Shop Made Tools

[Blueskys]

Take a 30 dollar drill press and void the warranty and you get this:

Just think about the uses for drilling holes if you index the spindle.

I've been thinking about putting some live tooling on my lathe.
What do you think about using an encoder and digital readout
for positioning the spindle. And then I would just have to figure
a way to lock the gears.

EDIT: Or maybe a variable resistor with an analog readout

[The Artful Bodger]

Take a 30 dollar drill press and void the warranty and you get this:

Just think about the uses for drilling holes if you index the spindle.

Evan, buy another 30 dollar drill press and take off the base casting then flip the table upside down and clamp that to the top of the cross slide. You now have a useful system for drilling radial holes and the warranty is intact!

[john hobdeclipe]

Brian's first pic, of the spider for a 3-jaw, got me thinking...why not have something similar, but that lets me adjust the depth and that will stay where I put it. So I rummaged around and found a 3MT / 5 Jacobs arbor that I had turned down to make a stub arbor for a job long forgotten. I turned the shoulder down enough to clear the inside of my chuck.


Then bored and tapped the end to take a 1/2-20 bolt, shown here with a spacer under the head, and the head faced off clean.


And now I have this:


I can set the depth by using spacers, washers, or shims under the bolt head. I can replace the hex head bolt with a socket head for smaller diameter work. I can make these changes without removing the chuck, and it will work just as well with a 4-jaw chuck.

Sure wish I had thought of this a couple weeks ago!

[bborr01]

Evan,

I'm thinking tool post grinder when I look at your setup. Sure would beat spending a ton of $ on a Dumore. Oh wait, I just did that. ID/OD Dumore.
I'm not sure if the bearings in a $30 drill press head would be adaquate for grinding though.

Doc,

Some pretty neat ideas you got there. I especially like the stop for the lathe.
I'll be putting that on my round tuit list.

Keep the posts coming. I am getting more and more geeked about this thread all the time.

Edit: John H. Nice stop there too. I get the feeling I have a lot more tools to make.

Brian

[camdigger]

Ummm, not that I've done it... But for the live tooling crowd, some lathes could be indexed off the Bull gear behind the chuck using a simple spring loaded pin or lever.

Just count the # of teeth on the bull gear and some simple math to get degrees per tooth...

[dockrat]

Getting back to spiders, I made up a set of these with varying diameters and thicknesses.



I have held some really thin stuff with them.

[Evan]

Tool post grinder eh? Why didn't I think of that?

Oh, wait.... I did.

[JCHannum]

I run across a lot of shop made fixtures and tooling in my quest for fodder. I can't take credit for these, but I have found them quite useful for holding odd sized or small parts that would otherwise require a mix of angle plates or assembling something out of 1-2-3 blocks. These are hardened and ground with 1/4-20 holes tapped at various places for fixturing or clamps. The 6" rule gives an idea of size.

There is no reason similar blocks could not be milled out of mild steel for occasional use.



I will try to trot out some of my other shop made tooling. I prefer to use these items over store bought, keeping the original maker's memory alive. I have had the opportunity to meet some of the makers and that connection adds to the enjoyment.

[gary hart]

Made little steam hammer years ago, last year finished a larger air hammer with Coleman controls.

[bborr01]

I do a lot of collet work, and I've occasionally found that certain long, thin pieces, especially if the stock is undersize from the norm, could tilt in the jaws and spin eccentric.

To fix this, I made this special 5C collet stop:



The pointed end is for small tubing or pieces that are centerdrilled. The concave end is basically a circular V-block, and will center an undrilled piece. The "nut" is even counterbored to the point the big end can almost go flush with the threads, to give me the max working range for a stop.

Next, the tool that gave Frank the idea for his air grinder.

I made this mount to hold a cheap air die-grinder on my QC toolpost, though rather than grinding, I'd originally intended mine for thread milling.





I had some work that needed a short, coarse thread to a shoulder, and cutting conventional internal threads... well, I was scrapping more than I was producing. Milling the thread made it easier and faster, and in aluminum I could cut the threads full depth in one pass.

However, the airmotor was far too fast for any other application (and the bearings really not all that great for any kind of precision grinding) and slowing it down (hence the brass flow control valve) would lose what little torque it had.

So I built this electric workhead:



It's just an old DC treadmill motor on a cobbled steel frame, and a modified prefab "buffer" arbor- the kind where you bolt it to the table, hook up an old washing machine motor or whatever, and have a buffing wheel.

This one's considerably slower (about 2500 rpm or so) and variable down to probably 500 or so before it loses too much HP, nicely rigid, and has enough torque I can mill semi-coarse threads in 303 stainless in one pass.

It also works very well as a toolpost grinder, though is probably a little slow for the small stones.

My shop is chock full of stuff like that. None of 'em are particularly fancy, they were built to do the job and not much more.

Doc.

Doc,

I never thought of milling ID threads on a lathe.

But looking at your idea reminds me of a solution to a longstanding problem we had at the plant I worked at.

We made a part by the millions that had to have a groove turned into the ID that was about 3/8 inch wide by maybe .050 deep in an ID that was about 5/8 inch.

We turned these on automatic screw machines, and when we turned the ID it left a chip inside that looked like a clock spring. These chips were a constant problem for years.

Finally someone came up with the idea of milling the recess in the ID.

Problem solved. The chips came out as small chips instead of a long wound up chip.

Nice work.

Brian

[bborr01]

Dockrat,

Looks like you came up with a similar solution to a similar problem.

Evan,

Is that a diamond wheel on the tool post grinder? The bearings in that spindle must be a lot better than I thought.

Brian

[J Tiers]

My mill has only one slot, and I didn't have a vise, nor did I have a lot of "daylight" to work with. So I wanted a low vise that would securely hold things and relieve me of the crazy setups I had been using in many cases.

This vise is the result..... picture is of it in partly finished condition, some added trimming was done later.



Later I decided I could stand some more height, but wanted rotation and an angle scale, so I mounted an old Millers falls vise on a shop-made base. The extra tilting jaw is removable for square pieces.

[Doc Nickel]

I picked up an older, probably Royal, lever collet closer for the Sheldon lathe I got back in the beginning of '08. It was a good unit, just needed minor tweaking, but unfortunately was for a threaded-spindle headstock, while mine's an L-00. The drawtube, therefore, was roughly an inch and a half short.

So I just turned up this collar:



Which stretches the drawtube the appropriate amount.



Doc.

[Evan]

Brian,

That is a CBN wheel. Diamond won't hold up used on steel.

[Bob Farr]

Made little steam hammer years ago, last year finished a larger air hammer with Coleman controls.

Gary,

She's a little beauty, nice work! Would you mind sharing some construction details? I happen to have a few unused heads from a Lockformer power sheetmetal notching machine which would make good frames for such a unit. The throats aren't real deep, but for the right kind of work they might be perfect. What do you make with yours?

Bob