Multidisciplinary Project

What at first was going to be just a little cleaning and polishing has become a monster of a project. After a good hard think I decided to bring my 20th century CNC lathe into the 21st. First up is a stand or bench to hold all the bits together.

The picture was taken last friday and I've spent a lot of time on it since then so it's mostly finished by now. You can see the lathe in the background. It has lost it's control cabinet and I've taken it to pieces (right down to individual screws) to clean and adjust it. While I was at it I've painted some bits black beacause, well... because I think a black machine looks the part. Old Henry Ford and I would've agreed on one thing>> You can have it any colour you like as long as it's black!

Here's a list of improvements I want to bring to the machine.
- Replace the outdated DOS platform by a modern computer running Linux and EMC2. If anyone reads this and they have experience they'd like to share about EMC2 I'm keen to learn. I'm especialy troubled about the HAL component of EMC2.
- Fit and wire up a breakout board so the computer can talk to the lathe.
- Replace the stepper drivers to modern microstepping Geckodrives. I've bought these allready.
- Possibly replace the Slo-syn stepper motors with modern 200 step NEMA23 motors.
- Fiddle with the spindle drive circuitry to enable computer control of speed and start/stop and reversing. This bit is underway.
- Figure out an encoder arrangement on the spindle to enable "spindle synchronised motion" like threading.
- Add a coolant pump and attendent circuitry. Under computer control no less.
- Fabricate a coolant/chip guard on the front of the machine.

I think I'll be busy for a while yet.

Avec d'la scrap

C'est un petit projet qui dure deja depuis 3 rotations au Canada. C'est ce qui me tien occupper quand je n'ai rien d'autre a faire. (s'arrive pas souvent!) Quand j'ai l'atelier a moi seul je travail sur mon petit moulinet. Il est entierement fait de matiere recycler. L'arbre est fait avec un boulon en stainless, les bushings sont fait avec des offcuts de bronze et les joues sont fait avec des restaants de tole d'aluminum.Ah oui, la petite poigne est faite avec une branche d'un arbre qu'ils appellent un teak mais je ne sais pas si c'est vraiment du vrai teak, en tout cas c'est un pas mal beau bois.

Bohle My Dear I'll Miss You

I think Pat is the only one who's ever visited my work so I thought I'd take a few pictures of my favorite machine there to give you guys an idea of scale. There it is in all it's glory. It's a German made medium size milling machine. Yes, we've got bigger one's than this one but I like the Bohle, it's a nice aprocheable size and nice to work on. It also contains the whole and extent of my German vocabulary... actually I don't really know what the words mean but I can very well see what's happening when I press the "Notausschalter" button. I think that one means something like emergency stop or something to that effect. By the fact that I'm standing directly on the table you can see this ain't your uncle's drill press! To get a better idea I'm five feet six inches tall. You have to click on the picture to get the whole picture!

Situation Update, Project Update and More!!

Here's a small update on the New Caledonian adventure which by the way is more of a "dealing with the french consulate" adventure up to now. Bright eyed and bushy tailed, oh early hour at the doctors office for my consulate medical. How much of a tough cookie are you? Well I'm not a spring daisy but I don't know how tough I should be... at which point he started jabbing sharp needles into my arm. Vaccines oh ye! Oh and blood work too, cool sorta, not really... an ECG, what the hell is an ECG, ok so you put stickers on my chest and look at the computer monitor for a few minutes, at least there's no needles involved! A chest X-ray, cool, I love the smell of radiation in the morning! After the fun and games at the doctors office it's back to paper work... bloody hell will this never end.

Project update, I showed you a nasty looking little anvil a while back and now I show it to you again. All that remains is a nice final polish and an appropriate looking tree stump to mount it on and it's done. Doesn't look half bad if you ask me. Now what I really need is to learn how to use it properly!

And now for something completely different! In the shits and giggles category I'm proud to present to you the Dali-esque, music lovers, listening room clock! I saw this on Make or Instructables some time ago but never really went ahead with the idea which I think is really cool. Anyway, boil one long play record (yes that's what people mean when they say I just bought a new LP.... long play) so boil your long play until quite pliable and, quite literally, throw it unto a convenient shelf nearby, watch it re-solidify for a few seconds. Install a cheap quartz clock movement and you're done. Cheap and cheery!

An Overdue Payment

My uncle Jean-Yves gave me a box full of caribou antlers quite some time ago. I use bits and pieces here and there when making handles, knobs, coat buttons and the like. I've always had the intention of making him a knife to thank him for the generous supply. Well here it is! Sort of a little photo sequence of how I went about creating it. The blade is from a broken industrial band saw. I just gave it a shape and an edge. The little ferrule is H13 steel for no other reason than that was what I had on hand. The handle is, of course, made of caribou antler and you can see in the first picture what part of the antler I used. In what is left of the antler I see at least three coat buttons and one handle perhaps two. As you can see close to nothing goes to waste!

