Let's Make a Tungsten Grinder | 3D Printing with NylonX

let's make a tungsten grinder if we play our cards right we might be able to spend more time and money than it would take to just buy one so welcome back to cloud 42 i'm james like most people i have been grinding my tig welding electrodes using a cordless drill and a bench grinder and while that works just fine it tears up the wheels pretty quickly and it makes a big mess so i'd like to have something better and given my mad tig welding skills i grind a lot of electrodes you can of course just buy a tungsten grinder if i go out to amazon search for tungsten grinder one of the first ones that comes up is this cordless sharpie dx and honestly this is what i think of when i think of buying a tungsten grinder and so if you look at this it's got a head that's got collets for different sizes of tungstens it's got ports for flattening the tips it's got an angle adjustment so that you can adjust the angle of the grind this is really quite a complex tool and it comes with the cordless battery and the what you know is obviously a milwaukee rotary tool but it also comes with a hefty price tag 377. they have something called the sharpie sd and when you look at this this looks like it's a similar kind of a setup but not as complex and it doesn't have an adjustable angle so you're fixed to just a 20 degree grind angle and i really like to be able to be able to grind at different angles now one of the things i do see it has is it has a cut off slot so that you can cut off the end of a tungsten that's really contaminated that's certainly something that i'd like to have let's see next up is the eastwood here the tg-1800 i looked at these for a while and tried to decide if i wanted one and it's just got slots for guides so you just sort of put the tungsten into the slot and hold it at the right angle and sharpen it and you know it's not going to be as easy to use because it's it doesn't fully contain the tungsten you just have to kind of hold it and there's a guide to help you do that that's great we're still talking about 130 dollars and then we can get into the imports so this is the three mirrors unit and you can see it's got just holes drilled in aluminum at different angles and different diameters and so this is just a piece you can screw onto your dremel and you can you know grind your tungsten so that's interesting we're still talking about 65 bucks they have one that they sell that they sell with a rotary tool and that's interesting but what's really interesting about this one to me are the brass inserts so if i want to make one of these especially if i want to 3d print it i don't think that the plastic plastic's really going to hold up to the hot tungsten as you grind it or it's going to hold up to the wear of that very hard material but it would be pretty straightforward to get some brass set screws drill them through in the appropriate sizes and set those into a plastic 3d printed part and we might have something this one also has you can see just a notch here cut into the side so that you can reach down and access the side of the wheel to cut off the tip of a tungsten and that's definitely something that i would like to have on mine let's see and here's a version where you doesn't come with the tool it's just the guide with the brass screws and the cut off wheels that's still almost 100.92.99 but they also sell the same company three mirrors sells just the wheels and you know a couple of barbers to go in a rotary tool and the wheels and they want ten dollars for ten double-sided wheels that seems like a pretty good deal so why don't we order a set of these wheels you can get them in 25 millimeter and 35 millimeter i'm gonna order them in 25 and let's see if we can make one of these this is the rotary tool that i'm going to use this is a milwaukee but you really can use any rotary tool and i did go out and buy this specifically for this project because i i joined team red a while back i had some cash from the four jaw challenge and decided to replace my drill and driver that you all have been making fun of so um yeah i joined team red so i decided to go ahead and pick this up i already had the batteries so i already am in this battery ecosystem already had the batteries and charger so i just had to pick up the bare tool which is you know less than 100 bucks and so far it seems all right i do have a regular dremel too but it's corded and i didn't really want to drag the cords around i'm going to have enough cords when i'm welding and i'd rather just have a portable tool i can use for sharpening the tungstens every time i take it for a swim and this will this will fit that bill now every one of these tools has an accessory thread on the front if you unscrew this cap there is a thread on the front to accept a rotary a flexible shaft or a guide or a guard for cut off wheels or various accessories and we're going to use this to attach the guide for our tungsten grinding wheel and this is a standard thread this is three quarters 12 meaning it's three quarters of an inch in diameter 12 threads per inch and if you look closely at it you can see there's a little shoulder at the bottom the thread doesn't go all the way down to the body of the tool so we'll need to take that into account as well and these are the grinding wheels i picked up from amazon 10 for 10 wheels and they are double sided and they come with an arbor or two i have already assembled one of them so i've got the wheel on here and you can see the grid is on the top it's also on the bottom so you can flip the wheel over when it's worn and it's also around the edges so we can use this to cut off tungstens when they turn into a lollipop so i will just mount this in here leave a little bit of space just because i don't know if i'm going to want to replace this with a different one in the future and i want the design to accommodate a little bit of adjustability so we'll mount that in there i will take some measurements of this thread and the whole tool stack up and we'll go