Getting Started In Machining - Absolute Beginners Click Here!

i swear some days every giant truck drives by when i'm trying to record hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondie hacks a question i get asked all the time is hey i'm interested in hobby machining but i don't know how to get started what does day one look like what should you buy and what do you do when it gets here i'm going to show you right now so you've decided you're interested in metal working maybe you have another technical hobby like knitting or 3d printing and you've gotten sucked into all of these youtube machining videos and it's piqued your interest or maybe you're a woodworker who's recently learned that there's a whole world of precision below the 16th you might say you're metal curious so how do you get started in metalworking what kinds of tools might you need to buy and where do you even begin there's so much to know here well let me walk you through it i think there's a useful distinction to be made between different types of metal working most people who aren't familiar with this stuff think of welders and angle grinders and sparks flying off i-beams in skyscrapers to them that's metal working and for the record all of that stuff is awesome but it may not appeal to you and so you may not be considering this hobby as your thing i group all this stuff into something that we call fabrication which is kind of the heavy and dirty side of metal working this is your plasma cutters your welders and so on and this is projects like making this big steel workbench here and if you're interested in this type of thing great go watch the welding channels on youtube lots of great content on this stuff however i'm here to talk to you about machine shop work you can think of machine shop work as the clean side of the metal shop that's not to say there aren't plenty of machine shops out there that look like filthy hell holes but it is at least possible to stay clean doing this there's frankly no way to stay clean using an angle grinder or sandblaster for any length of time however here in the machine shop the work is very technical and very meticulous now obviously i'm oversimplifying here there's plenty of meticulous and precise work in fabrication and most professional machinists are also competent welders and so on but the point is for a hobbyist i think that's a useful distinction to make and what's great about machine shop work is that you can do it at any scale depending on how much space you have most of youtube machining is dominated by people with great big shops and great big machinery and that's great if you have that but for lots of us you might be working out of a corner of a garage or a spare bedroom or even the corner of your kitchen table and there are machine shop options for all of those situations all the way from giant knt horizontal boring machines down to watchmaker's lathes that you can use on your kitchen table okay but everybody always wants to know what should i buy i want to buy machine tools is this machine tool good is that one good tell me what one you have tell me what to buy and i can't do that but i can tell you what to start with and where to look first and foremost buy a lathe just let that sink in for a second yes buy a lathe a lot of beginners want to start with a milling machine and i think it's because milling machines are intuitively more obvious we're used to things like drills and other cutting tools where the cutting tool spins and the work is stationary and the beginner looks at a mill and says oh well it's like a drill except that i have a way to move the work like this and therefore i can see how that's useful but this is actually the wrong way to think about machine tools the way to think about a machine tool is they are a highly precise and rigid spindle with some form of work holding so the lathe and the mill are really the same thing they're just different orientations of the same tool and in fact all machine tools are just optimizations effectively of what lathes can do that intuitive leap is really useful because the reason you want to start with the lathe is that lathes are much more rigid for their size and if your hobbyist size is almost certainly a concern most of us don't have as much space as we would like and so the lathe lets you get a lot more done in the same amount of space the geometry of them is such that they are extremely rigid by nature so if you can get past the intuitive leap of the fact that the work is spinning and the cutter is stationary then you unlock a whole world of things that you wouldn't be able to do with a mill that's in the same space now obviously the mill is much more convenient for certain operations like creating large flat surfaces and so we all tend to end up with a mill and a lathe sooner or later but if you only have room for one definitely make it the lathe before we talk about anything else the top of your shopping list has to be ppe if you're coming from other hobbies like 3d printing or basic diy stuff then you may not appreciate that machine tools are quite a bit more dangerous than other things that you might be used to now if you've used table saws or angle grinders and things like that those are murder machines and so you're comfortable with that already but you got to have some basic ppe in the machine shop top of the list of course is safety glasses don't even set foot in a shop without those on your face it's just a no-brainer it's non-negotiable safety glasses all the time also important but less commonly used in the machine shop are earplugs the truth is machine tools are mostly pretty quiet it's one of the reasons i like machine shop work over say woodworking which as i always say woodworking tools are screaming banshees of dust and death machine tools are pretty civilized but occasionally certain materials or operations get really squealy in so it's good to have those to protect your hearing if you have long hair a way to tie that hair up is also non-negotiable ppe unlike other tools that you might be used to all of the spinny bits in machining are exposed and you're frequently working close to them so you got to have your hair out of the way