Lathe Stop!

that is a terrifying saw and this has zero chance of working but i'm going to do it anyway hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondiax today i'm going to try my hand at making a carriage stop for my lathe this is something that you can clamp to the ways and it holds an indicator or can also be used as a physical stop to repeat the carriage to a given position okay let's go this is what i'm using currently it's 3d printed and i'll put a link to this on thingiverse down below if you'd like to try 3d printing your own and this worked okay i've used this for a couple of years and it's not too bad it holds an indicator in there just with a friction fit which works fine because of this plastic here and then there's a nut pressed in the top for this brass clamping bolt that i made as well the two main issues with this are that it's kind of fiddly to install because i have to kind of pull this clamp down and rotate it because there's a mortise and tenon arrangement in there that holds it in place you have to rotate it and then seat it in there and then kind of fish it into place again and then tighten the bolt and then because it's plastic it's not super rigid now it is good enough for an indicator holder i can bring the carriage in here the plastic grips stronger than the spring in the indicator so it does work as a repeatable fixture in that way but it would not be strong enough to repeat for a physical stop on the carriage it's just not that rigid and doesn't clamp that well so these are all things that i'd like to improve by making it out of aluminum fitting something to these ways turns out to be a more interesting problem than you would expect we need to find a way to clamp and there's no way to clamp across this way there's no meat here that is opposed to this surface and this underside surface here is not deep enough such that we can get an opposing clamp from the top so we're forced to clamp from this surface to one of these angles here and it's not entirely clear how that ends up working i learned somewhat after the fact that the plastic one ends up just kind of mostly deforming in here it's not exactly clear where the clamping forces are being applied now when i make this out of aluminum i end up learning exactly where the clamping surfaces end up being in this geometry and you know what i should have maybe done a little more carefully to make it work but what are all of these angles here we're going to need to know them in order to cut them and you could look at this prismatic section here and assume well surely that's 90 degrees because it looks really close to 90 degrees and why wouldn't you make it 90 degrees but it isn't as you can see right there it's ever so slightly off of 90 degrees i can measure this angle here fairly easily and this is 137 degrees which makes this angle 94 degrees i don't know why it's 94 degrees but it is the instruments don't lie and when i made the plastic one i did make this angle 90 degrees because i didn't measure this as carefully and just assumed it was probably 90. and well the part works but again it's mostly because the plastic is able to just deform into the shape it's close enough but if you look closely on the plastic one you could see that it doesn't actually fit and i knew that so when i went to set up for the aluminum one i measured much more carefully and learned about these tricky angles now i don't know anything about machine tool building so there may be some excellent reason why it's 94 degrees if you know put it down in the comments because i'm actually curious why that isn't just 90. so i took the model that i used for the 3d printed one and i modified it somewhat for machining and here's that version of it still basically a two-piece design with the green hook feature that goes over the ways and then the orange clamping bit on the bottom there and there's a number of optional features here in the machinable version that i'm going to talk through as we build it here i've got a scrap of 6061 aluminum here that i think i can get all these parts out of so i'm going to go over to the bandsaw and i've got my 4x6 bandsaw set up in the better than nothing vertical mode and that's going to come in handy later as well so i'll tap this thing in on the vise and i'm going to start by facing off the top so i'm going to make the larger part of the clamp first and i think it's going to make sense to square up the block all the way around because that's going to make it easier to locate all the features we have like a couple of small operations to do on every single side so it's going to be i think the fastest guy just to clean up the whole block first so i do the top and then i deburr it and then i set it up with the machine surface on the fixed jaw and then i put a piece of wire in there to keep it square on the fixed jaw tappy tap tap it in little wd-40 and do the second side and then we've got two sides at 90 degrees and then work our way around i've done a video on squaring up stock with this method if you are interested sure this fresh powder may look nice but the skiing on it is terrible that's a funny story that i'll tell you some other time and i side milled to square up one end and i'm going to flip it around and bring this down to dimension so i'm using my scale to make sure i've got enough stick out there to face it down to the right dimension without hitting the vise and then i'll deburr with this nova tool here there's a link to this tool down below if you're interested these guys are really nice for deburring okay there's our little block all squared up and on dimensions so i'll get some dicam on there and i'm going to lay out the weird hook shape and i'm going to machine it first because it's the trickiest feature so if i do this wrong then i haven't lost too much work these layout lines are just