Metal Lathe Tutorial 16: Your First Project!

hello Internet my name is Quinn and this is blondie hacks this is lathe skills a series of quick videos on getting started in machining this is episode 16 your first lathe project that's right I think we finally covered enough skills that we can actually make something hopefully fun and useful if you like this content go ahead and subscribe over there on patreon that support is what keeps this content going ok let's dive in so of course your first question is well what are we going to make yeah choosing a first lathe project I think is kind of an interesting challenge because you need something that you can make with the fairly limited skills that you're going to have when you start out but to me you know I think it's also important to make something that's fun and interesting when you're done and that last part is kind of a challenge so if you if you've read a lot of manual machining books you'll find that first lathe projects come in a couple of basic categories you've got your cylindrical square which is a kind of a specialty item that beginning machinist doesn't need and doesn't really know what it's for so you know you might make this beautiful part and then when you're done you put it in a drawer until two years later when you actually need a cylindrical square the the next category is projects that require specialty castings for example here's a good book on learning machining that's I'll link to down in the show notes but you know the intro project here is a screw jack that requires a casting kit which is fine except that this book was written in 1933 and the company that makes this casting kit went out of business in World War two so that's not going to help you a whole lot and while you can make a machinist Jack without castings that's another example of something that actually isn't very useful for a beginning machinist because when you first start out you probably only have a lathe and screw jacks aren't that useful on lathes they're extremely useful in milling machine setups but most beginners start with the lathe and maybe you buy a mill later so for quite a long time again you're gonna have made this thing that isn't of any use to you and then the final category of beginner projects that you see in these books is something like a bushing and don't get me wrong bushings are great they they make the world go round but unless you actually have a specific need for specific bushing then again you've made this donut and when you're done it's like well okay I made a thing all right why do I like machining again so here's what we're gonna do we are gonna make decorative rings now I hear some of you in the back saying those looking awful lot like bushings with a chain through them and to those people I say quite down they're decorative rings so these are actual pieces of jewelry that I've made and that I wear and I get a lot of compliments on them and people often ask me about them the great conversation starters you know where did you get that it's like oh well I made it with my bare hands and then they say wait how did you make that with your bare hands and then you say well actually I with my bare hands and thousands of dollars worth of machine tools and then the conversation goes from there or they walk away because you're weird but either way these things are fun to make and when you're done it's something you can wear and enjoy and you can achieve all kinds of different looks so this piece was made with brass and this guy is about a year old you can see it acquires kind of a nice patina when it's freshly made it's going to be much shinier and more yellow like this guy and if you want to keep this look then you can just clear coat it or personally I prefer to let things acquire their own patina and if you leave it unfinished it will do that and then here's another option made from a steel and this is this is actually made from 12 L 14 steel not regular mild steel and if you're gonna you know make this out of steel I do recommend using 12 L 14 because you're gonna have a much easier time seeing us how this is your first lathe project but if you do that and you're making it as a gift don't give it to children there's a little bit of lead in this type of steel it's not gonna hurt you as an adult but you know kids tend to put things in their mouths and in depending on the look you want you know you can put a decorative chain on it or for the steel one I like it with this safety chain on it's a more of an industrial look it could go with a leather cord so lots of different options I would avoid copper or stainless steel those are both tempting options for a jewelry project like this but those are both very challenging to work with for beginner so I would avoid those and also don't try to machine precious metals like silver or gold or if you do just send me your chip tray for for safekeeping it's not a bushing so I've put these rings on chains because I prefer necklaces I'm not much of a ring wearer but if you want to make a ring a step is to measure the biggest knuckle on the finger that you want to wear it on this is a 600,000 uncle it's a standard Imperial knuckle then make sure that you have a drill bit that will accommodate that so 600,000 $25 free running fit on that Imperial knuckle and that leaves us at five eighths so make sure you've got a 5/8 drill bit so Ari they're called drills not drill bits I know I just angered all the machinists okay so our next order of business is going to be stock and I pulled this chunk off the scrap pile this is some 360 free machining brass but