and no long sleeves no jewelry nothing like that those machines are always always trying to murder you so don't give them the chance to do it the first question most newbies have is should i buy a new chinese machine tool such as this one or should i buy an old american german or british machine that i find on the used market that's maybe 40 years old but is going to be much better made and they tend to be about the same price so that's an interesting question now if your workspace is small then you're almost certainly going to end up with an asian import machine because above all else they come in all different ranges of sizes so you can find one to fit whatever your situation is but on the subject of quality most of the internet's knee-jerk reaction to this question is american good chinese bad however that's a really lazy way to think about this really what you need to examine is the value proposition of the machine tool let me show you what i mean let's start with the bridge port because that's a the only machine tool that most amateurs seem to have heard of and b it's the one that everyone always references as the benchmark of original american quality so here's a price list from bridgeport from 1964 and you can see that the basic j-head that everyone knows and loves is listed at 1575 us dollars so let's go ahead and put that number into a buying power calculator now this is a little different than just inflation this includes inflation of course but also how much a particular sum of money impacted a person's life so how much of a burden on you would it be to buy this thing relative to how much money people generally make because salaries have gone up over the years as as the economy has grown so this is a more relevant indicator of what things would cost now so i put in 1 575 dollars in 1964 and this one only goes up to 2019 so that'll be close enough and you can see in 2019 that same mill would cost 12 hundred eighty nine dollars that's why the bridgeport is such a nice machine it's a twelve thousand dollar mill it was a high-end machine in its day if you go out right now and spend twelve grand on a milling machine it's going to be an extremely nice milling machine all this to say if you have the space definitely buy one of those vintage machines because they're going to be incredibly well made and they've survived the test of time so let's roughly compare apples to apples instead here's a south bend lathe catalog also from 1964 and a model that's comparable to the machine that you see me using is the 10k model c here that's no quick change gearbox or really any other fancy options now this thing is listed at 417 and back to our buying power calculator we see that that same machine now would be 3 500 which is about what you pay for a mid-range chinese machine tool but now compare the features the south band has flat unhardened ways plain bearings no electrical components and it's using the half nut for power feed the asian lay that the same value today has prismatic induction hardened ways a one horsepower variable speed motor included all the accessories including multiple chucks keyway drive power feed power cross feed left and right hand power feed power feed speeds on a gearbox roller bearings in the spindle so you see that you get way way more for your money nowadays so the point i'm trying to make is the value proposition of hobby grade machine tools is not as simple as people would have you believe now that old south bend is really beautiful and it's likely very well made and you should definitely enjoy using it if you have access to one the field of quality on asian import tools is a lot more varied and some of them are definitely not so good and some of them are actually quite good so it's a little more complicated but in general beware of reductionist opinions on basically everything if you've decided to buy a used american german british machine etc you're going to be buying that locally and so you're probably just going to buy the first decent machine that comes along not a lot of choices there if you're going to buy an import machine new there are a million choices and i'm not here to recommend you one particular brand or whatever but i do have a video called the import lathe buying guide that i will link to below specifically on all the different things to look for when buying one of these beasts but before you go and melt your credit card or hand a giant wad of cash to some rando on craigslist make sure you have a way to move that machine tool that you're about to buy you should always have a way to move the things that you own sure you can have stuff delivered and maybe it arrives with liftgate service and they might even put it in your garage for you but someday maybe not today but someday you are going to need to move that thing you're going to need to clean behind it you're going to need to rearrange your shop you're going to need to move something will happen and you will need to move it so it's very wise to make sure you have a way to move that thing before you buy it for hobbyist scale equipment luckily this is pretty straightforward this guy the humble engine hoist will do everything that you need these can easily lift the weight of the machine tools that you've seen on my channel and they fold up pretty compactly and you can stuff them in the corner of a storage shed or what have you as you see here the machines that i have can be lifted by two or three strong people but i wouldn't recommend that you're going to hurt yourself and the cost of pizza and beer for all of that labor is going to add up pretty quickly to what the cost of an engine hoist is if you're looking at full-size machine tools now you're making a serious lifestyle choice you can move them within your shop with toe jacks pry bars and pieces of round bar egyptian style but sooner or later you're going to need to move them on or off of a truck and now you're looking at forklifts or bridge cranes or other more serious equipment and yes you can do a lot with winches and rollers and come alongs and things like that but just know what you're getting into if you want to move a monarch lathe from one side of your shop to the other that may well