This week was exactly like every other week this year, more and more machining.

Friday

On friday I finished up the pins I made, this wasn’t very much special, but because we don’t have a 1/4" 5C collet (We now do don’t worry) I had to get creative and put my pins in a mill tool holder and then that into a collet that we did have. While being unorthodox it was surprisingly normal and effective.

Lathe setup
However well it works, its still cursed.

Monday

After finishing the pins last week I noticed that it wasn’t possible to screw the bolts into the threads. This couldve been for a few reasons. Either I used the wrong tap, the wrong drill bit, or the wrong screws. So I tried the first thing. I re tapped one and it seemed to work much better. Then I tried using a different tap and that worked even better. I later looked at what drill I was using and it was incorrect. People really have to start putting the drill back correctly, and maybe I should really look at what drills I am using. After this I was able to start getting everything setup for a new base that I need to cut. This was very boring as it entailed very long bandsaw cuts as well as lots of tool indexing and offsets.

Tuesay

On Tuesday I cut the new base. This was exactly like the old base, except the holes are now threaded so I can utilize the intended mounting solution, as well as there not being any drill bits embeded in it. Luckily the CNC work was all uneventful however long and annoying. I did create quite the challenge for myself. I didn’t leave enough room to hold onto the material in the horizontal bandsaw, meaning I had to remove the material by turning it into chips. This isn’t the end of the world but also gave me an opportunity to use a new process I had done before.

Wednesday

Wednesday I had a lot of material to remove. This I chose to do with a big roughing endmill. I had never done this before so it was pretty interesting. At first I was running the HSS mill about 4 times faster than I should have, at about 1000 rpm. Even though it wasn’t optimal it still worked really well at removing large amounts of material.

Roughing

Credit to Aaron BenDaniel for the camera work.

After the roughing, I still had to face it to width and drill and tap the holes for the mounting. This went off without a hitch and honestly is not very entertaining.

Facing
There is nothing more satisfying than a flycut surface.

Now with this done I was able to assemble the thing for the first time. Unfortunatly I lost one of the pins, but otherwise, everything works perfectly!

Thursay

SNOW DAY!