you can watch my video on how to buy metal if this is your first time doing this and you don't have any scraps lying around now the next thing to figure out is what size you need obviously the length is not very important so what do boys down to is you need to do the math on the hole that you want in the center plus two times the thickness that you want on the wall of your ring and then make sure you've got enough beyond that to machine down and get everything concentric so for some reference this ring that I showed earlier this is kind of a good thickness for a ring that you might wear on a finger and this is 50,000 as' and then this guy which is really more of like a decorative chain type of ring this guy is two hundred thousand key ring that I'll be making I need a 625 hole in the middle plus 50,000 'us times two that puts us at 725 out at a diameter and so I'll use this 1 inch stock which gives us 275 to remove good buy a slightly smaller stock make sure you've got probably no less than 50,000 or a low spot in the material that you can get rid of that now we're going to do this project entirely in a single setup on the three jaw Chuck which is part of what makes it a great beginner project now when you check this guy up make sure that you leave enough room for your parting tool to get in there and still leave the thickness that you want on your ring tighten that guy down we're good to go now one of the interesting intellectual challenges with machining is figuring out your order of operations and I think that's something that big a lot of beginners don't realize is that you once you get into more sophisticated parts you will spend quite a bit of time thinking about that and I've chosen this order of operations not because it's the fastest or the most efficient or whatever but because I think it's the for beginner and has the fewest places where you can make mistakes so the first step though is easy which is facing it's very often the first thing you do on the lathe and some set up for that I have my tool post at a comfortable angle and I'm going to be doing almost this entire job with this single tool here and this guy is ground with a flat top which is typical for brass that's what you want and I've got a very generous nose radius on it because brass is easy to turn so I don't need to worry too much about tool pressure and this is going to give me a really nice surface finish in a single pass easy peasy hey I got my lathe at 450 rpm which feels about right for this operation and we're just gonna touch off on my face here and once I see a chip form then I'm just gonna wind my cross light out and then down here on my carriage hand wheel I'm gonna dial in about 20,000 it's always a good first facing pass and then I'm gonna lock my carriage and then I'm gonna wind in my cross slide nice and easy nothin to it making chips if you've been following along in my lathe series this might be your very first two chips next so welcome to machining you're gonna love it so this is all in real time here so you get a sense of the pace that I'm using and I'm not in a hurry you can go faster than this but you don't have to there and if your tool height was good then you won't have any kind of nubbin or anything left on there now we need to set up to turn this outer diameter and to do that we need to square up our tool post so here's a quick and dirty way to do that since we've just faced the end of this work we know that the end of this work is Square to our ways and parallel to our chuck so we can just use that to square up our tool post so we're just loosen this guy off and winder carriage in and then just bring this guy in and with it loose it'll square itself up nice and easy and then just kind of snug it up a little bit and then you can move it away and put a little hurt on it okay so now we can come in here and do this turning now we're gonna be working a bit close to the chuck which can be scary for a beginner but you need to get comfortable with this because in here close is where all your rigidity is so might as well start getting comfortable with that now so a simple trick here for this turning operation because we're going to be starting out here and coming in we want to make sure that we don't come in too far and crush the Chuck so an easy way to do that is just kind of line it up out here with the machine off if you're not sure you can always just stick your machinist scale there on the edge of your tool and you can see that we're going to have clearance there now with this guy set up where you want it and then just start the lathe and then just wind the cross slide straight in a little bit and just make a little mark so now we know how far in we can safely go when the Chuck is spinning it can be a little hard to see exactly where the front face of these jaws are so that little mark makes it a lot easier okay now for turning I'm using a little bit of a lower spindle speed because we're on the outer surface of the part now so I'm at about 380 rpm which feels about right for this brass and with any turning operation first step is always to find that surface so I'm just gonna wind in here until I see it touch that surface there we go and then I can just wind this guy clear the work and then down here on my cross slide I'll go ahead and put it on the closest whole number there and now I can dial in let's say 10 20 thousandths will be a good first pass here and this is a direct read hand wheel so it's reading the amount of diameter reduction that I will get by doing this so we're gonna remove 20,000 and away we go I'm just feeding by hand