Die Stock (Die Wrench)! Let's Make One!

this is either going to be amazing or i'm definitely going to die pray to metallicor the god of machining hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondie hacks today i'm going to make a die stock it's kind of like a wrench that holds round dies allows you to cut threads by hand or also on the lathe and i'm going to make this entirely on the lathe this is a great project for people that are just getting into machine tools and just for fun and to challenge myself i'm going to make it entirely on the four jaw chuck that's the only work holding we're going to use for this entire project it's going to be fun let's go here's an example of the dies that i'm making this for there are dimples on either side for retaining the die and then there's a split which is retained with a set screw now often you'll see a third set screw on die stocks that have a point on them and it's for wedging into the split here to keep that from closing up as you tighten the other set screws and these dies don't need that because they have the set screw in there but that is an option if you want there's room for that in the design here's my design for a die stock that we can make entirely on the lathe the sides of it are quite beefy for such a small die and that's because we need the space on either side for the handles to thread in and be counter-bored for alignment so you can see that the center section here has threaded holes on the sides with the little counter bores there and then there's set screws on opposite corners for holding the die in place it's never a bad idea to leverage the parametric features of modern engineering software but for something like a dye stock it's especially powerful because i can change one number here and now i have a die stock for two inch dies or for metric i can go 45 millimeter it's all unit agnostic of course so this is all on my patreon if you're interested in making a die stock for whatever size dies you need go check that out i rated the junk bin for this and i found a nice little stub of 12l14 and this longer mystery steel it's rusty so i know it's not stainless the end on it is pretty rough no idea what that is but let's see how it machines i always like making things that use up scraps of mystery junk because i don't know just makes me feel like i'm creating things without putting more junk into the world so i'm gonna dial in this guy on the four jaw of course we're gonna do this whole thing with the four jaw as i said so get used to dialing things in because we're going to do that a lot and i will face this off as is tradition most of the stock is inside the spindle bore but i'll pull out just enough of it for the first handle here and then of course you have to dial it in again as soon as you touch the jaws things are going to shift a little bit but if you're careful you can usually keep it within a couple thousands each time and just checking on the straightness here and you can see that we've got about quite a bit 15 thou maybe a run out at the other end so either the bar is bent or it's crooked in the jaws or some of both so i'll start by tapping it in and see if i can straighten it out in the jaws and it got a little better after i did that but not much it gets to the point where it won't move anymore in the direction that needs to and that means there's just frankly a bend in it so we can deal with that though we're going to be machining the od anyway so we can take that bend out however we need to make sure that the bend doesn't interfere with the tail support so it's best to center drill it with the stock pulled out like this and then the center will be true even though the bar has a bend in it you can see this in action here once i get the live center in there you can see once i spin it up that there's a wobble in the middle where the bend is but the tail stock isn't moving if you do this wrong if you for example put the center in it while the stock is choked up in the chuck then when you pull it out and put the tail stock in the tail stock will be wiggling because that center wasn't on the center of rotation of the bar at that length okay first cut here i've got my go-to high-speed steel cutter here that i use for steel and this is cutting pretty decently it's mystery steel so you never know this is clearly some kind of mild steel it's cutting fine but the surface finish on it is not great so after that first pass i switched out to this new insert that i've been using at the recommendation of my viewers it's actually an aluminum grade insert but on small legs it works really well on mild mystery steel and the finish on that is great though it's very hot so i let that cool down and then take a measurement here and that'll tell me how much i need for my finishing pass on a long part like this i always measure in multiple places just to see if there's any taper in it and then i go to a very slow feed very high rpm and let that run all the way down for a nice finish this is going to take a while because it's a pretty long part next i need a little shoulder at one end so i just touch the cutter lightly on the end of the part there and then i'm going to set up an indicator on the carriage and then i can zero out this indicator pull the cutter off the work move it over the depth of the shoulder that i want using the indicator to measure the precise distance there and then i can pull the indicator off of the carriage and then put it back on with a light preload and zero it right there and then i know i can just take each pass up to the zero on that indicator and that saves me having to worry about counting how many laps the needle has done and that sort of thing it's just an easy way to you know eliminate