be an all-day project so when you're choosing how big your machine tools are going to be do consider how you're going to move them if you don't have room in your life for this type of equipment then maybe stick to your 7 by 14 mini lathes and your watch maker's lathes and things like that they can just be moved by hand buying the machine tool is the fun part but next you have to buy all of the tooling and accessories that go with them and if you've watched a lot of machinist youtube you know that every machinist seems to have a huge array of tools and fixtures and widgets and it's really hard to know how much of that stuff do you need to buy on day one just to start making chips assuming you've started with the lathe as i recommend then obviously you're going to need cutting tools for the lathe these come in the form of tool bits either high speed steel or carbide insert tooling for this i always recommend starting with a pre-ground set of high speed steel tool bits it's not the cheapest option but it's going to really shallow up the learning curve of lathe cutting tools lathe tool geometry is a very complicated subject there's a lot to know about it so buying a pre-ground set gets you started without having to learn how to grind tools or how to navigate the bewildering array of insert tooling that exists in my videos i always link to a grizzly pre-ground set hashtag not sponsored but i think it's a great buy for beginners it's not the cheapest option you know it's obviously more expensive than buying high speed steel blanks and grinding them yourself but again they save you that learning curve and you get seven tools in the set this is three of them and it really is a great set that covers most of what you're going to need for your first you know year or two of hobby machining you'll note that all of my tools are in these alaris style quick change tool post holders and this might seem like a luxury item but i actually do recommend that you buy one of these right out of the gate or buy a lathe that includes one these chinese knockoffs of allure's tool holders are frankly very good and really quite inexpensive the quality of life improvement for what they cost is dramatic so just go ahead and buy these next thing up on your day one shopping list is a drill index you are going to need lots and lots of drill sizes this is one of the more expensive things that i recommend in your starter kit but it's really money well spent this is a set from little machine shop i'll link to this below hashtag not sponsor but i've actually been super happy with this set now this is an imperial set but you can also of course get metric sets so whichever direction you're going pick the right drills and machine shop work is quite a bit different than diy or woodworking or other areas where you're used to when working with drills you really do need all zillion of these sizes this might seem excessive but trust me it's not you're going to use every single one of these drills now you do get what you pay for on quality with drills but the good news is most of these sizes you don't use often so what you can do is buy a cheap set and then the common sizes like quarter or 3 8 that wear out then you can replace them with high quality versions and then the cheap ones that you don't use very often are fine because you only use them five or six times a year so you can save a lot of money on a big drill index like this by buying the import one and then just upgrading the individual sizes as you need to you will also need a set of center drills these come in sets of five pretty inexpensively online and again the import ones are just fine these are crucial on the lathe because they create a tapered hole that's the same angle as tail stock centers for proper support and honestly they work great as spotting drills for drilling holes as well and yeah everyone's going to get super internet mad at you because you're not using a proper spotting drill you're not supposed to use center drills for spotting yeah everybody and their dog does it it works just fine and frankly i'm just amazed that my dog knows how to use machine tools at all so you know take that with a grain of salt i'll link to this set below next up is reamers and i recommend the same thing here that i did with the drills namely you buy the cheap import set and then as they wear out or you get sick of the cheap ones you upgrade the common sizes and that saves you a lot of money while still giving you the full range of reamers that you need so i'll link to this set below and i think again these sets are pretty good value now make no mistake these are not very good reamers but most of the sizes for the one or two times that you're going to need it it'll do an okay job and then for the really common sizes like here's my one quarter i went on msc direct and bought a real high quality one i think this approach works really well because a single high quality reamer you can spend a lot of money on you can afford to do that and it's going to serve you extremely well and you're not spending a whole pile of money on all these other sizes that frankly you're going to use once or twice in your lifetime and honestly the cheap sets with the little box is kind of nice the box is handy it's not super well made but you know a wooden box is a wooden box next on the list is the accessories for the lathe itself this is what i would consider to be the absolute minimum set that you need to start with with this stuff here you can make pretty much anything that you're going to want to i think there's a million more things you can buy that'll make life easier but this will get you started first and foremost of course at the head end is your four jaw chuck lots of mini lathes are going to come with three jaw chucks and those are fine as far as they go but you really need to get a four jaw chuck so if you can't get one or your lathe doesn't come with one think about another lathe the four jaw chuck is by far the most versatile and most precise option and sooner or later you will need one if only because in a three-jaw chuck you can't flip parts end for end to do work on both ends next is the face plate it's a dead heat which of these