Easy Improvements For Your Lathe And Mill!

man this thing is ugly if I show this on YouTube everybody's gonna make fun of me hello Internet my name is Quinn and this is bloody hacks it's an ancient machinist tradition to modify your machine tools to make them safer more efficient more pleasant to use that sort of thing this is a collection of stuff that I've done to my machines along with stuff that I've seen other people do that I think you might like and I'm sure you've got other ideas things that you've done to your machines that I've missed so comment down below okay let's go first up is slide locks a lot of budget import lathes don't have locks on everything that moves and you do want locks on everything that moves in this case you might notice there's one cap screw here that does not have a jam nut on it and this is the lock for my cross slide so this guy here with an allen key can be locked and then these guys are the Gib adjusters so if you don't have a lock on your cross slide it's quite easy to Simply drill and tap a hole here for a screw just like this and if you want to be fancy about it you can also put a dimple on the Gib on the inside there so that this guy registers in that but that's probably optional also visible here is this strange looking Contraption this is the carriage lock on this lathe now they've provided this nice big Allen head cap screw here for the lock but well you see the problem depending on where the cross slide happens to be located the give Adjusters block this Lock super annoying and it also means you can't leave the wrench in place in that lock which is very convenient when you're turning to a shoulder because well now it's going to interfere with the cross light as you're trying to do operations so to get around this problem I made this little guy out of some scrap and it is literally just a piece of scrap that I drill the hole in filed that hole into a hexagon and pressed the end of an old Allen key into it that I cut off and then that guy just lives in there and it's clear of all of these cap screws and then I can lock the carriage and unlock it that will no matter where it is I really should make something more attractive here but I literally made this in 10 minutes in the first week that I started using the slave because this drove me crazy and I kept meaning to make a nicer one and then five years happened and well here we are one of the annoying things about small lathes is that the compounds are very small and so the compound hand wheel is quite fussy to manipulate so if you're turning a lot of tapers this gets old really really fast so simple trick to make this more pleasant is to get an old pen cap this is actually a brass one that I turned for a pen project but any old regular pin cap will actually work and now you have a speed handle on your compound or if you have an old Sharpie cap that also works very well another great trick I've seen people do is to Simply make a tea out of some round bar and then you can put that in a hand drill and turn your compound that way get a power feed on your compound if you're turning a lot of tapers or a lot of back and forth that might be useful the compound travel on these small lathes is so short this is about two two and a half inches that that's probably Overkill this here seems to work quite well for me speaking of locks here's the most important lock on a small lathe the compound slide lock what Quinn you're crazy true but that doesn't make me wrong the one thing that lathes this size have in very low Supply is rigidity so anything you can do to improve rigidity is going to be a huge win and one of the best things you can do is keep your compound locked this is a big source of rigidity loss up here especially if the end of it is hanging past the slide so you want to keep that guy flush on the end there and then keep it locked down unless you really really need it I also keep these Gibbs a little on the tight side and that also helps and if you really want to maximize rigidity take a page from the Stefan book eliminate your compound Mill yourself up a block the same height and stick it in here because really take a step back and ask yourself how much single point threading or short taper cutting do you really do maybe swapping out the compound when you need it occasionally is not that big a deal so Food For Thought now I can already feel the commenters spooling up all of the other things the compound can do for you and yes the compound has many other uses it's helpful to turn it parallel to the waves sometimes you can do a little cosine math and use it as a very fine feed on your cross slide and there's many other little tricks that you can do but on a small lathe the price and rigidity that we pay for having this guy here is pretty high now I've kept it on here but I've definitely thought about taking it off it's been here for five years but we'll see how much longer it lasts this next one might seem silly but it's actually very helpful label things especially if they are unintuitive and potentially dangerous to get them wrong this lathe has regular power feed and also power cross feed chosen with this lever here and the trick is one of them is over and down and the other one is