Mill Foot Stock (Tail Stock)! Kinda Fail?

oh now i see why nobody does it this way ah poop knuckles hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondie hacks some projects work out better than others i have a small footstock for my mill but i have a setup where i need to use a footstock with my big six-inch rotary table so i decided to see if i could adapt the little footstock now i got it done in the end and i got a setup that's going to work but i learned a lot along the way and i would have done things pretty differently if i were to do this all again so join me on this little journey and you can learn along with me let's go here's my phase two four inch rotary table it's adorable but it's a little on the small side for most jobs and even after i knew that i bought a foot stock for it because well in my family the cost fallacy is quitter talk so now i want to try and use this footstock with my six inch rotary table now you can see that this foot stock is height adjustable there's two inclined planes there that work together but they only give you about fifty thousand height adjustments so that's good news though that it has that because it just means i need to get in the ballpark and then i can use that adjustment for the rest i also have an alternate sneaky plan i want to also set up this footstock for use with stock in collet blocks i would like to be able to use tail support effectively on long parts that are going to call it blocking the vise so to do that i need to get the tail stock elevated up to that level with a riser block and i'd like to make a block that can also allow me to move this side to side because the t-slots never line up with stock that's in the vise so i need to be able to adjust it laterally as well so i had a plan to make two riser blocks one for that case and one for the case over here on the rotary table now the rotary table needs a much larger block but my thought was if i use a one two three block to take up most of that space on the rotary table i can use a thin piece of stock and make both of these risers now i considered using steel i have this chunk here but i would need to make a longitudinal cut down it otherwise i'd be making chips for two days instead i bought this piece of drawn iron bar from mcmaster carr it should be just the right thickness to where i can make both of these riser blocks and again one block will be used with a one two three block to get the much larger height needed now this seemed like a good idea in past quinn's brain turned out not to be such a good idea but bear with me here so i'll set this up in the band saw to cut the overall length here down to what i need because this is such a thin piece and it's cast iron which cuts quite easily the saw makes extremely short work of this chews through that very very quickly with a piece cut i'm going to do a little mock-up here with this use case here the goal was to have a riser block that will get me basically on a center there with the footstock in the middle position and unfortunately even with the footstock in the highest position it looks like it's still too low for that center mark i put an indicator on there just to be sure and sure enough when it engages with the center on the work i can see that it is lifting itself up a little bit so i cannot get it high enough with this riser block basically this means i mismeasured i was sure that with this thickness of stock i could get sufficient height for both of my use cases and i just did it wrong so i'm going to forgo the vice collet block setup for now and i'm just going to focus on getting the riser block going for the six inch rotary table and i'm going to continue to use the one two three block strategy but again in hindsight that wasn't a very good idea stay tuned for why now because this is such a thin piece i wanted to face the top first so i tried to set it up like this in the vise and wow yeah that sock cut is so crooked that the vise jaw couldn't grip it in that orientation so i'm gonna have to face this edge first in almost every video i talk about how great that 4x6 bandsaw is and how straight it cuts well this time for whatever reason it didn't cut straight at all so probably it was pushing too fast through the material there and the blade wandered a little bit those saws have a spring counter weight adjustment on them so you can slow them down but yeah i never bother with it i'm not doing the textbook correct method for squaring stock here where you do a lap around one axis of the part squaring up each side and then using round bar or copper wire to take out the movement of the movable jaw and so on i've done a video on squaring up stock the textbook way in my mill skills playlist so check that out for that procedure however it doesn't work very well in this kind of situation where the stock is really thin so i'm kind of cheating here and i'm not doing it that way but that's okay because really all i care about is the parallelism of the two large sides so i'm going to focus on those i've got a big surface to face down there but i have a secret weapon for this this is a prototype of a facing mill sent to me by shrum solutions andrew schrum you can find him on instagram this is an insert face mill designed specifically for small milling machines and it's such a great idea because tooling like this just really doesn't exist much for hobbyists you've typically seen me use shell mills for this and they work good except that you know they're a little expensive and they're hard to re-grind so once you wear them out well yeah it's a lot of money down the tube potentially so an insert tool is great and i have to say this thing is working really really well i wouldn't want to go any larger diameter wise with this machine but doing a full two inch wide cut at 10th out depth cut left an absolutely stunning finish look at that you can read the scale right there in the surface and you know this is cast iron right off the tool no polishing that's really quite remarkable now obviously the inserts get the credit for the finish there but this facing mill uh worked out really really well very happy with this guy you can buy those from andrew shrum with that top surface faced and i've got one edge cleaned up as well i put those down and back in the fixed jaw there trying at least to get this thing moderately square even though squareness is again not super critical here i'm going to tap tap tap that down and then i'm going to face the other side and then i'll face this final edge down to dimension now you might be wondering why did i go to all this effort to buy this special material for