model that in cad and design the part that we need as with any of my 3d designs i always start with a model of the things that i can't change the things that i have to interface to in this case you know it's the spindle nose of the rotary tool so i just came in here says fusion 360 but you know any cad program can do this and i modeled up the spindle nose so i've got the collet i've got the wheel and all these dimensions i took off of the actual tool and off of the actual grinding discs with calipers so this should be accurate enough for me to design a guide to go around it now i didn't really need to design this thread and actually model it because i'm not actually going to make that thread sorry jeremy but i went ahead and did it because it was easy and because it looks nice and it gives me kind of a perspective when i'm trying to design and my computer can handle all the extra faces so it's not a big deal and here is what i came up with now this has some extra features has a lot of the features that we saw in some of the commercial tools let me get a cross section of this we've got of course the barrel and the threads that fit onto the rotary tool and we've got the guides in here at an angle and these are just brass set screws that have been drilled through to hit that but i added a few other things there's of course the cut off slot like we saw in a couple of the ones that were available for sale you can see i also put a hole in the side and what that's for is for sighting through the tool across the top of the arbor without the wheel attached there so that the top of the arbor should be exactly centered in that hole and that gives us a means for adjusting the height of the arbor so that the wheel will be at the right height to intersect the correct angle on the screws so we can get the tungstens to grind you know at the correct point on the wheel without that you would have to pretty much assemble the whole thing and put the wheel on and then test the height and if it wasn't right you have to take the wheel off in order to get the tool off now i could have put windows in the side but i opted not to do that just because i wanted to contain the dust and because i was going to print this in plastic and i wanted to make sure we had the strength and rigidity that we needed now i've added some other features here on the outside i've added a tab here with a 5 8 inch hole and this is so that we can anchor it hanging off the side of my weld fixture table which has 5 8 holes in it and i added a dust port now this is just a tapered inch and a quarter dust port that should fit any inch and a quarter shop vac hose and you can see i've got all the surfaces rounded and smoothed on the inside so that any of the dust there should be continuous airflow down through the top and out so that any of the dust that comes off or i need the grinding grit so which is going to be diamond and tungsten and maybe some metal isn't going to end up in the bearing of the rotary tool it is or in the air where you breathe it it's instead going to get pulled into the vacuum and in fact if you cut the tip off of a tungsten that should get sucked into the vacuum as well so that it won't get bound up or caught in the bearings or in the nose of this tool now i've got a lot of hours in modeling this actually figuring out how to get everything lofted and in here correctly get the strengthening ribs and to get all the surfaces to interact intersect properly and get all these curved surfaces inside it can be a bit of a challenge and so i'm not going to walk through all of that but i will show a few of the trickier operations that i thought might be interesting and might be something good to learn from so let me go over to another model that i have here where i've rolled things back and i've got a nice bright color so this is easy to see let me turn off the dremel and all we've got here is i have just modeled the outside cylinder with the boss in the bottom i have modeled the little relief here for the base where there's no threads and then this is where we actually need to put the threads so to model threads in fusion 360 is really easy i'll just click that surface and i will go up to create thread and it'll give me a bunch of options so these are unified screw threads and i will pick five so three quarters of an inch and i'm going to pick three quarters 12 u n and i am going to click to model those so that will actually model that particular thread we can choose our tolerance here i'm going to choose 3b because i know that my 3d printer when i'm printing with carbon fiber nylon filament which is what i want to use for this i know that that is going to it's going to actually shrink this hole somewhat so the 3b will make the largest threads that i can but i'm going to need to stretch them a little bit more than that even so click ok that gives us our threads but you'll note that the bottom of this is very flat and it comes down to a little razor sharp kind of an edge i do not want that i would like to chamfer it but chamfering it once you've got the thread here is pretty complicated so what i'll do is roll the history marker back to before the thread we'll click on this edge and go to modify chamfer and i'll put my chamfer here and let's see 0.50 nope i can't remember how thick this is so there we go 40 thou so that'll give me a 40 thou chamfer which is pretty much the width of that and now if we roll the history marker back forward to the thread you can see that it's not really giving us what we wanted because it gave us a chamfer but then the thread kind of gets buried and doesn't open through the bottom of that chamfer but if you take the chamfer and drag it after the thread in the timeline then now you get exactly what you want you get the thread modeled with the chamfer on the bottom and so if we bring up a section analysis here so we can see what's going on and choose an appropriate face so that this is open then we can see that we actually do have a nice clean chamfer on the bottom and the thread just starts