back and up if you get that wrong there's a good chance you'll crash something and nothing on here is labeled so it's very easy to forget which way is which amongst those confusing four motions that you have to go through so I keep this guy labeled Carriage power feed over up cross slide power feed back and down it's a simple thing that has saved me a lot of potential grief similarly over here on the Quick Change gearbox using that term loosely with hobby lathes I've marked the feed speeds that you get out of this transmission here because they're marked a b and c which is part of the chart that sets up for threading but those don't map linearly to the feed speeds when you have the feed gears in there so a is actually medium B is the fastest and C is the slowest so once again to avoid mixing that Up In the Heat of the Moment I just labeled them foreign one of the first things you can do on a new import lathe is take all the change gears apart and clean them up your machine likely came with all messy gears and bushings and other paraphernalia that are combined in various alchemies to create different thread pitches and also possibly different feed rates depending on the machine and if it's anything like most import lathes the fit and finish on these gears is going to be pretty terrible so you're going to want to spend some time deburring the bores and the keyways and cleaning up the bushings and just make all of the parts fit together smoothly and nicely otherwise messing with change gears is going to be a huge chore and it's not something that you will enjoy so it's worth spending two three hours with the deburring tools and some files and some member cloth and clean all the stuff up everything here should slide together smoothly like adult Lego you shouldn't have to tap anything or pry on anything or Jam anything together it should all just click together very smooth and very nicely so if it doesn't do that spend more time deburring and cleaning up those bores and keyways Etc another area that's ripe for modification are the maintenance areas of the machine just like on a car all the gearboxes on Machine Tools have to have the oil changed periodically and on this particular lathe guess where the drain plug is for the quick change gearbox right there not only is it too high it's not at the bottom of the sump it's also behind the change gears that's super terrible so I've changed the oil on this guy once so far but next time I do it I'm going to put a new drain plug right there amazingly that drain plug might be the better of the two on this machine The Carriage gearbox drain plug is under here it's so close here that a regular allen wrench won't even fit and I had to make this special stubby one to get in there so make yourself some little tools like this as needed and keep them in the toolbox with your lathe tools but seriously how did they expect you to get in there this thing's built like a British car and here's an easy win for quality of life go to Target or Walmart or wherever and get yourself the cheapest cookie sheet that they sell and you have yourself an easy to clean chip tray these small lathes can be hard to get in and around with your hands when it's time to clean up and this guy makes a quick work of that job done and of course it doesn't catch every single chip but you know you got to leave something for The Apprentice to do I don't know if this counts as a mod exactly but here's a tip anyway recipe boxes are the exact right size to hold quarter size sheets of Emery paper so I keep this next to the lathe and they come with these little index cards which you can use to sort them by grit and I keep my Scotch brights in here as well another great thing that I recommend doing pretty much right away is make yourself a set of copper soft Jaws I have them for the three and four jaw Chuck and I actually have a separate video called stupid four check tricks where I show how to make these guys but you can see that they're just folded out of some copper sheet material and they're more useful on the four jaw than they are on the three jaw because the three jaw you're probably not using for a second operation which is where you want to protect an already machined surface and also on the three jar they tend to introduce a lot of run out whereas on the four drive that doesn't matter because you're dialing out that run out but I do occasionally use them on the three jaw as well so it's worth making a set for both Chucks and maybe make them fit a little better than this one what is this thing's problem can we just cut all this out yeah you're gonna edit that out right okay good I don't want to look like an idiot up here and I'll finish with a couple of mods from let's say viewer mail things that other people have told me they've done to their lathes which sound like really good ideas to me one is a cross slide stop so the idea is you put an adjustable stop back here that mounts on the back of the carriage and so you can get repeatable depths just like you would with say a stop on your Mill table and that would be great for things like cutting o-ring grooves or anytime you need to do multiple plunging operations with a tool another one that a lot of people suggest is when using