going to serve as a sanity check i'm going to be setting up the actual operations with angles and squares and so on but i'm going to go over to the bandsaw and this is the reason that i left it set up and i'm going to cut most of that out of there i think i can save some time here by starting with the fastest machine tool and that's the bandsaw so i cut the main square chunk out of there that i could and i started also cutting out the little angled areas but i was into diminishing returns here and the bandsaw is not very efficient in this case this bandsaw is not really designed to be used that way it's running too slow for aluminum and the quote-unquote vertical option on those cheap 4x6 bandsaws is pretty terrible but it is better than nothing in any case i started by machining the square corner there on the inside of the hook so that's the easiest place to start and you can see that i've got it set up on an adjustable parallel there because that gave me just the exact height that i needed so that i could get the entire hook shape above the vise jaw while still having as much clamped in there as i could so i machined this square feature to the right depth and also to the right width there on the main body of the clamp and now one two three count them three angle blocks yeah i have to use three angle blocks to get the exact angle this is obviously silly and not very precise but it's the best i've got something like a sine bar or sine vice or sine plate or an angle plate or there's lots of other much better tools for precision angle fixturing none of which i own so i'm using ridiculous stacks of angle blocks for this so i milled straight down on this one angled side and i'm using my depth micrometer to check the final dimension here just because it's the only tool that i can kind of get in here and i'm just using the side of the anvil to square it up as best i can this won't be perfectly precise but it doesn't have to be wait a minute now your basic angle block set comes with angles one through five degrees 10 15 20 25 and 30. little second degree math will tell you that means you can get any angle between one and 45 degrees with no more than three blocks almost always two that looks an awful lot like four blocks well present quinn is a lot smarter than past quinn and somehow i decided i needed four blocks to do this so i used four blocks and this is going to come back to bite me later because that angle is going to turn out to be quite a bit less precise than the other one and i can sanity check on my layout line here if i did it right it should be horizontal to the top of the vise it looks good so then i used the end of the end mill to mill straight down to that layout line more or less again i'm going to be checking the dimension here and i just did my best to line up the inside corner there by eye and cleaned up the bur a little bit with a triangular file and that seemed to work okay for the dimension on this side an adjustable parallel seem to be the easiest way so i just enlarged there until it seemed to seat on both of those inside corners and checked my measurement so that's looking good now we just need to mill that little triangle down in the middle there so i put in a smaller end mill and set it up in this orientation again and so i'm milling that guy flat and once again just milling it down until it meets up with the two other sides just by eye this isn't very precise but i think it will be good enough and that came out okay so let's do a little test fit on the lathe and see if it actually fits the ways kind of the first moment of truth here on this part and well it fits okay one of the angles came out perfect and the dimensions look good but it looks like i missed on that other angle there it's off by a couple of degrees so i think it may still work however so i'm going to go ahead and proceed i found one corner with the edge finder and i'm using it to locate the first two holes here so one of these is the main hole that holds the indicator and this little one that i'm drilling first is just the hinge point for the end of the slot that's going to clamp on the indicator now this clamping slot is kind of an optional feature you could actually do this just with a really precise hole that was say a couple of tenths larger than the barrel on the indicator and you'd get a nice slip fit like the handle on a steric tap wrench it would be stiff enough to hold but you could still slide it in and out i don't think i can attain that fit with this hobby equipment so i'm just going to go ahead and ream it to 375 which is one thou over the diameter of the indicator barrel and i'm going to put a split in there so i can make a clamp out of it the other advantage of a true positive clamp though is it's going to allow me to put a pin in there and use it as a physical stop which i couldn't do with the plastic one this is one of those optional features on this part though if you have better equipment and more skill than me you might be able to make a simpler version of this now some deburring and i'll do a little test fit on the indicator and see if it slides in there and uh yeah that looks good it should be a close fit close enough that the clamp doesn't have much work to do and i think that is going to achieve it all right clean up my toys and the next setup is going to be from above so i think i can do all of the vertical aligned features on the part from this side i could have saved myself some time by setting an end stop on the part before taking it out of the vise on the x-axis and then if i'd done my y-axis edge finding on the fixed jaw instead of the movable jaw then i wouldn't have had to redo the edge finding in this setup but you know live and learn first hole here is for the clamping screw that's going to clamp on the indicator so this is tapping size for 440. this is pretty