days worth of Injera and assorted dishes thereon, she is currently my favorite person in the world. She just called up and said "I'm bringing you some food"! The spicy hard boiled egg is my favorite!

This is a book you can buy me. His illustrations in The Circus of Dr. Lao were mindblowing when I read it in my childhood.

Shapeaholic's Workshop, all things shaper-ey.

Dishwasher Fun

The handle on our Maytag dishwasher broke for the 2nd time the other day...

The above is the first handle, note how all the hinge pins sheared off...

The above is the 2nd handle. Notice the redesign with a dowel pin molded into the handle for the broken hinge pin. Unfortunately they used some tiny supports for the pin in the mold that left small holes in the plastic - which were akin to perforations and led to the handle breaking again, and the pin on the right actually pulling out (and probably getting sucked into the pump, but I haven't heard any bad noises as yet)

I laid out the bits of a piece of aluminum that weren't the handle and milled them away

This was more like machine assisted sculpting than precision machining...

I then laboriously filed away all the bits that were not a handle.

And believe it or not I made a handle that snapped into place and works great!

Felice just got back with a replacement handle from our local and wonderful appliance store. I won't install it unless the aluminum one fails. Notice this is a third design, with only one large hole for pin support (one assumes the pin was supported also in the mold at the end where it sticks out) on each side. I'll have to make a real drawing of this in case I ever have to make another one. I wish Maytag had worked out the bugs in the design before selling me the washer...

Henry has some Matzoh ball soup.

Henry hunts eggs indoors as it was hailing all day. Notice the seasonal Easter basket.

Here's a good DIY CNC site.

Who knew so many Japanese soldiers ended up in Russia? You could make a good movie out of this story.

Nerdy stuff

A customer emailed needing a way to make a custom thread for some optics, so after some thought I recommended thread milling. But I can't recommend something without trying it out, can I?


A 4 flute hand tap with 3 of the cutting edges ground off to make a one flute thread mill.


A hole produced by thread milling.

So my customer will save the $200 for a custom tap, after he does some headscratching of his own....

In other nerdy news, I installed SuSE linux earlier this week. I had no real reason, except that my old PC was being neglected. I need to reinstall though as it was a dual boot and windows isn't working well after the installation...also I can't log onto the linux box from XP...Linux may be free and cool, but it's more of a pain to setup networking, as you can see here than it was in Windows...at least for me, who knows nothing of the underlying mechanisms of either.
(not to be taken as an attack in Linux, which is neat and has lots of free software...)

Here is how to grind a drillbit for drilling plastic.

Here is my friendly local gun shop.

Max is One

Happy Birthday Max! 04/03/06 One Year Old.

Mmmmm, cake!

Old age and youth.

Henry has been painting his cars, I can hardly wait to start building and painting models with him!

Two happy, suspciously so, boys.

So we had a successful birthday party for Max, although all the children that attended now have various ailments which I'm assuming they contracted somewhere else. That's my story.
The house is full of mylar (the balloon that never dies) ballons, some sent by my mother, others purchased at the dollar store for, um, a dollar. The effect is somewhat like being 3 feet below the surface of a multicoloured sargasso sea, or jellyfish convention.

At the dollar store the guy ahead of me had a total purchase of $2.50. That confused me until Felice revealed that things at the dollar store can cost less than a dollar, just not more. (she now confesses that in a Cliff Claven moment she just made that up, it may not be true...)

I finally put something up on Ebay a few days ago. Why I even bought it in the first place is a mystery, but that someone has bid is a miracle. I think my description is accurate.

If you watch "Lost", this will help.

I was reminded of the Maparium a week ago, it is a wonder.

I am trying to figure out which "mini DV" camcorder to buy - if anyone has any hints about what is a good or bad brand/model, I'd love to hear about it, I'm trying to spend less than $400.

Felice stayed home from the market yesterday, although the promised rain never arrived I think we all needed a day off. This morning I fixed the door to Max and Henry's bedroom, it didn't engage the striker, so I filed the opening slightly larger using a square bastard file.

Then I started the DR mower up, and after much cursing and my determination that I did have spark, gas and air it finally roared to life. I also killed a sleepy yellowjacket, who was sitting in the shed toolbox, with a ball peen hammer. I used to feel guilty killing yellowjackets when slow moving but now I kill without compunction. We have too many in our neighborhood.

The other day while driving to the post office, I glimpsed a stray dog wandering alongside the road, as I came closer I realized that it was a stray goat! I love rural living.

March Non-madness.

March Sanity doesn't sound as good. Max has been sleeping in his crib for the past few days, with very little waking. Not that I'm not still exhausted, but at least I don't feel as close to collapse.

Henry sick, Max demented, Daddy tired.

Henry is one cool dude.


I finally finished my 3D milling article It was picked up by the Make blog which doubled my daily bandwidth useage for a few days. They love little projects like this, those crazy Make people.

Market starts the 1st of April and going by Henry's tantrum today when Felice slipped out for a checkup, I'm pretty much in for trouble.

Watched the first two episodes of the new Dr. Who, pretty well done with a bit of Hitchhiker/Brazil added to the classic style. I also watched "Chan is Missing", Wayne Wang's first(?) film, which was a great little detective/identity film.

I cleaned out a Thomas Train yesterday (see the Brio train cleaning also)

Housing opened up (make a triangular screwdriver to remove the two screws)

Disgusting hair wrapped up in gear train.

Motor removed, take care not to break the wires.

Notice the gear units can just be popped out for cleaning...I used a dental pick and tweezers to clean out all the hair and dirt. It now works fine.

Other than that, just work and children...

Links:
elonka.com (cryptology...)
Sandbaggers fan site.
Siris, my latest favorite blog...
Milling machine maintenance.
The John Street Roundhouse (Toronto)
Internet Acronym Server