errors when turning to a shoulder like this so a couple of passes will get this down to the major diameter i need for my thread and then on my last pass i lock the carriage and wind slowly out to clean up the shoulder and everything should be nice and on dimension and then i'll just break those edges there with a file as well and then i'll put the threads on the end here with my tail stock die holder and know the irony of using a die holder to make a die holder is not lost on me if you don't own a die holder and this is the very first one you're ever making then i don't know i guess you gotta single point cut these threads this shoulder needs to thread tightly into a counter bore so it's a good idea to undercut the base of the thread to make sure that it's going to seat tightly all the way down make sure there's no fillet in there so i'm coming in with a very sharp nose tool and just undercutting that area above the thread a little bit there's no such thing as a perfect inside square corner in the real world so we undercut things that need to sit together and then i'll part this off to length just using my eye and a good quality scale for the length here the length of the handles doesn't need to be to the thousandth precise if you measure the length of the handles on my die stock with a micrometer you are getting kicked out of my shop parting mystery steel is always a little bit hair-raising this is where you find out if it's going to bite you or not sometimes it'll machine okay and then just explode when you try to part it but this actually went pretty well it's fighting me a little bit but yeah then activate the bar feeder and make the second one the same way bring it to the same point now with both of them done to that point i can put them back in flipped around the other way and i've got some shim stock on there to protect it from the jaws and i'm going to dial that in again and now we're going to finish up this end of it so i'm going to put a nice rounded end on the end of these so it'll be nice and comfortable to use so for that i've got a form tool here now using a form tool in mystery mild steel on a small lathe is really asking for trouble but you can sometimes get away with this so i'm going to try it i'm going in feeding very very slow and the more the tool gets engaged the slower i run the lathe so towards the end here i'm down to about 90 rpm very very slow just to keep it from chattering and lots and lots of cutting fluid and i did indeed get away with this that form tool by the way was just made with a dremel sanding drum just held at an angle to get clearance on the underside of it now if i had not gotten away with that then what you can do is do some step turning on the surface first to create the rough profile that you want and then go in with the form tool just to clean it up because then the form tool isn't doing as much work it's all about keeping the tool pressure as low as possible so then i went in with a file and just blended everything together because the radius of the form tool wasn't exactly perfect for the diameter of the stock the finish on that is okay with that insert that i used but i'm going to improve it a little bit further i think just to make it a little nicer so pull it out a little bit and i got some protection on the ways there oil it up and i'm going to come in with the 320 grit emery cloth and just polish that up a little bit smooth that out a little bit all the way down the length of it there and then i also came back in with some 800 and polished it up a little further as well and then you can flip it around and do the end that was in the chuck the same way you don't have to dial it in for these steps when you're just using every cloth it doesn't matter if the part is running true or not on to the body of the die stock now i've got this scrap i showed earlier but it's too big hmm i'm gonna need a bigger chuck i guess that's frustrating imperial fist shake oh wait these adjust okay so i'm gonna move the jaws out and dial this guy in as well of course this is a leftover stub from 28 previous projects so it's got a whole bunch of weird random diameters on it that i'm going to face all the way down as is tradition and then once i've got one nice clean face on it for the final finishes i used the power cross feed because you want to feed very slowly which gets old pretty fast even on a two inch diameter like this then i score up the tool post using the face of the work which is now nice and square might as well and that will allow me to get in here with the chamfer tool now and this is the back of the die stock body so i can put a really generous chamfer on here i can have a little fun with it you can get away with this to a point but if you want a chamfer much bigger than this you need to single point cut it by using the compound i'm going to reference that back to the chuck face now and so i've flipped the jaws around and i'm going to hold it using the outside jaws like so for the rest of our operations this is going to let me machine it down to quite a thin dimension while still being able to access it so i need to dial it in here once again of course but i won't need to move it again here for quite a while after this now the stock is quite a bit too thick so i'm going to face it all the way down it's kind of right on the edge of where it was worth getting out the saw to cut off the excess it's going to be a lot of chips but it didn't quite feel like it was worth cutting it off so i'm just gonna face it all the way down and this will be the last job that this stock is ever used for it's served us very well now unfortunately i can't get my calipers in there to see how close i am i know i'm close but i got to take it out for a measurement