into into and above that chamfer okay that's the that's the thread down here the other thing that i wanted to show is how i actually modeled the holes the threaded holes at an angle up here at the top so let me turn the dremel back on here so we have this surface and what i want to do is create a sketch on this surface so i'll say right click create sketch and in here i want to put in some lines so i'll hit l for line and i will put a line across this and in fact i'm going to hit p for project first i want to project this outside edge and now i have some guides now l for line and i will just draw a line that goes across this now i will choose horizontal vertical to lock that line horizontal escape now i'll select the line can and select this point and i will click coincident i don't know why that's not working so this line is still move control click coincident okay there it is not sure why that wasn't working okay so now we have a sketch line that is locked down here now i actually want to put multiple holes around the sides of this so i'm going to hit l and i'm going to run a couple more lines at an angle across this and i'm going to do exactly the same thing select those two points say coincident select the line and the point and they're coincident and then i want to hit d for dimension and put in some angles so i will make this 60 degrees and then between here and here also 60 degrees and so now i have some lines that are around that disc so these are the points where i'm going to create my axes for the for the tungsten that comes in because i want those to actually intersect at that point so let's construct a plane at an angle and i will select one of these lines and then now i can see the angle of this plane so if i put it at exactly 90 degrees that would give me a 0 degree grind which is not what we want and if i put this up at say 45 degrees that would give us a 45 degree one-sided grind so for my normal um 30 degree included point i'm actually going to want this to be 15 degrees above the horizontal so i'll say 90 minus 15 and that gives me a plane at the correct angle now we can go around and create one of these planes on each one of these in fact we can make six of these all the way around and we can set them up at whatever angles we want now to actually make the hole now i can right click on this plane i've created and say create sketch and in here on that sketch i can create a circle so c for circle and i'm going to uh make this circle d for dimension a quarter of an inch because that's actually how large i want the hole coming through the side here to be now how far out from the center i think i want this about 3 8 of an inch from the center point so i'll put in a dimension here as well 0.375 and yeah i've just played with this and that looks like that's about the right point now how high above the disc do i want it well i want it to be a quarter of the diameter of the tungsten because if it were half the diameter of the tungsten then the point would come exactly to this center line and i would have the i would have all swirls because the grinding action is coming in so i'd like to have the point the whole grinding surface centered on this line so i actually only want this to be up one quarter of the diameter of the tungsten well i'm going to do a bunch of diameters of tungsten but i'll just say that 330 seconds is actually the one that's that's average so i will just put this one quarter of that up which would be three sixty fourths so that center point now is half of half of the diameter of the tungsten above that itch so now i can finish the sketch i can come in here and just select this profile and i can control to do a multi-select and click here and hold and i can just this will pop up and i can choose which other profile i want now i have both of those selected right click extrude and i can just pull this out through the side and so now i've got a hole through the side a quarter of an inch that is at the right angle so that the tungsten will come in to grind on that wheel at the size that i want or at the angle that i want and so now i can always just go up here and say create thread click here that is going to be a quarter inch thread and i'm using quarter 20 model it and boom i have a threaded hole at the right angle to accept the brass insert screw to grind a tungsten and i can just go around and do that with each one of these lines at a different angle and put in all of the holes that i need now i'd actually kind of like to clean up the outside of this so let's go back in here and turn this sketch back on and let's edit it and let's go ahead and put in a clearance hole so i'll just say c for circle and i'll draw another one out here and actually better yet let me delete that circle let's do o for offset and let's offset this about a millimeter which would be what about 0.040 inches and that will give us then an additional circle around this i can come in here select that right click extrude now if i just extrude out in this direction that's then going to make a hole around the outside of the hole that i already made and it's going to go all the way through so instead i'm going to say start from offset and that offset will say one inch and then we'll cut in the other direction until we've just cleaned up and that looks about right and now we have our threaded hole starting just below the surface so we kind of have a guide surface here to guide the screw in straight so the screw can then start straight on that surface it'll make it easier to get a tap in there and that's how you make those holes and you can make those all the way around at all the different angles and i have already done that so let's take this part send it to the 3d printer print this out in carbon fiber nylon and take it out and give it a try [Music] so i went to mcmaster carr and ordered a bunch of these these are one quarter 20 by one half inch brass set screws so these have an 8 inch hex drive on one end which means that i should be able to clear a hole for an eighth inch tungsten