this instead of just using the steel that i had a main reason is that with small machine tools like this it really pays i've learned to minimize the amount of chips you have to make otherwise these projects just take forever these machines cannot take heavy cuts and cannot shift a lot of material especially in steel cast iron things like this so it really pays to try and buy stock that's close in dimension to your final product but that does mean you take a risk like i did with buying stock that was a little too thin for that other application with the two big faces cleaned up that's the important part let's line it up on the surface plate now with my rotary table and see how i'm doing on height i need to get the height correct so it's just cleaned up now but i know it's not to final thickness so i can set it up here on the surface plate with a center in the rotary table there that rotary table has a morse tape or two in it which is great for this sort of thing so i can put the height gauge on the tip of the rotary table center there make a note of that reading and then move it over to the footstock and measure the height of that center and then the difference between those two readings tells me how much i have to take off of my riser block back over to the milling machine and i can take off the rest of that material before i get too close to final dimension though it's important to make sure i'm going to end up with these two large faces being super parallel remember that's the important dimension here because if these faces aren't parallel then of course i'm introducing error in the orientation of the footstock so when i'm close to final dimension i take some measurements on thickness at both ends and i can compare those and see how parallel the two faces are and i see that i've got a couple thousands of error here probably mistakes in previous setups so what i can do is just tap one end until an indicator shows me that i've got plus one thou at one end and negative one thousand the other and then when i do this cut it'll take that two thou parallelism error out of the piece little tricks like this are how you can get more precision out of low end machines like this just check your work when you're close and you can make little corrections like that and then i'll finish up by facing the two edges now that face mill that i was using was basically the exact same width as the material which always leaves you with a extra nasty burr because it pushes the material over on the edge and doesn't really break it off so clean this up with a file and because i was feeling frisky i decided to draw file the edges a little bit just make them look a little nicer back to the surface plate now and let's see how i did on my final dimensioning there again this doesn't have to be dead nuts on because the footstock is set at its middle height position so i've got plenty of wiggle room on either side but if i can get these points lined up visually with the footstock in the middle then i will feel good about it and that looks very good indeed so we'll definitely be able to dial in the height to be level with whatever setup we have now now the footstock has slots in the base for mounting it and so i decided to replicate those slots with my riser block here and that will allow me to just bolt straight through it this seemed like a good idea but it's actually not such a great idea as you'll see here when i go to try and set this footstock up but it does look nice and it was a fun exercise in cutting slots of course since these are centered it's easy enough to just run down to the other end and do the same thing next i brought in my zero flute chamfering tool and uh shout out to bernie solo for this little technique for chamfering a round ended slot like this you know it's funny i guess this is obvious probably to lots of people but it just never occurred to me to use a chamfering tool this way to move it along a slot like this to chamfer all the sides simultaneously it's a simple technique it works really well and for whatever reason just never occurred to me so thanks bernie now you can see the setup that i was going for it matches the base of the footstock perfectly there which again turns out not to be a very good idea i didn't think this through very carefully beyond oh i'll match the footstock and let's see how i did on parallelism here so i've got a dti on there and i'm sliding the riser block under it and i'm within a few tenths there all the way down so that little correction we made at the end really did the trick now that's a half thou indicator i'm sure the tenth indicator would make a liar out of me but let's just move on and pretend that i did it perfectly i made some special t-nuts for this footstock they are regular sized t-nuts with small quarter 20 threaded holes in them because i'm going to use quarter 20 threaded rod to hold this thing down it's a good fit for the holes on the foot stock and it will also allow me to bolt through the one two three blocks so i'm lining this up now as you see here and of course these one two three blocks are a matched pair but even if they weren't i mean if they're out by a few tenths or whatever it's not going to matter so i bolt this guy down and now comes the tricky part i have to get it squared up and this is what i really wasn't thinking about so i tried to do this by squaring up the one two three block first and then squaring the footstock riser block to the one two three block and then you gotta square up the footstock to the riser block or try to square up the footstock on its own first ensuring that the final footstock on top is square to the table was turned out to be pretty tricky the way i had done this normally a footstock and also the rotary table have keys on the bottom of them that align them to the t-slot automatically essentially and i just didn't think about that when i was designing this riser block and kind of got myself into a little bit of trouble there but i do manage to figure this out here as you'll see here in a moment the next step is to align the tail stock to the rotary table to do that i'm going to need an alignment bar i found this chunk of aluminum that's the perfect length already cut aluminum is not the greatest choice for this sort of thing but it was already cut and it'll be quick i'm going to face off one end and punch a number two center in it then i flip that around and do the same thing on the other side the goal here is just to get two ends faced and with centers in them it doesn't even matter if those centers are especially concentric now i take the chuck off and set up for turning