is more flexible and more generally useful there's basically no operation that you can't do on the face plate it's just more work to set up and there are plenty of operations for which the face plate is the only way to do it on a lathe so you definitely definitely have to have a face plate and you would be forgiven for thinking that the faceplate isn't that useful because you don't see them get a lot of use on machinist youtube but remember that machinist youtube is full of real machinists who have bigger fancier equipment that have other more convenient ways to do the things that the faceplate can do however for a hobbyist getting started there's going to be a lot of operations where you really need this so go read like old model engineering books for inspiration on how the face plate is used and how it can empower you to do all sorts of things on a lathe that you would have no other way to do the last headstock tooling that you'll need is a center this goes in the spindle and is crucial for turning between centers that's how you get maximum precision and there's plenty of times when you're going to need to do that down at the tail stock end your lathe probably comes with a dead center don't buy the lathe if it doesn't because i'll lay these useless without at least a dead center and a little quality of life improvement is a live center you don't need this but again they aren't that expensive the import ones and they're pretty good for what they cost and again big big quality of life improvement from the live center so definitely worth the money and then of course a drill chuck jacobs chuck that goes in the tail stock is crucial frequently you have to buy these in separate pieces there will be a jacob's taper in the back of the jacob's chuck a jt 33 is very common there and then you buy a mandrel that has the jacob's taper on one end and the matching tail stock taper on the other end you can often buy this as a kit that's designed for your lathe or the lathe may come with it but be aware that they are two separate pieces that you need to buy there headstock tail stock and the middle stuff down in the middle of the bed you're going to need these two guys this is a steady rest and a follow rest the steady rest is absolutely crucial again don't buy a lathe that doesn't have a steady rest or if you don't know where to get one there are many many operations on the lathe for which the steady rest is absolutely essential and the follow rest is a nice to have i would say you can live without them they don't get used that often but again there are certain operations where this thing will really save your bacon the humble follow rest doesn't get a lot of love on machinist youtube but if you're working with small parts that don't have a lot of internal rigidity the follow rest is really the only way to do a lot of things whatever you make you're going to have to measure so make sure you're equipped with at least some basic precision measuring tools i think this humble set here is enough to get you started this is a one inch micrometer or if your metric then a 25 millimeter micrometer will serve you very very well here of course we have the basic caliper every 3d printing nerd has one of these but you will of course need one in the machine shop personally i recommend the dial type and not the digital ones that everybody buys the digital ones are cheap like borscht but the cheap ones honestly aren't that good the batteries go dead in them constantly and i just find the dial to be a lot more pleasant to use but you know you do you and then you will need at least one basic indicator and indicator stand a basic one inch or 25 millimeter indicator will be more than enough for the hobbyist to get started with this is going to do 90 of everything that you need and i do recommend shelling out a little bit extra money for the noga one knob adjustable indicator stand these things are an absolute miracle for quality of life and i can't imagine setting up indicators any other way frankly so save some money in your budget for one of these the real machinists out there looking at this and saying this isn't nearly enough metrology equipment well no it isn't but for the hobbyist this is going to get you going for at least several months micrometers of course for example come in a million sizes but the hobbyist is mostly making pretty small things because you probably have pretty small machines so this one size is probably enough if you want to buy bigger ones you can but you know don't feel like you have to run out and buy a giant set of mitutoyo micrometers from 1 inch to 12 inches or something like that you can buy these over time as you need more sizes and real machinists are howling that i haven't included a dti or dial test indicator in my list here and i think that the beginner can forego these initially these read plus or minus and are generally much more precise than the big basic dial indicators and frankly for the beginner these are not strictly necessary for quite a while you can do a lot of fun hobby work before you need to get one of these so these are expensive and you know you can wait a little bit i think on these but if you have the budget again go ahead and pick one of these up they come in different precision levels this is a basic half thou one i think this is a really good basic one of course you can also get the tenth indicator it's rare that you genuinely need one of those unless you're getting into grinding work and frankly those things are a little crazy making so i think the half hour indicator is a great way to go then you can build on this basic set as you do projects you know let's say you're going to make a hole and it needs to be extremely precise because you're going to press a bearing into it well then maybe you go ahead and buy the telescoping board gauges so that you can measure that really precisely rather than relying on the cheapo calipers to measure that hole you can start basic like this and build your way up and spread that cost over time as you need to with the projects that you're doing lastly on tooling you want to think about taps and dies you're of course going to need these however i recommend a different strategy