for the final pass so take it out figure out how much i got to take off and then put it back in and this is the final cut so i want to be nice and parallel so i'm going to tap tap tap this in make sure that my reference face is seated well against the jaws there and then to do this dialing in i've got to get in a different indicator tip here so i can sneak in behind the spinning wings of death there you've always got to be careful with the floor jaw working in this position and then i'll tap it in one more time and then check it with the indicator one more time because anytime you touch anything something else might have moved you got to go back and forth checking everything until nothing moves and then i can come in here and break this edge after that final cut and now we can start putting holes in it so there's the first hole center drilled and pilot drilled but i'm getting into trouble here because the jaws are closed up behind the work here so if i go in with larger drills i'm going to hit them so i need basically a drill with no point on the end and for that i've got this guy right here this is a dewalt drill that has a flat grind on it and this is going to allow me to go through the stock without breaking through to the other side with a big point that would hit the chuck jaws you could also grind a drill like this or use a two flute end mill or make the hole in the previous setup before we flip the jaws around which would have been a lot easier precision depth is going to be key here because i don't want to go too deep so i'm setting up an indicator on the tail stock coil here and i just touch up the drill zero it right there and then i can come in with this flat grind drill because the grind on the drill is flat you can see it wanders quite a bit when it starts but that's okay because we're going to be boring this this is just a roughing operation to get most of the material out of the way and that makes it just big enough that i can get my smallest boring bar in here and then we can open up this hole to the final dimension required by the drawing the idea here is this is a pass through for the largest stock that you might ever want to cut a thread on which in this case is half inch because it's a one inch die and that's the biggest thread that you can cut with a die that size so i'm making this hole a little bigger than half inch so that you can pass material through it as needed we have a long way to go but now it's big enough for i can switch out to my larger boring bar so i can take heavier cuts and oh nope not quite gonna fit okay back to the little one for a little while and widen this guy up a couple more passes and now i can come back in with the big one and finish this out to size should be close now on the diameter so out comes the telescoping bore gauge or the snap gauge as i like to call it to engage the trolls and that tells me how much i need to take off for my finishing cut and i've also stopped a few thou short on the depth so i'm going to check how much further i need to go there and then i do both of those finishing cuts in one operation so i go all the way in to zero on my indicator with the boring bar and then i lock the carriage and i wind in with the boring bar to finish that back face just like you would with turning to a shoulder but kind of in the negative aspect something into sciencey words you get the idea the result looks very nice it should be right on dimensions so i can deburr that and let's do a little test fit here with the die and see how we did survey says oh not quite we're just a hair too small just the tiniest little bit so what it needs i think is a spring pass because normally you do two passes with the boring bar you go in and you go out and the spring pass kind of finishes a two dimension because boring bars have a lot of flex in them but when you do that final pass on both surfaces you don't get that spring pass on the way back so i just go in with the boring bar to the inside corner again without changing the setting on it at all it's exactly in the same place as it was when i did that surface previously go in come back out again and now the die fits perfectly oh mercy that's a good fit i just moments like this are why i like machining that is just so incredibly satisfying let's see how we did on depth and yeah the scale sits perfectly across there it's not proud of the surface and if i reach in there and try to pull the die out against the ruler i can't so it's basically sitting exactly in the right place that's wow i'm very pleased with that now let's get crazy so i'm going to put this thing in the four jaw edge on like so and we're going to make the holes for the handles so you dial in the sides of this just like you would a square part you rotate it back and forth till the needle stops moving and that tells you when the surface is vertical and that gives you a reading and then you flip it over and do the same thing on the other side and that gives you a reading and then you use those two readings to dial it in on that axis just like you would with a round part you just have to be a little more careful about how you flip it back and forth for the other axis we can do the same thing but we can't access the side of the part so instead we're using a cord of the circle across the part and you can do this as long as you're very careful that nothing moves in your setup so don't move the indicator don't let the part move in and out of the chuck and so that you're always on that same circle cord if you do this carefully you can get away with it and then after doing one axis you got to go back and check the other one because it's likely to have moved and you go back and forth until everything is dialed in on both axes and then