so what i need to do is take these and drill them through the first tungsten size i'm gonna drill for is three thirty seconds this is a three thirty seconds tungsten and i just need to put a hole through it that will clear this and then i'll make some of these for each size of tungsten that i regularly use which would be one eighth three thirty seconds one sixteenth and uh o o40 but we're starting with 3 30 seconds so i've got a quarter inch collet in the collet chuck here and we will just mount this and this should be really simple just drill straight through i've got a number 41 drill bit here which should just clear with a fairly close fit a 330 seconds tungsten so let's put a hole in this thing and see how it works [Applause] [Music] [Applause] and that's that let me check the fit on the tungsten i think i've got some chips in there yeah that fits through it's got a little bit of motion not too bad it'll be fine for grinding so let me do three more of these and then i'll do four for each of the other sizes that i want to grind and then we can put this thing together and here's the part off of the 3d printer this actually turned out pretty well now this is not the first one i printed because i'm still fiddling around with how to get the inside threads and the inside holes the right size and that includes the vertical ones with support now with this particular material with the carbon fiber nylon the support material is pretty difficult to remove the stuff on the outside was no big deal but the stuff on the inside especially the solid layers or the dense layers that were on the bottom were very very difficult to remove i spent a bunch of time under magnification with a bunch of sharp tools doing things that i probably wouldn't want to show on camera and manage to get it all out but i really am looking forward to being able to get some dissolvable support to try with this stuff but this is the part and i think it came out pretty well the dimensions are close enough but these threaded holes that the guides need to go in of course are you know it's a quarter 20 thread it was too much to expect them to be usable right out of the box but i have a tap and we will go ahead and just run the tap through and clean those holes up and we should be good to go i'm just trying to be very careful to find the actual angle of the hole because with this soft material it would be very very easy to just re-cut the hole at a different angle okay the tungstens that i want to grind first are going to be three thirty seconds so i grab my three thirty seconds guides and an eighth inch wrench and install them and there we go four guides all at different angles it should accept three thirty seconds tungsten now let's get the tool mounted now i'm going to start with just the the empty collet here or the empty shaft set it to about the length i need screw it in and then check it siding through the guide holes we made in here and that's a little bit low okay that splits splits the hole nicely so we'll just go ahead and snug it down that still looks good so let's put the wheel in it there's the wheel [Music] and okay let's take this over on the welding bench see if we can mount it with the tab and grind some tungstens now this is a rhino cart so this is a two inch grid of 5 8 inch holes and i've got some of these ball bearing locking pins for mounting fixtures to it and we'll just run one of those through this hole tighten it down and now that's firmly attached hook up the vacuum and no this is not a milwaukee vacuum it's the same color this is actually a porter cable but uh you know milwaukee does make a nice cordless vacuum that would work really well with this let's give it a try and grind some tungstens let's start with a standard one at 60 degrees looks pretty good let's try a couple of others let's try one at 45. hmm looks pretty good and let's try 60. okay as long as we're getting crazy let's see what 15 degrees looks like well that's a long sharp tungsten let's take these over and look at them under the microscope and see how they actually look okay there's our standard 30 degree point this is what i use most and wow that looks really really good looks a lot cleaner than the ones that i've ground on the bench grinder and just kind of looking at it you can see that down near the heel of the of the grind the scratches are not perfectly vertical but up near the tip they're very close to vertical which is really ideal it's really what you want on a ground tungsten now if you wanted to flatten the tip on this you could always just reach in there and put it on the on the grinder and do that and let's compare that to let's look at the 15 degree and that is a long pointy tungsten but again you can see that out near the tip the scratches kind of go along the tungsten rather than around it they kind of swirl because it's a round wheel moving in a circle they kind of swirl down near the base but near the tip they're kind of longitude and they'll kind of right where you'd want and let's see if i can figure out which one of these is which i think this is the 45. and you can see it's pretty much the same thing the scratches are close to lengthwise on the tip and then the 60 which is really blunt and yeah pretty much everything i could probably take that one around again it doesn't look perfectly even but it is just fine so there you go shop made grinder 3d printed a couple of brass set screws and we can sharpen tungstens to our hearts content well that's all i've got for you today if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up feel free to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment i'd like to know what you think thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Clough42

Views: 45,333

Rating: 4.9610963 out of 5

Keywords: Tungsten Grinder, TIG Welding, Tungsten Sharpener, 3D Printing, NylonX, Lathe, Drilling, Milwaukee, Rotary Tool, Machine Shop, Machining, Grinding, Sharpening

Id: p80Hpj905Vo

Length: 32min 5sec (1925 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 21 2021