The Last of the Old

Here are the last two items from the pictures my dad sent me. The first one on top is a marking knife. Because, a line scribed with a knife is so much more precise than a pencil line. The lower one is a dovetail marking guage. It is used to mark-off dovetails before cutting them quite obviously. One side has angles to mark softwood dovetails and the other is for hardwood. I think I saw this in the Lee Valley catalog and though hummm I can make this.

Once More with Feeling

These are guage blocks. Basically they are just blocks of brass. What sets them apart is that they are very precisely machined on all surfaces and therefore make a wonderful reference when working with a height guage. I also made the box. That was when I still had access to a CNC mill. Maybe four, five years ago.

How About Another One?

I made this little bugger just last december. It's a height guage. It is useful when you want to set up your saw to a pre-determined height or many other things around the shop. It's all steel and quite heavy if I remember correctly.

Old Fashion Routering Combo

These are other gifts I made for my dad. They kinda go together but I think I gave them to him on two different occasions. The top one is a stair saw. You can barely see the teeth on the bottom. It is a small saw with an adjustable blade depth and it is used to delineate a dado in a piece of wood. Hummm, that was kinda obvious as I don't see someone trying to cut metal with that!

The black spot on it is a quarter that has been coated with titanium/aluminum nitride! I used to work with a high vacuum plasma coating machine and I'd throw my spare change in it just to see the results. Anyway, the quarter has the correct year that I built the saw on it.

The bottom one is a router plane. It's kinda nice, you can see I've made progress in the design of handtools if you compare this one with the one I won the contest with. They go together because you would then use the router plane to remove the extra material in the dado you delineated with the stair saw.

A Block Plane

I made this block plane for my dad's birthday some years ago. Say 6 years, I think, maybe? The body and cap iron I milled out of naval brass. The wood, if I remember correctly, is some kind of mahogany that was salvaged from a pallet! That's right, recycling at it's best. The knob is plain mild steel and the iron is O1 steel. The iron is peculiar in that it has no chipbreaker to help it along. It is though just a bit thicker than a quarter of an inch. That iron will chatter the day it rains 500lb anvils!

The anvil

I've been working on this little gem on and off over breaks and lunches for quite some time. It doesn't look like it but there's a lot of filing to get a reasonable shape. Of course it's an anvil. A rather small one at that.

It doesn't look very good because it just came out of the hardening salts. Usually I take care of all my hardening needs with a torch or small kiln. This time around I wanted specific results. The material is M42, that's right high speed steel!! We have plenty of offcuts and scrap pieces at work so I appropriated this piece. Back to hardening. I wanted to have a hard outer surface and a tough inner core. So I left it with one of the hardening gods who work in the hellish shop next to mine. He dipped it in molted barium salts at 1850deg for a time and let it cool in air. High speed steel is an air quench steel so no need to dip it in water or oil. Long story short I got an outer shell that's about 55Rc and an inside core that runs around 45Rc. 55 is what ordinary knives are hardened at and 45 is something like the face of a hammer. Which is perfect. Not so hard that it will crack but hard enough not to dent if I accidentally hit it with the hammer while using the anvil for it's intended purpose.

Of course now it looks like shit so finishing is in order. First I'll sandblast the whole thing to get a uniform canvas. The table will then be ground on the surface grinder. The horn I'll have to finish by hand with sand paper and india stones. Then of course I need to make a stand. The underside is drilled with two holes for just that purpose.

I'll let the reader wonder how I drilled a square hole through it. Toolmakers must have a few secrets! ;o)

Birds Mouth Router Bit

Reading a past issue of WoodenBoat magazine I discovered the birds mouth joint. It is used to make hollow spars (masts, booms, etc...). I got to thinking this would make a wonderfully light shaft for a double paddle. One problem though, I don't have a bench saw... well not one accurate enough to do this kind of joint. Lee Valley sells router bits to cut this joint but then I though hummm for an eight sided spar the angle is 90deg, right? So with that in mind I started making my own router bit with a 90deg cutting face.

I made the body out of H13 steel (wonderful stuff) and I've silver soldered two bits of carbide on it. You can see in the photo I was kinda messy with the silver. No worries though it'll clean up nice. Then it's on to the cutter grinder to give the carbide bits their cutting shape and clearances.

One of the wonderful things about H13 is that when you're soldering get the body to a nice red heat. Once the soldering is done clamp the piece in a heavy vice and it'll act as a heat sink. Now if the part cools down fast enough (not too fast or the soldering 'll have stresses in it) it will harden to 40/45 Rc. That's the perfect hardness and toughness for a tool shank and body. Wonderful isn't it!

A Tiny Router Plane

Here's a neat little thing. A little while back WoodCentral and Lee Valley had a contest for would be toolmakers like me. The object of the contest was to make a woodworking tool, that's it. I won the blue ribbon (1st place) in the function category. To get the whole story click here to go to WoodCentrals website. And if you'd like to see the other winners click here.