the four jaw Chuck to make a second Chuck key so that you have two keys that you can use on either side of the Chuck and people say that makes it a lot quicker and easier to dial in the four jaw I have not tried that myself but it does sound like a good idea here's another simple idea make yourself a special wrench for the tool post now a lot of people will make a dedicated thing that sits on this nut or even replace the entire mounting post with a permanently attached lever of some sort that locks and unlocks the tool I think that's a great idea but this solution has worked really well for me so this is a 17 millimeter bolt on here so I went to Big Box store bought the cheapest crappiest 17 millimeter wrench that I could Lop the end off it and ground it all nice and smooth and the reason that I went with this is well a I have a perfect little pocket here in my apron for this wrench and B it happens to be the same size as the hardware on my strap clamp set on the mill and a couple of other things around my shop and as I've made new tools I continue to make them with 17 millimeter hardware for example my steady rest or other fixtures that I make and or modify to use this 17 millimeter wrench for everything so this wrench lives in my apron and I use it a thousand times a day very quick to pull it in and out one wrench for everything super super handy over to the mill now for a couple of mods here the first one I did is these little brass knobs which you've seen on my channel before and these replace the factory Kip handles which were excessively long for this machine these are fairly full size handles for a very small machine and so they were constantly in the way they would snag on the Y table slide and they would interfere with the vice if you weren't constantly monitoring the positions of these things as you use the machine they would inevitably get snagged and to Bent as this one has been so these were a pain in the patootie these little brass knobs were a 30 minute lathe project they're never in the way and they work great I've got some commercial mods on my machine as well this is the quill stop from priest tools I've shown this in previous videos and this guy works really really well it adds a very useful feature to a mill that doesn't otherwise have one the only thing I have left to do on this is do something better with the routing of this wiring I've got it hacked up there with a zip tie for now this is just an old safety switch that isn't used anymore if you have a Precision Matthews machine go check out Greg at priest tools he's got some great accessories for it full disclosure he did send me this kit for free but with no strings attached and I just like it very much one thing that's very different between Mills and lathes is that Mills really really throw chips like they will make a mess of eight feet around your Mill whereas the lathe pretty much just drops all of its chips into the chip tray maybe a couple of feet on the floor around it but generally speaking they stay pretty well behaved Mills are a huge mess so something like this is great for that this is a chip Shield this is another free beat from priest Tools looks like it's co-branded with a little machine shop as well maybe they sell it through there and it's magnetic and it sticks on the end of your Vise and it's got these adjustable Wings on it I like that it's removable so that you can still access you know the tool in your setup whenever you need and then when you're just doing heavy Cuts especially if you're cutting left to right and the Cutters throwing the chips at you then dropping this thing on there is really great I've also got a smaller version that was donated to the channel by mm and LS and I'll link to all of these folks in the description below but you can see that this guy is also a nice size for when I'm doing smaller work and closer to the device so it doesn't interfere with the head it's handy to have both of these and uh he helpfully engraved it with my logo there which was pretty slick now the one downside to these guys is of course anything involving magnets in the Machine Shop is uh always a problematic Endeavor because of this problem and yeah magnets collect chips and they're pretty hard to clean once this happens the chips get magnetized and yeah it's kind of a hassle so one thing I'm considering doing is just covering the magnets with blue tape and then when the chips pile up like that I can just maybe peel the tape off I haven't tried that yet seems like it'll work but in the meantime I just live with a blob of chips on the magnets so uh yeah magnets in the Machine Shop other than the noga bases that turn on and off they're not always a great idea that's similar mod that I would like to do is actually some acrylic shields for behind the table and maybe the ends of the table as well just to really contain the chips because I've got a small Workshop here and so I've got workbenches on both sides of all my machines and so what happens is the mill throws chips all over my main workbench because it's it's right here so I've seen other people do this where you put in adjustable acrylic sides around the table to really contain the chips it also makes cleanup a lot easier at the