here don't have to use the power feed on your first time out just focus on turning that carriage hand wheel smoothly and consistently smoother you are with it the better finish you'll get yeah we've got that witness mark so we don't have to worry about the Chuck jaws we're just going to come in so we encounter that line and we're good and I'll wind it back out now normally you'd be ready for your next step but this piece of scrap I have here has a little bit of a step on it because it was previously used for something else so I'm just going to turn that down and I'll bring you right back okay now that we're all cleaned up nice and shiny we have a machined surface now that we know is concentric to the a spindle axis so we can take our first measurement and now we're not making racing engine parts here we're making jewellery so we don't need a ton of precision and then good old caliper here is going to do everything that we need so we can take our first measurement now yeah and we can see that we are at 9:44 so we're going for 725 so we've got two hundred and nineteen thousand oh we want to plan our passes now we've got 219 to go so I'm gonna do two passes of a hundred thousand then that should leave us with one pass of 19 which is kind of you want to kind of break it up so that you've got some big roughing passes and then something in the sub xx outrage as you're finishing pass and that will absorb any errors that you make as you get closer and closer to your final dimension and of course you know this is jewelry final dimension what does it really matter well precision takes practice so I might as well take every chance you get to practice hitting dimensions because someday when it does matter when you go to build that racing engine and you want to have that practice under your belt so same spindle speed here I'm at 380 390 and I'm gonna dial in in 100,000 [Applause] and we could use cutting fluid here but for this little brass project it's not strictly necessary as you can see 100,000 on that difficult even with all my little bench top machine first hundred thou second hundred thou hath the roughing pass is done we can now see how deep our finishing pass needs to be take a little measurement here so we are at 7:43 which means we had 18 that elect to go we expected 19,000 where that cost us a thousandth and if I just blindly gone in and done a 19th out pass we would have ended up 1,000 or dimension all right for this finishing pass I got this Pinto speed higher now I'm a little over 500 rpm both because our diameter is now a little smaller and because I want to get the best possible surface finish so higher spindle speed and I'm going to feed nice and slow [Music] once again the more evenly and consistently you feed the better finish you'll get and on this last pass I'm gonna wind the cross slide out I'm not going to drag the tool back across the work and risk scratching it up okay now I'm set up with a parting tool and this is gonna seem a little unconventional but this is back to what I said about choosing your order of operations and this is going to make sense later on so what we're doing now is setting the final thickness of our rings so again this isn't super precise so I can just set it with a machinist scale here and I'll go for a hundred thousand for my pinky and then I'm gonna go ahead and lock that carriage and you'll notice that I'm using a traditional ground parting tool not a parting blade and this wide parting tool is going to help us later on this particular tool is the one that comes with the pre ground set from grizzly and there's a link down in the show notes for this guy right here now I've got my spindle speed way down now about 140 rpm and I've got my carriage good and locked what I'm gonna do is just come in here and find the surface just touch off okay now I'm gonna look at my hand wheel and the depth that we want here is a little more than the wall thickness of our final ring we just would only need to go in that far we're not really parting anything off here we're just making a groove now at this point it's critical to know if you have an indirect or direct read hand wheel because you might be reading the depth of cut or the diameter reduction in my case I'm reading the diameter reduction and we need a 50,000 is our ring so we need a total diameter reduction of 100,000 in whoa cut away all there never a bad idea okay and we go so I'm just winding in nice and easy [Music] okay there's my wanna hurt down come back out all right the next step we're gonna do is actually to deeper this part with a fine cut mill file and this is kind of our best opportunity to do this this is another great example of how your order of operations really takes some thinking and the more well-planned your order is the easier your part is going to be to make so obviously we can deburr the outside edge but the reason that we did that parting now is that now that that groove is cut it gives us an easy chance to come in here and deburr the backside of that part and of course you can always deburr after the parts you know finished but with a round part you get a much nicer result if you can deburr it while it's spinning in the lathe okay so I've got my spindle speed up a little bit now about 200 rpm and all these rpm numbers I'm giving you you know plus or minus one it's fine it's really not that critical for what we're doing okay so just like I showed in the deburring video we're gonna go ahead and just give these guys a nice slight chamfer okay there's the outside now the inside is a little trickier but just kidding there's the result of