Let's Make a Knurling Tool! Part 1

the parts are sloppy the fit and finish is terrible it doesn't work very well disappointed is what I'm saying hello Internet my name is Gwen and this is Blondie hacks I'm starting a new multi-part tool build Series this week I haven't done a tool build in a while so I know some of you like that stuff so I'm going to build a new knurling tool let's go long time viewers will know that I made my float lock Vise specifically because I hated my drill press Vice well this is a second incidence of hatespiration for a project this is the cheap import nurler that I bought that I'm sure many of you have bought on Amazon I bought it because I don't want to use the crappy push knurlers that come with lathes and I wanted a nice scissor style and while it is functional I also strongly hate it and wish it would die in a fire to hopefully avoid needing to start a fire of death in my shop I got this guy sent to me by D gray Drafting and Design This is a knurling tool kit now you may recognize this company it's the same company that did the clamp kit that I built a while back and I really liked it so I decided to try this kit folded disclosure he sent me this kit for free but no strings attached and I'm going to give you my honest review of it it comes with all of the stock and hardware and everything and the neural wheels of course and then his kind of signature I think which are the laser cut hot rolled steel parts with the drilling locations etched into them as little X's now these are laser cut Parts not torch Cuts so the edges are mostly nice and smooth there is a little bit of a roughness there to them but it's much nicer than you would expect from plasma or torch cut parts and of course Doug's drawings are always a delight they're very detailed he's got really great build notes including setup suggestions for some of the trickier parts and so on so let's get going I'm going to start with the main arm piece here the first task is to Mill the thickness of it down to size it ships oversize and you Mill it down to fit with your particular tool holders so I'm going to shave about 40 thou off each side and that will fit in my half inch tool holders now this top surface here is laser cut and a bit like a torch cut surface it can be pretty hard so I'm taking a fairly deep cut to get underneath that initially here this is a 30 thou pass which seems to be enough to get under that kind of case hardening layer that the laser puts on it most of the surfaces of these parts I won't be Machining I mainly just clean them up on the grinder and the Scotch Brite wheel but a couple of these do need Machining I like these guys I milled down to a distance that looked about right kind of right at the start of the radius there and then squared up the end and I zeroed my dro right at that point and that's so that I can repeat this little shoulder that we've created on the other side then I did a second pass to the same point on the dro and once again squared it up that's a really nice finish there this material is Machining very nicely now I'm going to set up an end stop here on the end of the part and that's so that I can repeat this x position not Exposition as in what I'm doing right now but position on the x-axis a little bit of deburring there to clean up that edge so that it doesn't interfere with the vice clamping in the other direction and now we can clamp the part upside down and machine the other side so the end stop gets the part back into the same position on the x-axis and remember that I zero the dro right on my little shoulder right next to the radius on this part so I just machined to the same depth as I did on the other side into the same X position and now we've got two nice little shoulders and I've given you an X position on how I did that my original thought on this was that I would Now set up to recut the radius there to line it up with my new surfaces but actually I kind of like those two little shoulders they register on the tool holder like that and they give a repeatable depth for the knurling tool and it also increase rigid a little bit by having a vertical registration there as well so I think I'm going to leave it as is I like that now I can lay the part flat and get ready to make the two holes there you can see here the laser etched X's that come on these parts so you can line up the whole positions easily very very handy I'll tap tap tap that down and I'm also going to put a machinist Jack here under the front edge probably doesn't need it because this is quarter inch plate but yeah a little bit of overhang support there never hurts and that will be clear of both of the drill holes so it's easy to do now I'm going to use a pointer in the spindle to line up the X here by I for these holes their relationship to the edges of the part is not that critical so doing this by eye is plenty sufficient and then once I've found one I zero the dro there and I move down to where the drawing says the other hole should be and Sanity check that my pointer is centered on that X as well and so I feel good that both holes are in the right place now I can easily go back and forth to save tool changes Center drilling both holes then pilot drilling both holes and then drilling these out to one size below the reamer size since these are both going to get reamed that pilot drill rule of thumb of one size below for Imperial means 1 64 of an inch smaller than the reamer it's a convenient shorthand but for metric generally you pre-drill 0.05 millimeters below the reamer size now those numbers 164th and .05 assume holes roughly in the range that you see me doing on my channel kind of hobbyist sized holes up to half an inch let's say when you get larger than that the drill size needs to be closer to the reamer size because of course the relationship between diameter and amount of material being removed which is an area is non-linear on circles the whole point of it is to make sure the reamer doesn't have too much work to do reamers are not cutting tools they're just dimensioning tools so you want them to have just enough material to remove to where they can accurately inch in the hole without having to do much work reamers are like software Engineers very very fussy but ultimately lazy bums a little deburring and a person could leave this part here if you were so inclined that hot rolled Mill scale finish is natural Corrosion Protection and it does look pretty decent sometimes but I think I'm gonna snazz it up a little bit I'm gonna go over the Scotch Brite wheel here and my goal is to increase the snazz by 15 to 22 percent on hot rolled plate like this Scotch Brite wheel shines it up really nicely and softens all the edges for you you can still see the texture of the hot roll there but the part is you know shiny and the edges I also hit with the grinding wheel a bit because there was some roughness from the laser cutting process there I did get a little carried