Gallery, Projects and General > Project Logs
A junkyard lathe and mill tool grinder
nel2lar:
Steve
I must say right on time. I have a nice belt/disc sander and the disc just sits there spinning because I use my pedestal grinder to do my tool grinding. But using the disc I can cut more precise settings much easier. Thanks for the update and show up on my radar. I'll be using your ideas to make it work for me.
Thank you Sir, by the way I like the way you think.
Nelson
vtsteam:
You're welcome Nelson, glad it's helpful to you. I never did make an adjustable stop, as intended for mills, but maybe this winter.....
vtsteam:
I actually never finished the end mill sharpening part of this project. Almost there, but lacked stops. I'm going to pick this back up as I have a big bunch of dull end mills in need of sharpening, and they are getting rather expensive to buy!
(Heh, it took me about 20 minutes of searching to find this old thread -- I couldn't remember what the title was, and searching on "belt sander" and "Delta" didn't work. Couldn't remember where I'd left things either. I do have all of the mechanical stuff, so on with the show...
RotarySMP:
I think this is an excellent use of web necrophilia. I like it when old threads get resuscitated. Look forward to seeing your depth adjustment system.
vtsteam:
Thanks RSMP. :beer:
I wanted to get a feel for how it worked before making the stop, just to see how well it functioned and in case I wanted to change anything.
Also I've been suffering with a bad 1/2" I need for a long slot in another project I'm working on. That mill was so bad that it screeched bloody murder when trying to take an initial .010" cut, and had the whole mill table jumping when trying to plunge at the start. The flutes didn't look that bad, but I think one of the corners was burred, couldn't quite tell with just glasses on and no magnifier.
So I decided that would be my first experimental victim, using no stop, just sharpening by feel and eye. Well that's not quite true since the angles are all set by the fixture, and really all I needed to do was decide how far to plunge the mill into the sanding disk. I decided to just touch it lightly, and repeated that for both sides. I could see that the grind was even. I think it took me at most a minute to plunk the mill into the holder, tighten the setscrew and grind both flutes.
It looked good, but would it cut? Did I have the angles right? Were the flutes even ectually?
Well, I don't know about the technical quality of that sharpening job, but I do know that mill plunged quietly to .040" into a slab of chewey hot rolled steel, and sliced out a 4-3/4" slot with no complaints whatsoever. It was an end mill transformed! :ddb:
Hard to believe a junked and broken cheap sander could put a properly formed cutting edge on an end mill. I don't know what to call this thing, maybe the Antiquorn? Not to take anything away from the Quorn, and this is certainly less versatile, doesn't do the side flutes, and is by far less beautiful. BUT, it just provided me with a near lifetime supply of usable end mills (old ones given to me mostly).
I'm feeling stupid for letting this project lapse for 9 years without even once trying it out, while I bought end mills, some of which lasted minutes through an error by user. And for trying to get by with dull ones, taking .010" cuts, and suffering cramps from long hours trying to cut through reasonably thin materials. Milling projects that might otherwise taken a quarter or less of the time.
Well anyway, here we have the first slot being cut with a sharpened mill from the Antiquorn:
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