we can spin it up and see how it looks and that is looking good one cautionary note here you really only want to hold round things sideways in the jaws like this if the jaw is at or over the center line of the round part because otherwise you're holding it behind the curve if you will and you don't have a secure grip and it's going to shoot that part out of there like a wet hot dog now you can get away with this to some degree if the other two jaws have a good grip but just know that your part is not very secure if the jaws are not over the center line of the round surface so that setup is fussy but once it's done we can proceed as if this wasn't a crazy round part sitting sideways in a four jaw chuck so i can center drill that and then once again we're going to need very precise depths here because we got to make these blind holes as deep as possible without breaking through into the center bore there so then we're going to follow the drawing to the letter here and we want these depths precise to the thousandth if we can get it and of course we're going negative here we're pulling away from the indicator so that's why the indicator was pre-loaded all the way up once we're at depth with the tapping drill then i can come back in and tap those threads for the handle all the way down this hole is so shallow so i go straight in with the bottoming tap there's no point even trying with the taper tap it's never going to even start quick test fit of the threads with the handle and that looks good of course the handle won't seat down all the way because we haven't counter board that yet so that's next luckily this hole is just big enough that i can get my little boring bar in there so i'm going to counter bore this out for the handle and this looks nice but it's more than just aesthetic it's also going to hold the handles in alignment and add a lot of strength so it's not just the threads that are holding the handle in there the handles themselves are going to have a positive registration against the body and the fact that a counter bore can hold the part in alignment is going to serve us very well here in a minute as you will see moment of truth let's see how the handle fits in there it should disappear completely into the body if we did our homework and that is looking really good threads in there real nice and oops ah yeah see that chamfer was not actually in my drawing i went off script there and didn't account for how it was going to expose part of the counterbore there but well other than that little space there we'll see if the inspector notices it but otherwise it's looking good so now i can pull that out of there and remember how i said that counter bore is going to serve to align the handle well here is how we're going to leverage that so now i put it back in the other way and i'm going to use the handle to align the other handle at 180 degrees opposed so i dial that in you might think i'm crazy but bear with me here this is not as crazy as it looks so what i'm going to do is just center drill that and then i'm just going to put a little tiny pilot hole to the final depth of the counter board feature here i'm not going to do all the machine work on this side with this crazy setup just putting a little pilot hole in there and then i go and find a gauge pin that's a good fit and it's that one's too small go up a little bit and that is a good fit this is three thousand size because it's a drilled hole so that's about what you'd expect now i can take this out of this maniac setup and take the handle off and now i can put my gauge pin into that hole and use it as a reference so i just used that fragile setup to establish my reference and now i can make a sturdy setup to do the actual machining using that reference so i put the gauge pin in my tail stock just to get me in the ballpark here and then i'm going to get my shim stock back in there to protect the work and then i'm tightening this up very lightly you don't want to tighten it up firmly because you'll risk bending the gauge pin because you're unlikely to tighten it up perfectly on all sides so just lightly and then tighten the jaws up and now dial it in using that pin easy right dialing the pin and we're done well not quite as you can see the part is actually still crooked in the jaw the end of the gauge pin there's wiggling around so i had to come back in loosen it a little bit and shift it slightly in the jaws after i pulled the tail stock out it must have shifted a little bit so i wiggle things around a little bit tighten things up again and i dialed it in on both the far end and the near end of the gauge pin and just went back and forth until i had it running as as true as i could get it it's not perfect but i got as close as i can here with this method spin that up see how it looks it's not perfect but it's pretty good more than sufficient for the handle on a die stock and drilling threading counter boring just like on the other side now we need the little threaded holes that are 90 degrees opposite the handles for holding the die in place so i'm going to blow up the general area where those need to go and these need to be you know roughly 90 degrees off of the handles but they don't have to be precise so i'm going to do it on the surface plate and i use the handle to just eyeball the top vertical there and then i'm going to use my height gauge to find the top surface and then i come down the radius of the part and i'm just going to scribe that line right there so that's going to be a center line that's pretty close to 90 degrees off of the handles and then for the other dimension i'm going to find the top of the part and then i'm going to come down half the thickness of the dies so that the set screw ends up on the