deep and i'm drilling it all the way through it doesn't need to be all the way through it could be blind but it doesn't hurt anything to be all the way through and through holes are just easier to work with when tapping and so on next i'm drilling quarter 20 tapping size and i've got an option in the drawing here as well for a counter bore here for a steel insert that you could press in and put the threads in that instead of threading the aluminum directly as i'm going to do threads sometimes don't hold very well in aluminum but i'm going to thread this entire hole all the way down so there's going to be a lot of threads in there i think it'll hold up just fine and then i'm counter boring the top of the 440 hole for the cap screw using this little two flute end mill to center cutting end mill so maybe it's called a slot drill i don't know i can yell that every time i do or do not call something a slot drill a little test fit with the bolts to make sure my counter bore is deep enough and that looks good i think that'll be nice i really love counterbored cap screws i think they look so nice now the top half of the clamping hole needs to be clearanced so the depth is pretty important so i'm using a feeler gauge to find the exact top surface there and it needs to be drilled so that the clearance section comes to just on or below the split line for where the clamping action is going to happen so that's important now i'm going to try to thread the bottom half of that hole unfortunately i couldn't do it from the top there isn't enough room to get down there with the tap so i'll thread the quarter 20 hole while i'm here and i'm going to have to flip it over and do the 440 threading from the other side this is another good life lesson in design for manufacture if i had not made this a through-hole that would have been impossible to tap from above without a very long specialized tap but tapping it from below worked just fine and a test fit of the thumb screw recovered from the plastic clamp next i'm going to mill a slot down the middle the two halves of the clamp are joined with kind of a mortise and tenon arrangement to keep them aligned and sliding back and forth now my woodworker friends tell me that a tannin is a species of south american hardwood it's very inexpensive and commonly used in framing houses that sort of thing i'm no wood worker but i'm pretty sure all of that is correct speaking of design for a manufacturer it would have been smart to make this slot the exact width of a standard end mill because then i could just mill it in one pass and it would end up a couple thou oversized which is what happens when you mill a slot with one end-mill pass but that's actually what i want in this case i did not do that so i had to mill it down the center and then widen it slightly to get the proper dimension to cut the slot for the actual clamping action i'm going to use a slitting saw which is going to require kind of a gnarly setup at one end of the vise here so i've got a machinist jack on the other side to balance the clamping and i'm finding the top of that part with a feeler gauge and then a little bit of arithmetic thickness of the saw yada yada tells you how far down to go to get into the middle of the holes there and then i'm feeding in the maximum depth that i can here it would be nice if i could do this in one pass but the slitting saw is not large enough and the ridiculous arbor that i have here is taking up a lot of the real estate on the saw this is one of those universal arbors that's supposed to fit all sizes of slitting saws and while it does do that it is really quite annoying on these small saws because it takes up a lot of the blade it's really a terrible thing that i need to get rid of so then i flipped it around into the same cut on the other side i set the part up on this end of the vise because this end is better for filming and so i actually had to run the mill in reverse on the previous pass and then my plan was to flip the saw over run the mill forward again for this cut to avoid climb cutting but honestly this cut was going so well that the climb cutting just really wasn't a problem this is cutting very easily but as you can see i couldn't quite get all the way through my saw was just slightly narrower than half the material so i went ahead and finished it up with a hacksaw i put a piece of scrap in there to prevent the hacksaw from popping through and damaging the bore did that actually work let's look at the replay not completely clear the bore seems okay though so i'll call that a win these features are very tight so deburring was a bit of a challenge but a combination of needle files and actually a razor blade was helpful here as well try to get in there and all those little cracks and nooks and so on a quick test fit on the indicator let's make sure the clamp is actually going to function here so i snug up that bolt and yeah that looks good the indicator is nice and secure in there and i can still turn the dial so everything looks good now the second half of the clamp i think we can do in a really interesting way we can basically do it entirely in one setup from this other piece of scrap here the way i made that first part is kind of like chiseling gemstones out of the wall of a mine with a pickaxe this method is more like strip mining we're going to create a scar upon the earth for which whatever god you believe in will never forgive us so fire up big musky the 13 000 ton drag line and let's carve this part out of here start by side milling one end about a hundred thou taller than the part is going to be and then that becomes my zero on the x-axis so i zero the dro right there and i do the same thing down the long side and then again i zero my y-axis this time so now i have a zero at least where the edges of the end mill were and so now i can go and side