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The lathe arrives!
tinkerer:
I have no idea what a good substitute would be. The 100 may mean 100%. Amazon sells it by the gallon for $38.00 US.
AdeV:
--- Quote from: tinkerer on November 09, 2009, 02:53:49 PM ---I have no idea what a good substitute would be. The 100 may mean 100%. Amazon sells it by the gallon for $38.00 US.
--- End quote ---
Not in the UK they don't - it's all ultra-expensive "health" stuff, or hair conditioner, or similar, and comes in little tiny pots or bottles... Anyway, I had a slightly closer look at the lube chart, and did a bit of deductive reasoning (probably entirely wrong, knowing me ::)), which leads me to believe it may be a lube supplied by Houghton Edgar Vaughan ::):
I've sent them an e-mail... hopefully they'll reply. Thanks for taking the time to try to puzzle this one out for me :thumbup:
Meantime, I couldn't resist a little play. The first job was to make a chuck key, there being none supplied with the lathe. I couldn't find my square bar stock, so I decided to use one of the arms on the chuck key I made for my dividing head. The bar only needed about 0.020" shaving off to make it fit the 3-jaw chuck - and accuracy wasn't mad important, so I lobbed it at the vice & took very light (0.005") cuts with an end mill:
I invite you to count the number of errors/bad practices I'm indulging in here. I can think of at least three.
Anyway, managing to avoid launching lumps of metal across the shop, I milled down 3 sides by 0.015" each (who can't count? me?). The 4th side wasn't possible with the key in the bottom of the vice due to the right-angled bit. And it's slightly narrower than my parallels. A trial fit showed it was OK anyway, so I left the 4th side un-milled. This is the result:
Nasty, but it allowed me to chuck some bar into the lathe to have a little play.
Oh boy, now the learning begins....
I won't show the results of the first bar, because frankly it's dreadful. I managed to chip the carbide bit that was in place, and mounting a new tool will be a major pain in the posterior - a QCTP is definitely right near the top of the agenda. At first, it seemed that the lathe was in a massive hurry. Observe the chart below:
I wanted the slowest possible feed rate for either sliding or surfacing. 14 is the smallest number, so I set the gearbox accordingly. Banzai!!! :bugeye: The carriage shoots off across the room, and it looks like I'm cutting a really naff thread. WTF??? Shurely this isn't right? I try facing the end of the bar & get a lovely spiral pattern. What's the deal here, do I need some uber-wide bit here? Have I made a massive mistake buying this lathe? I do recall that the minimum number of threads per inch was a comparatively low number. 28, in fact.
Hmm. 28tpi is all the way over the other side of the gearbox.
:med:
:smart:
I remember reading about this on Tony's lathes.co.uk site. Edgwick didn't quote their surfacing/sliding speeds in thousandths per revolution; they described it in cuts per inch! So I'd managed to pick the MAXIMUM speed of the lathe, instead of the minimum!
:wack:
Adjusted over to 200 "cuts/inch", and got a MUCH better surface finish. Still rough as a bear's arse, but that's because I've chipped my carbide bit. :hammer:
Oh, and when I clamped the bit in the chuck, I broke the (really really crappy) weld on my chuck key. So I can't get the bar out now.
Hey ho. Tomorrow I shall make a whole new chuck key. One that doesn't have welding on it.
That's all for now!
AdeV:
Well, the machining practicing continues apace. No photos I'm afraid, because everything I've produced so far has either been garbage, or just a thinner bar than it was before I started ::)
Lacking a thread cutting bit, I figured I could get away with using my carbide cutter, as the angles weren't a million miles out, and this was just a practice piece. As mentioned above, I'd chipped the cutter, but being indexable meant I had two good cutting faces left. Well, a couple of dig-ins later, I didn't have any cutting edges left. :hammer: That'll teach me to use the wrong shaped bit incorrectly (I should have set the compound slide to 22.5 degrees & advanced that way, instead of trying to cut corners & use the cross slide). Lesson learned, but now i'm clean out of carbide cutting edges. Doh. Most of the other bits of tooling I've got are either HSS, or brazed carbide - all of the brazed tools have chips or dings.
So; I pick the best shaped piece of HSS I've got & free-hand grind it on the grinding wheel. It cuts OK, not the best finish on the planet, but I've probably not ground it too well; and the pointy bit cut theads just about well enough to screw into the Lister's exhaust pipe, which is what I wanted to try out.
As a result, I really need to find a suitable grinding wheel for my fancy Abwood grinder... so I can cut nice accurate angles without worrying about whether my freehand technique is any good or not (that can come later). I think I need 8" cup-type wheels (so I can grind on the face, rather than the edge), but can I find any? Not likely....
Anyone got any idea where I might get such a wheel? Or have I bought a lemon?
trevoratxtal:
for large cup wheels Try
http://www.mscjlindustrial.co.uk/CGI/INSRHM
some times expensive but have a huge range,
If you find the item you are after google it to see if someone else does it cheaper.
:wave:
Trev
AdeV:
Thanks for the link Trev :thumbup: Unfortunately, they don't seem to do any 8" cup-shaped wheels :(
So, I've just gone & taken one of the steel wheels off & measured it.
:doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh: :doh:
It's 6"!
What an idiot.
I now need to find a 6" cup wheel with what appears to be a 2-5/8" hole for the hub. I suspect this will be a much easier task...
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