end of the session so also something I'm considering but I haven't done that yet you might have noticed a theme in all of my mods and hacks for these machines and that is efficiency I am obsessed with efficiency because I like to get a lot done in my limited time that I have here in the shop in between my 60 hour weekday job and editing video but one of those areas is the drawbar and like many small benchtop Mills that came with this kind of cheesy wrench that you're supposed to use but it's a square drive and so this thing is never aligned way you want and it's kind of fussy to get it on and off of there and you have to turn the drawbar a lot so this wrench gets old very very fast now this is a 10 millimeter square drive and as it happens that's the same as a metric dimension of pipe plug so this is a 10 millimeter pipe plug socket and I keep it on a socket wrench that I bought on eBay very little money and this is a very quick way because it's ratcheting it's very quick to undo and redo the drawbar this little change has probably saved me I don't know 100 hours of my life over the course of several years of tool changes on this machine now The Next Step Up would be a Pneumatic or electric drawbar and Greg priest tools does also sell a Pneumatic drawbar I don't have air permanently in my shop and I don't have space for it so I don't have that option here but that is something else to consider I've made a very similar change down here on the Vise this is a four inch Milling Vice it's Taiwanese made I bought this from Precision Matthews it's their High Precision option when you buy these machines it comes with this style of Vice handle which you've probably seen you can slide it on and you've got lots of Leverage or you can straighten it out and twist it for quicker motion these things are okay but I'm not a huge fan it's also quite heavy and it's very long and so it's in the way of the y-axis crank a lot much like the table locks it's just over scale for this machine it's not a good choice for a small Mill like this to solve this problem you may have seen the Cool Kids on YouTube using those Edge technology speed handles they look very similar to this the problem is this is a four inch Vise with a 9 16 Drive which is smaller than those big six inch Curt vices that all the cool kids use so this speed handle I bought on eBay there's a hobbyist whose name I'm sorry I have forgotten if I can look it up and find it I will list it in the show notes below he doesn't have a mark on this but a fellow makes these in his garage for smaller vices and he sells them on eBay so this is a 9 16 drive with the same design as the edge so you can slide it on there for quick motion and then you can move it over when you need the leverage and the nice thing about this is on a small Mill like this it's not in the way of the crank on the y-axis so that right there is a huge quality of life win another great quality of life win especially on small Mills is make yourself a dedicated machinist Hammer this was a great Saturday afternoon project on the lathe it's just you know a central section here and then a handle and then there are two ends that are threaded in and I've got an aluminum end on here and a brass end I need to make a nylon end as well something softer but this is a smaller size than like commercial machinist hammers that you can buy so it's a really good fit for getting into the smaller spaces on a hobby Mill like this so I may do a video on a hammer like this if you're interested let me know this is a really fun little lathe project and I use this thing 100 times a day so this is probably one of the most useful things that I ever made on my lathe honestly and once again flirting with the definition of mod here but I made this little bracket on the mill to relocate the limit switch that came with the power feed now it came with a bracket very similar to this it's basically a t-shaped bracket that mounts on the four corners of this limit switch and then it has a slotted hole here that mounts to the front of the mill the problem is it was about two times the size of what would actually fit in this space and the limit switch stuck up above the table when the plastic cover was in place which I have lifted up here so uh yeah this thing just didn't fit in the space that was allotted for it so not a great design but an hour on the mill and I was able to knock out this lower profile version of the same bracket I did a blog post on this project which I will link to below it's always extra satisfying to make parts for the mill on the mill itself I think the cover back in place you can see it clears the Vise and still has the travel that it needs to act as a limit switch it's also really good at collecting chips yeah so those are the few of the little modifications that I've made I'm sure you've got lots of good ideas and things that you've done to your machines so leave a comment below and share your ideas with everybody thank you very much for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 221,287

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, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial

Id: d89LKhwPAMA

Length: 20min 28sec (1228 seconds)

Published: Sat May 16 2020