center line of the dies themselves which is different than the center line of the die stock body inscribe that and there is our center now i can center punch that and we're ready to go now i'm going to dial in this punch mark but there's something important to understand here it's not enough to get this punch mark on the center axis of the lathe you also have to have this punch mark on the outermost part of the curvature of the stalk otherwise you're centering your punch in the wrong place so you need to have some way to reference the punch mark on an imaginary line going through the center of the die stock so in this case i'm using the counter bores that we made and i've lined them up on the top and bottom jaw of the four jaw chuck however if you weren't able to do that depending on the part you were making you could also scribe a center line and then line up that center line so that it's horizontal with something on the lathe something like that this is not the most precise way to do a feature like this but for something like a die stock it's sufficient if you needed a high precision version of a feature like this you'd probably want to set it up on the mill where you can control the references much better or if you needed high precision and you needed to do it in the four jaw then you're probably looking at building a fixture that can reference the other features of the part to the chuck so now i can bring in my dead center which if you've never noticed has a center in the back of its own and i can use this to align my punch mark on the center axis of the lathe so i pin it between the punch mark and my live center put the indicator on that and then dial this in just like any other part i have that board down there because it is possible for the dead center to fall out while you're doing this if you're not careful i'm doing it this way because the punch mark is not centered on the body like the other features were however you could also do this with an indicator just when you dial it in bias your indicator readings to one side to shift the hole that you're going to make to one side now once again we need two of these holes 180 degrees of pose like for the handles however these are through holes so i can just drill both of them straight through all the way and while i needed to center drill the entry point because that's a convex surface the hole on the other side is a concave surface we're coming at it from the inside of the bore so that's going to self-center and the drill can engage the material on the other side just fine then i can keep it in this setup and tap the first hole then i flip it around and just roughly position it with the gauge pin trick again just close enough is fine here the tap will find the right place and you can even tap that by hand if you wanted you probably noticed i never did machine the od and that's intentional i just went with the od of the round bar that i had because this outer surface doesn't need to be precision and it saves me making a lot of chips and then a little polish on the scotch brite wheel it's looking pretty good all right test fit time i should be able to put both handles in and i got some little bolts there that i just cut to length to use the set screws i just filed a little dog point on the bottom of each of them die goes in set screws go in and that is looking suspiciously like a dye stock i think that will work okay finishing in final assembly i'm going to clean everything up with acetone i'm going to leave it bright finish because i think it turned out nice visually and i put some loctite on the threads that will keep those handles from loosening but i can still remove them if i ever want to for finishing normally both shield t9 would be my go-to but crc sent me this stuff i'm gonna give it a shot full disclosure they sent me this for free but no strings attached so i guess that makes me some sort of corporate sellout i don't know what happened to you quinn you used to be cool wait no no i was never cool all right i'll try this stuff and if it sucks i'll tell you there it is i'm really pleased with how the handles turned out they have a real beefy feel to them plenty of leverage lots of strength there and well good for light murder as well so let's give this thing a test run it works as expected on the lathe in manual usage it's got the pass through there and i can cut a very long thread on the stock as hoped but i also wanted to make this thing extra beefy so that i could try using it under power so let's do that and that's working quite well i tried a couple of different positions on the board here and you do have to be careful the board has to be slippery otherwise the handle can get caught up and you gotta kind of keep it moving but you know without getting your fingers anywhere near there where they might get squished this worked surprisingly well on my little one horsepower lathe it's working really hard and there's lots of smoke but it does cut quite a nice thread very very quickly so i'm pretty pleased with that result this was a fun little project we got to try some interesting things on the four jaw and now i have a terrifying new way to make threads under power in a very very fast way i hope you enjoyed this project if you like these videos throw me a little love on patreon there's a link in the description and there's a card here on the screen thank you very much for watching and i will see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 43,099

Rating: 4.961484 out of 5

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, die stock, die wrench, die stock tool, die stock use, how to make a die stock

Id: bHRqEGRR440

Length: 26min 9sec (1569 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 17 2021