between centers because now we're going to make the real alignment bar regardless of how well the line those two centers are we're going to make them extremely well aligned right now i'm using a drive pin there on the lathe mounting surface that i made specifically for this lathe and i put the stock between centers there and now i can turn down the od as long as this cut is deeper than whatever run out exists caused by misalignment between the two centers then the resulting bar will be extremely concentric so you can do that first step in a three jaw chuck for example even if your three jaw has five thou of run out the two centers will be misaligned by a few thou but you're going to turn that out in this step so it doesn't matter the trick is that for this to be a valid alignment bar for a footstock the diameter of this bar has to be extremely accurate and precise all the way down and that means the tail stock on your lathe needs to be extremely well aligned so really this is a good exercise to align your tail stock at the same time now i had 1.6 thou of taper in that which is actually not bad for this length but i can take that out by shifting my tail stock eight tenths inward to make the tail stock end slightly larger and so you work the two set screws against each other with the tenths indicator on the quill there and lock it down and then take another test cut and measure and i didn't expect to get this in one you never get it in one but wow i got it in one i'd rather be lucky than good every time little hand gesture right here is the huh well i'll take it gesture amazingly that bar is now within a tenth of the same diameter all the way down and as a bonus my tail stock is now super well aligned about that over to the rotary table now i'm going to put my dead center back in there as you saw before there's a morse tape or two in that rotary table so i can feed it through the chuck seat it in the rotary table and now i can insert the test bar that we just made here and i can set up my footstock in the other end unfortunately i didn't get the position of the footstock close enough so i had to unbolt it and shift it into position and then i had to go through all that process of squaring it up again yeah i really should have designed a a larger riser block it's one piece and has the keys in it and could be bolted firmly to the footstock instead of this mess of little pieces that i have here so i came up with a slightly better way to square it up using a larger square that just skips all the pieces below it but still not a very good system luckily the squareness of the footstock is fairly forgiving you don't have to get too crazy with it really what matters is the alignment with the center in that rotary table for that i set up an indicator i started with the indicator horizontal and i set it to zero at one end move it down to the other end and i see i've got about ten thou of difference there if i can tap that error out on the footstock i'll be golden and i got most of it out after that first attempt but i couldn't quite get it all the way out and it's because the mounting bolts on the footstock are bottoming out on one side of the t-slots there so again a big mistake i made not using keys in the bottom of my riser block i'm dealing with the t-slot clearances now so the solution is i needed to move the rotary table over a little bit to buy clearance for the footstock and of course as soon as i did that i had to re-indicate the rotary table because now it may not be square anymore after tapping on it so again use keys on the bottom of all the stuff and save yourself the grief but after that i was able to tap it in and i'm now super straight here i'm within a thou down the roughly 12 inch length of this bar which is excellent now things are about to get weird though i set up the indicator vertically now and i run the same test and everything seems okay i've got a slight incline here that i can correct but then right about here towards the footstock all of a sudden the height shoots way up and i thought well that's odd but i'll work on taking out the overall angle there first and i'll worry about that other anomaly here in a second so i adjusted what should have been about right for the amount of incline that i had and i wound it back and everything was real straight real straight real straight until all of a sudden it dropped way off again so it's almost like there's a bend in the bar right at that one point there i can fix the incline on either side of that but not overall and my first thought was okay the bar must not be a consistent diameter that would explain this but i measured it four different ways five different times the diameter of that bar is perfect all the way down the length so it's not that and then i realized what was happening the little shift is when the rotary table moves past the center point of the saddle on my mill it's so heavy that assembly and this is such a light mill that it's causing the table to sag when it goes over center so the solution was a bunch of big heavy scraps on the other end for a counterweight and that took out almost all of the droop and now i'm able to dial it in straight all the way across i've still got a couple thou of droop at the very far end there but that's more than good enough for what i need in this setup that setup is a lot of work but i mean we're basically building a lathe on the mill here so honestly that's not bad considering the difficulty here of aligning all of these different fixtures perfectly the end result though is excellent and this is super well aligned now this setup and i'm going to be able to do my operation in style so you saw all the design mistakes that i made in this riser block not using keys it should have been one piece should have been bolted firmly to the footstock etc so i'm probably going to end up making this part over again with all of those learnings in mind but i hope you've at least learned something about how to design and build riser blocks thank you very much for watching if you like these videos maybe help support me on patreon it's really the patreons that keep this channel going there's a link down below or you can use the card there on the screen thank you for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 59,837

Rating: 4.9700522 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, home improvement, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, foot stock, footstock, riser, riser block, tail stock, mill tail stock, mill foot stock

Id: Vq9hy_Rte3s

Length: 19min 33sec (1173 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 05 2021