for these than i did for the drills and reamers don't buy cheap taps cheap taps will break they will get stuck they will make crappy threads they are not worth the headache instead just buy the taps as you need them one by one for the project that you're going to do and spend the money for good taps they will last longer and they'll be a joy to use cheap taps are a nightmare don't buy them okay you bought your machine tool you bought all your accessories and tooling and you're ready to go make something awesome right well you need to buy metal now this is something that's easy to overlook as a beginner because you might think well i'm just going to go ahead and use this piece of scrap i found behind the barn or whatever think twice about doing that because as a beginner it's much easier to learn all the many many skills involved in machine shop work if you're using high quality materials of known alloys the big one is surface finish that's one of the more challenging things to learn in lathe work especially and it's much much harder to learn how to get good surface finishes if you're using materials that are of unknown origin unknown composition now i'm not going to talk about where and how to buy metal here i did a whole video on that called how to buy metal and i'll link to that below what i will say here is choose metals that are a good fit for the machine tools that you have if you're here as a beginner it's likely because you bought or are thinking about buying a chinese 7x14 mini lathe for example and those are really not going to have a lot of luck in steel for example so those machines can do lots of great work you can do a lot of fun projects in aluminum or brass on them so don't feel like you have to have some super capable machine in order to have fun but have realistic expectations of what your machine is going to be capable of and if you want to do a lot of work in steel the honest truth is you're going to need a bigger machine don't forget about fluids there is a starter set of these that you will need as well you're going to need at least cutting oil this is tap magic and you're going to need whey oil which is iso 68 oil for your lathe and don't forget lubricant for the machine itself so you may have a gearbox in the carriage or the headstock or both you may have a quick change gearbox that needs lubricant so make sure you have that on hand because you may want to change the factory oil that's in there who knows what they put in it and you will of course need to change the oil at some point just like you do in a car at least you better be doing that in your car i'll leave you with this thought before you dive too deep into buying machine tools and accessories think about what you want to make because making sure that you're buying tools that are a good fit for the kind of projects you want to do is important and i think it's also a common problem that beginners have where they buy all of this equipment and then they just kind of sit there and look at it because they don't know what they want to actually make so have projects in mind before you start a great way to have a steady stream of projects is what software engineers call yak shaving when you have a thing that you're going to make sometimes you need a set of tools to make that thing so then you go off and you make those tools and halfway through making those tools you realize you need another tool or another tool to make that tool and pretty soon you're six tools deep halfway through and then finally you can kind of climb your way back up out of that hole and make the final project that you wanted to make and along the way you made a whole bunch of other cool stuff this is the kind of thing that as a hobbyist we can do because you know we have basically infinite time if you were trying to do this for a living you just want to buy all of the tools and fixtures and stuff that you need but as a hobbyist all of this kind of stuff is opportunities to make things have fun and learn new skills so that beginner shopping list that i gave you seems very small and you've probably noticed that every single one of my videos i used 10 things that weren't on that list and that's because for the most part you can make everything else that you need making tools and fixtures are often great beginner projects because they're frequently pretty straightforward to make but they teach you a lot and when you're done you have this really cool thing that you can use for all of your upcoming projects so this is a little sample of a bunch of tools that i've made here in my little machine shop i've got a cross drilling fixture and tool makers clamps and machinist jacks and a fly cutter and a machinist hammer this is a small sample check out the videos on my channel to see all the tools that i've made over the years so yak shaving is great fun in software engineering but also great fun here in the hobby machine shop but one important note on this point don't go into it thinking that you're going to make all of these tools in your machine shop and save money because you will not these tool makers clamps for example i think you can probably buy them on amazon for ten dollars i can't even buy the steel that went into these for ten dollars so why do it well because it's fun and because you're learning if you're going into this trying to save money or you think that it matters that you could have bought them cheaper than the time it took you to make them then this is probably not the hobby for you the journey is the point not the destination the complete shopping list is below after you've bought all that stuff go watch my lathe skills playlist to get you started making chips on your new toy and thank you very much for watching if you appreciate what i'm doing here throw me a little love on patreon using that card there in the screen or a link down below thanks for watching and i will see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 110,484

Rating: 4.9587564 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, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, hobby, beginner, help, getting started

Id: lZJ45RIw77A

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 19 2021