away on one corner there with the grinder and I made it a little lopsided but yeah it's going to be inside the tool anyway so that'll be our little secret internet that main t-bar holds the arms of the nurler and there's some plates on the outsides of those arms that hold them captive so I'll make those real quick once again these are the laser cut Parts with the X's etched on them so these are very trivial Parts just a couple of clearance holes drilled in there and I'll once again set up an end stop to repeat on the other part now repeating on the end of a laser cut part like that is not super accurate but it's good enough for these parts since again these are just clearance holes for some mounting bolts a little deburring a little Scotch braiding and we are done with those parts very easy now on to some much more interesting Parts I've got these four intricate little laser cut pieces here these are the arms of the knurler and I need a whole bunch of operations done to all four of these and they need to be really really well aligned so in order to do that I'm going to do all four of them at once I'm going to gang drill them and I'm going to do that by tack welding them all together first I don't have my welding table set up yet so I've got a little piece of scrap here to act as a ground plate and I'm just going to put three tacks in between the four parts here don't do this with one two three blocks that you care about because they are going to get welts batter on them so three tacks there and I'll put three somewhere else just to make sure that that's strong enough and being careful to put them in places that are going to be out of the way there's one particular surface on these parts that's going to be my reference for all the operations so I'm not putting any tacks on that surface there we go that looks pretty good now over to the mill and I'll set up to do all of the operations here I've got quite a few operations to do on all these parts so tacking them together like this is going to save me a lot of time I've got thin parallels here because I'm going to be drilling a lot of holes near the edges so that will help and I'll use a piece of Emery on the movable jaw there to clamp against the crown of that ear there because the parts are tack welded together and you know the edges aren't all that consistent I don't have a real nice flat clamping surface there so Emery paper helps take up the variation clamp this down and that pop you heard was one of my tax breaking so one of the parts may have been misaligned or one of my tacks just wasn't very good can't really tell which one broke so I just went ahead and put three new ones on in a new place so now there's lots and lots of tax on there and let's try that again and once again using a pointer in the spindle to line up on the X now What's significant here is that I'm going to use this hole at the small end of the arm as my reference for all the other features on these parts the drawing actually shows using the end of the steel as a reference but again these are laser cut parts and you know lasers are accurate but when laser cutting steel there is some roughness and there's a kerf and there's a bit of a draft angle to the cut so it's not necessarily a very accurate reference furthermore what's important here is not the relationship between the holes and the edges of the part what's important is the relationship between all the holes on the part because the edges of the arms are just floating in space but the spacing between the holes is critical for the knurling tool to operate smoothly so I think it makes more sense to use one hole here as the reference for all the other features so I'm taking my time to line up carefully here then I zero the dro on this position and then as before I translate over to all the other x's and make sure that all the distances match what the drawing says they should be for the space between all of these elements and this is going to come back later you'll see me using this hole once again for reference so keep that in the back of your mind while I center drill this and pilot drill for reaming this is kind of fun because this is actually like drilling through a one inch block of steel because these arms are fairly thick and there's four of them tack welded together so this is drilling through a giant block of steel I remember in my days before I really understood metal working like a lot of diy-ers I thought drilling through a big block of steel like this would be really difficult and take forever well that's because I didn't understand how to drill metal like most beginners and diy-ers I was running the drill too fast and not applying enough pressure and not using cutting fluid and you know generally had all my speeds and feeds wrong and thus it wasn't working very well but in fact if you get all those variables correct then drilling through steel is very quick and very easy and the reamer pre-drill size for the small holes was a convenient intermediate drill size for this much larger hole at the other end and then this hole needed to go up one more size to the pre-drill hole for the reamer at this end it's always nice when you can combine operations that overlap in some way between one end of the part and the other this end uses a fairly large reamer which is always a problem on small milling machines like this in this case I happen to have a collet that fits the shank of the reamer which is unusually lucky reamers tend to have weird shank sizes on them because they assume you're going to put it in a drill chuck but drill trucks take up a lot of precious Zed real estate on a mill so on longer reamers like this I don't have room for it in mine so I gotta find a collet that's the right size to hold it sometimes you can and sometimes you can't for the final feature on that ear area there I need to readjust my setup I had the parallels under the long section of the bar there but that's going to be in the way for the ear area there's an important subtlety to why I did it this way because now you see me putting the parallel under the ear so you might ask well why didn't I just put them there in the first place and do all the holes in one setup the reason that I didn't like that is because when doing these features near the ends of the parts that corner there is going to be unsupported if the parallel is in this position so maybe that would have been fine but I didn't feel good about it I didn't want the parts to move so I put the parallel in under the long section so now I have to move them to put them under the ear there as well I suppose if you had three parallels the same height you could also put three in there and then just remove one when you go to do the ear section and that would save you having to change the setup but since I do have to change my setup it's a simple matter of putting a gauge pin in the Chuck there and locating that reference hole that I had before now the y-axis is