The Home Machinist!

Bill Shields wrote: ↑Tue Aug 22, 2023 1:32 pm all of which amplifies the reason I have very little 1018 around my shop.

After this I happily have a whole lot less myself!

This would have looked much nicer if I had used 12L14 but it's finished and I don't want to repeat the exercise. Dimensions: The shank is sized at 7/8" to fit an R-8 collet and is 1.41" long. The entire upper body is 2.8" long. The big end is 1.43" in diameter and 0.900" lon...

Harold, the primary reason that I didn’t want to polish the bore was that one of the goals was to have a good machined slip fit with 0.001-0.002 clearance. Polishing would defeat the goal and done as you described is relatively imprecise. OTOH, failure to plan ahead the last 3-4 passes will lead to ...

This was a combination of needing to make an arbor for slitting saws with a 1” hole and an experiment to find out if I could get acceptable finishes on 1018 CR. It’s also the most difficult piece I’ve attempted from 1018. I ground an HSS tool several years ago that makes a “pretty smooth” but not sh...

Depends on what you intend to do on the workbench. Some of mine are coated in oil based Varathane polyurethane. It's very tough and resistant to the liquids you mentioned. Acetone will attack it. The bench I use mostly for model airplane and cabinet work has a Formica top that gets a fresh coat of p...

For the past two years I've had an opportunity to work with a lot of circa 1910-1913 machining and some from around 1940-42 while working on the restoration of the battleship USS Texas, BB-35. Much of our work is centered on the 20mm Oerlikon, 40mm Quad Bofors, 3" and 5" guns. The quality ...

The Battleship Texas Foundation ordered a Widell die and several Drill America dies to assist with this job. I ultimately opted to use two Drill America dies; one in the tailstock die holder and one in the hand die holder. Those dies were "interesting" as they had no wrong side from which ...

As I was making over 2 dozen 1/2” Fillister head screws I kept thinking about the old song, “Stairway to Heaven.” All that glitters is gold, unless you’ve bought brass lately. The labor was donated; thank goodness that “they” provided the free machining brass.

My lathe has an MT-4 spindle taper with a Bison 5C collet chuck mounted on a back plate. How well it releases is dependent on the collet but I'm very happy with the way it works. Stefan Gotteswinter has an excellent video on tuning up 5C collets for easier use.

Single pointing to near final dimensions followed by a die worked well, The heads of the screws are 1/2" thick after parting off so there was plenty to grip in a collet for head forming. The screw then went to the mill where I held it in a square collet block to cut the screwdriver slots. I thi...

Yesterday I watched while someone else removed some seriously rusted nuts from studs. I volunteer on a battleship restoration project. They were off of a 5" gun mount of the Battleship Texas. The guns and mounts were built in 1911 and their last maintenance couldn't have been more recent than 1...

The Widell doesn't want to thread unless I turn down the brass to around .480" and put a heavy chamfer on it. This doesn't seem right looking at thread specs. What am I missing? Not much, really. It's a great example of how poorly dies are suited to generating *good* threads. That's not to say...