mill the other end of this part down to the final length that we need then i do the same thing on the other long side again side milling this down to the final width that we need what's cool about this is now we have the final dimensions of the part in the xy plane we never did any edge finding and yet we also now know exactly where all our features need to go so now i can mill the top surface flat and zero the coil dro and now we know where we are vertically so now i can mill the tenon of the mortise and tenon joint that i talked about before again i can get all of the dimensions and the depth for this tenon without ever having edge finding anything just double checking the final width here that i need to make the cut on the other side for my little tenon before doing the final pass on the other side of the tenon i want to do a little test fit here and that's a little tight and so i'm going to take this opportunity to move in a couple of thou on my final pass and uh loosen up that fit a little bit it needs to be a nice easy slide so you know three or four or five thousandths of clearance so there would be good a little uh deburring before the final final test fit now and the tenon should be done let's see how it fits now and yep that slips right on there nice sliding fit now next i'm going to come in with a two flute center cutting end mill and i'm going to mill out a slot for the tightening bolt that will allow me to slide this clamp out of the way without having to dismantle the whole thing like the old plastic one had done similar to what i said before i'm doing this with a single pass on a quarter inch end mill the idea being it will cut a few thou over size and that's going to give me some sliding clearance on the bolt which is what we want for the final step i'll need to modify my setup a little bit here but gives us a chance to take a look at the part and you can see how big musky hath rendered it from the earth with extreme prejudice now we just need to slice it off the bottom which is why i left it a hundred thousand deep so i'm gonna try to use this nice big slitting saw which will let me do this in one pass now this is unlikely to actually work because as you can see here with punk ducky for scale this is a lot of cutter for my little toy mill but i'll give it a shot it'll be super cool if it works so i tried a bunch of different feeds and speeds here low rpms higher rpms nothing worked this cutter was just banging into the part shaking the mill around wasn't gonna work so i went back to my fine toothed small thin slitting saw here and i just decided i could probably get away with doing a loop all the way around i did the math and it looks like i should be able to just make it uh if i am really really close to the part with the arbor there unfortunately of course one side has a little more stick out than the other on the stock because the part was milled on that side so i wasn't quite able to get in there you can see just a sliver of aluminum left in there with a precision cat hair for scale so over to the vice now and i'm taping some copper on there to hold the part and then i'm just going to break it off here that worked out okay if you're wondering why i didn't use the copper soft jaws for that previous step my magnetically retained jaws aren't strong enough to grip on the very top edge like that but anywho it's time for a test assembly here things are starting to look nefariously close to being finished and that is okay i'm not happy with how that slides i think the slot needs opening up a little bit so a little filing and that moves much better now so i think we'll roll with this and see how it actually clamps on the lathe so in principle this should sit right on the ways there and i should be able to slide that forward and it doesn't slide as far as i thought it would so i'll need to adjust that dimension there but yeah that doesn't quite actually clamp all the way down so i thought there might not be enough of a gap on the underside of the clamp so i pushed all of those surfaces down about another 30 thou that was pretty easy to do and gave it another shot and it still didn't clamp very well so i did some experimentation with shims and i found that shimming on the sloped surfaces of the way there was really what it needed so that tells me that it's a little over constrained it's bottoming out on the flat surface on the top of the clamp so i went and machined that down a little bit as well and i also used a file to massage that angle a little bit i couldn't do too much without oversizing it but i was able to change the angle at least on part of it so that it would sit better on the way there and that worked out great now it's clamping very well so now i just have to shorten the underside of the clamp there a lot of these dimensions were really difficult to take off of the lathe and that's why these things all seem to be a little bit off and so i'm having to do some trial and error but a little uh machining there and that thing is now the correct length now it clamps on there tight i also shortened the brass clamping bolt as you can see indicator clamps in nicely and that is an excellent functioning carriage stop i am very happy with that result it's much much more solid than the plastic one and i should have no trouble now replacing the indicator with a physical stop if i ever want to do that and this will certainly hold up better than the plastic one did that's my little indicator carriage stop i hope you enjoyed watching me make it throw me some love on patreon if you like what i'm doing and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 96,882

Rating: 4.949831 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, carriage, carriage stop, lathe carriage stop, carriage stop plans

Id: rxMWhI1Yexo

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020