our champ ring right there yeah you can see how nice that's gonna be now at this point you might be saying to yourself wait a minute that looks an awful lot like a disc and the defining property of a ring is that well as a hole in the middle and well that's what we're gonna do right now this is our tail stocks time to shine this guys have been hibernating until now but now it's time for the good old Jacobs Chuck let's get set up for drilling that hole so we'll start with the number two center drill here and we want lots of spindle speed because we're drilling a very tiny hole and right in the middle where there was a very little surface beat so I got the lathe cranked up to let's say 800 rpm maybe maybe 900 and a little cutting oil on there and get it done before we drilled a big hole let's take a moment to talk about rake angles on cutting tools because this is going to be important for brass on these lathe tools you want the top surface to be flat you want zero back rake on that cutting edge for steel you want somewhere between 8 and 15 degrees of angle on the top of that cutting tool and those angles are tailored to the material you know how it sheers and these angles are important now what a lot of beginners may not realize is that those angles also apply to drills these drills have cutting edges on the ends just like our lathe tools and they also have those rake angles on them and those rake angles also need to match your material so any old factory drill that you buy is likely going to be ground for steel and you can buy special brass drills but they're very expensive and you know the average hobbyist isn't likely to have them so I can use these steel drills on our brass but we need to use a couple of tricks which I'm going to show you now the effect here gets much worse the larger the drill is so on small drills you won't notice this you just drill a hole and the material doesn't matter a whole lot but on these larger drills that are taking bigger bites of the material that rake angle starts to matter a lot more so for that reason and for others we're going to be doing this in a lot of stages because we're going all the way up to 5/8 which is a pretty big bite for brass when you're using the wrong drill so we're going to start with a quarter inch which is always a good pilot size to start with now we need to think about our depth the goal here is to get the full diameter hole a little bit deeper than the thickness of our ring and the thing we need to be thinking about is the distance of the pilot point on our largest drill that we're going to be using which is this 5/8 so you can measure this distance from here to here and you know just with rough measurement with a caliper is fine and you'll find it's about 300,000 we get to this guy the widest part of the drill has gone a little deeper than the thickness of our ring and to do that we're going to use these marks on the tailstock quill so we're just going to touch the end of the drill bit in see which line we're at and then we're just going to count three hundred thou go got my spindle Oh 400 rpm cutting oil on their tail stock is locked anyway we go all right our next drill is going to be this 5/16 and this is this is one you're going to start noticing the difference with using the wrong drills so the effect is that because this this cutting edge here is sort of too too too much of a hook if you like because of that back rake what's going to happen is the brass wants to grab the drill and pull it in faster than it can cut and you'll see that the effect of that is that the drill you'll feel the the work kind of pulling on the drill now the failure mode of this is that it starts biting too deeply all at once and overwhelms the torque holding your drill in place and it'll spin the drill in the Jacobs Chuck which is not very good for the drill or your Jacobs Chuck so to prevent that what we want to do is basically take very light passes to keep that cutting edge from digging in too deep so just feed very very gently with this and and you'll be fine my spindle speed is the same as the quarter inch drill and I'm feeding nice and gently very slow sweeping here it wanted to grab okay now it's cutting nice again feeding gently don't let it grab and the depths fear is not so important because we'll just feel a bottom out we don't actually have to measure the depth now here's the bottom here's our final 5/8 size that's cutting fluid on there yeah I got the lead slowed down about 150 rpm now now watch what happens you'll know when you're in far enough I'll see why we did that parting the way we did there's our ring so here's our ring fresh off the lathe it's looking very pretty indeed now weird to slide this guy on your finger immediately because there's gonna be burrs on those inside edges from the drilling and it's gonna be pretty sharp so let's get that cleaned up clean this up we can use a deburring tool like this guy and you'll find a link to this guy in the show notes and it's a little bit fiddly to work with apart this small but we can just kind of hold it on there like so and give it a few little twists there's our finished ring ready to be slid on your finger or slid on a chain or slid on some part of someone that you love so make a few of these for yourself it's fun and you will learn a lot and it's definitely not a bushing thanks for watching you

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 68,485

Rating: 4.9067597 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

Id: t9NGty1CVII

Length: 24min 18sec (1458 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2019