already in the right position because that edge of the part will repeat on the fixed jaw so I just need to locate the X position again and re-zero my dro and I'm back where I was and then I can locate and drill these final holes here once again Center Grille pilot drill and pre-drill for the reamer I went up in a couple of stages here because I need to go all the way up to half an inch here which is pretty big for my little Mill and thank goodness for stubby drills because boy these big drills get pretty long pretty fast at these larger sizes once again vertical real estate a big problem on small Mills to that end I've got a secret weapon here for some of my larger reamers this is a stoby reamer it's so short that I can actually get my drill chuck in and still hold a reamer that's much larger than the smaller ones you saw earlier and for some reason stubby reamers are not that easy to find I think most people don't want them because a longer reamer is actually more accurate the idea is that they should Flex a little bit so that they follow the existing hole you want them to Dimension the hole without trying to move it so flexibility in a reamer is a good thing so a longer shank is a good thing but here in the Hobby World it's nice to have them short okay the stack is looking good I've got one more really cool operation to do to all four of them which involves setting them up thusly and I'm going to Mill the top half of that semi-circle off of there those ears were just there to facilitate creating a half hole if you like this is a clever way to get half of a curved feature in a part this is of course not my idea this is how the kit tells you to do it so once you've drilled and reamed that hole you just Mill this whole ear off and you'll be left with a perfect half inch radius very cool and in fact while I'm here I'm going to go a little bit further down and I'm just going to clean up those laser cut edges and skim my tack welds off because we don't need those anymore we can separate the parts at this point foreign still got four tacks on the backs of these parts and I do want to clean up the other edges here so I can kill all those birds with one stone over on the grinder once again but before I do I might as well deburr all four of those radius edges while I'm here a little bit of needle file action takes care of that and over to the bench grinder to grind those remaining tacks off of there or at least so I think apparently I got really good penetration on these tacks because even after grinding them flat these parts would not come apart the first pair separated okay but those other two pairs well they really liked being joined together I mean I'm not judging when two neural wheel arms love each other very much who am I to say but I really kind of needed them separated a lot more grinding and a lot more prying first with the cheap pliers than with the good pliers finally got one pair separated and then the final pair needed some percussive persuasion over on the Anvil then once again some quality time with the grinder and the Scotch Brite wheel to clean up the laser cut edges there mostly it's just Scotch Brite wheel to soften the edge and remove the mill scale but some of the laser cut edges do have kind of a rough hard crust on them so a little bit of grinder action is required occasionally there but these do clean up quite easily and I gotta say those laser cut Parts really save you a lot of work making all of these parts from bar stock would be probably three times as much work as I'm doing here I've got one more operation to do to all four of these parts and I want to be able to repeat this setup so I'm using a gauge pin once again in that reference hole that's the hole that was the reference for all the other parts got a very close fitting gauge pin there and I'm going to Edge find on that gauge pin and that's going to give me the center line of the hole on the x-axis here and then for the y-axis I can Center up on the part now using the laser cut edges of the part here is not as accurate but it'll be sufficient for this which is just a bunch of centered set screws here now I'm setting up an end stop on the gauge pin not the end of the part because again the ends of those parts are laser cut and they've been ground on and Scotch braided on and all sorts of other manipulations so they're no longer accurate or consistent however a gauge pin through that hole is as long as the gauge pin is a very very good fit in that hole foreign center drill drill and tap this set screw hole easy peasy lemon squeezy but only with consent now here's the real trick after the first part I can stick the next one in there and once again put a gauge pin through that hole and Slide the part forward until the gauge pin touches the end stop this is the trick here to use that hole as the repeatability aspect of this setup and now I can drill and tap the other one and that second set screw hole is going to land in exactly the right place now again for the Y position this does count on the parts all being the same thickness because I'm using the fixed jaw as the reference there but these parts are all close enough for set screw holes that that is perfectly adequate all right we're basically done with the arms now a little bit of deburring action there to deburr the backs of those set screw holes an easy way to do that is to run a reamer through them just by hand like that and that'll clean up any Burrs that came through into the bore there from the set screw Drilling and tapping operation I have some clever inside deburring tools that you've seen on other similar features but they don't work on holes this small when doing this trick resist the urge to untwist the reamer as you remove it from the hole that's going to be an instinct that you'll have but running a reamer backwards is a very very quick way to dull it so as you insert and remove the reamer make sure you're always only running it clockwise all right I've got enough Parts here where I can maybe kind of mock things up and see how it's going to go you can see how the arms fit there and these arms are actually upside down but bear with me and then the end plates go on the end like that and well there we go it's starting to look like a knurler of sorts that's a nice little collection of parts for the first batch but that is all the time I have for you this week thank you very much for watching stay tuned next week for the next part of this series and thanks to my patrons for making all of this content possible and for literally feeding me Anne's pocket thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 162,804

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, diy, home improvement, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, model engineer, steam engine, knurling, knurler, knurling tool, knurling wheels, how to knurl, knurl wheels, knurl

Id: b3p5WQjofH4

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022