QCTP Tool Holders for the Lathe

so last time you saw me make some tool holders for the mill I thought it seemed fitting to follow up with some two older to the lathe now although it is true that you can never have enough quick change to post holders for your lathe they weren't really very high up on my list I mean three or four more for now would certainly be convenient but I was actually out looking for steel for the over arm support on the milling machine I found this nice piece they cut off a chunk for me that's not to scale but this will become the probably the next video and the over arm support for the mill and while I was digging around for that material I found this nice two-foot piece I think this is a 1040 C 40 that's just the right size get some more holders out of so I figured what the heck no time like the present so really the first step in making your own tool post holders is having a tool post with easy geometry and in this case it's really just a dovetail down the back we'll take a look at my tool post in a minute and I'll share maybe some other options you might have if you have a more complicated two older some of them have a lot of you know T slots and weird angles and not as straightforward of a mounting feature as this one might have but anyway I've already cut a piece off this is about 11 inches I plan to do the dovetails the backside and generally square up the block in the shaper so here I could knock out one whole long dovetail and then chop it to pieces I should get about four out of here maybe five depending what tools I end up building these for so here's my quick change tool post it's in Impero in Peru it's Italian big it's Italian anyway and next to it is the original Colchester four way tool that I got with the machine now at first they maybe don't look too different size-wise but if this were smaller it would have been a lot better fit for this machine by the time you get a tool on here the overhang from Center that it knows maybe two inches two and a quarter inches whereas here it's more like an inch or so this is just a simple sliding dovetail and geometry like this goes a long way to helping me make my own holders and then the only real difference between mine and the store-bought is I have a much simpler height adjust they have this really slick locking sort of height adjuster you can adjust it lock it in place and it's very convenient but I've just got a socket head cap screw with a large neural flange pressed on it and a jam nut underneath once you have enough of these tool holders with dedicated tools in them there is not a lot of very much fussing around at all with the height adjustment now I wanted to show you a couple of things a couple of different Stu holders or different ways to get sort of to the same result if you do happen to have two olders that maybe aren't as easy to make is this if you take a good look at it's called it may be your more sophisticated to older there may be a way to build up the geometry using simpler shapes so in this case I have just dovetails cut right off of the saw that are plug there's a plug weld through it and to a relieve the body so if you have fancy tea slots or diamond shaped slots you may be able to build up the parts independently just to make your life a whole lot easier or you can use sort of the two pin trick I'm sure you guys have probably seen this before it's just a couple of pins you know at the right distance to sort of mimic the dovetail locking geometry now this isn't going to have as much holding force as sort of a fully built formal dovetail I mean this isn't even a tool holder I think at some point I was I don't remember what I was going to do with this thing probably some kind of indicator holder or who knows what and that more or less works you know just as well so over time I build up I don't know it's maybe a dozen or so 14:15 tool holders but you can see there's still quite a few tools kind of up in the queue here that come out relatively often often enough to make me want to make a tool holder or two more anyway enough screwing around let's get to cutting some steel so I'm set up in the shaper the stock is really rough sawn so I just sort of eyeballed it I don't even want to use the word square but just so I'm taking off the least amount of material necessary to start develop a first reference surface this is a 12 inch shaper and that workpiece is 11 inches long that's sort of the integral number of tool holders I could fit in that length if it was a 20 inch shaper I'd probably be making more tool holders the tool is nothing special just some high speed steel that's a right hand and a left hand grind on the other side so I can turn this around and come from either direction I don't really need a mirror finish here so I'm not going with anything fancy first pass I'm hoping they do relatively quickly maybe 10 or 20 how depth of cut and a high step over just to identify any high spots or if I'm drastically out of plane somewhere roughing pass basically all right so I cleaned up pretty good this is actually the second pass though halfway through that first pass I realized I had my work too deep in the vise and I wouldn't be able to cut the dovetail ideally here the salt on in one setup so everything is parallel and square at least all the features on the backside so I picked it up on some parallels I have enough room to cut the dovetails and ran that second pass I've scratched in the dovetail geometry so I can rough out to these lines and then come back take some measurements and finish up all the cuts all right so I've gotten both shoulders roughed out now in order to set up both for the dovetail and to get the flats to final dimension I'm going to come back through here with a finishing tool and just clean up the top of this the back of the dovetail it's not really critical to the function but I'm going to use that as my reference surface to measure both these shoulders and the dovetail well to measure the two shoulders and then use those to measure the dovetail you know I think I'd be hard-pressed to explain why I like the shaper I mean it's certainly not the fastest thing in the world it certainly comes into its own doing things like slotting in key ways and like form tools what we're going to see in a minute cutting the dovetails is just something magical about them it's like watching a campfire and other than in the bathroom I think this is the only other piece of equipment you can use sitting down all right so that's our first reference surface I'm about ten or eleven thousand the right hand side here I'm going to set up for the dovetail cutter use the dovetail cutter to rough out the dovetail and then pull my way out on both sides trying to take these both to the same exact height I'm actually using the dovetail cutter as a spacer that's it there it's a two sided tool so you're going to do left and right hand side and there's nothing really magic to these they're the included angle is less than the dovetail that I want to cut so I don't recall what is in this case and it looks like they're probably not even the same but the dovetails need to be sixty degrees so these are probably 50 somewhere between 45 and 50 and that's your so it gives me enough clearance to walk in and move the tool around with I guess the top slide to generate that 60-degree angle and not foul on either side of that as opposed to say a dovetail cutter in the milling machine that pretty much needs to be exactly the same angle as your dovetail and it's sort of cutting all at least on one face completely along its length so I've sewn the top slide over to about sixty degrees according to its scale and now I'm going to use a reference plate and a dial indicator on a mag base to turn that in and one of these never hurts alright I'm happy with that it's about 2,000 oh an inch inch and a half of travel my dovetails are only 1/4 inch and it's I mean it's a quick change tool post holder the only other thing I'd like to change is this clapper box angle so the top slide is at the 60 but the clapper can be set anywhere with respect to that and then the last thing to check is the tool orientation and tool post alright that way we've got some clearance in the heel and the tools already been ground tighter than 60 so there should be clearance with the ceiling once we get it under there now this is going to be all manual operation with the top slide and the x-axis I'm just going to sort of nibble away till I get close lock all the other axes except the top slide and clean up that cut I'm going to establish this stuff tail first and then we'll get into dovetail measurements and setting the location of the other side all right well that's one side cleaned up and taken to size so now I'm going to flip the whole set up indicate the top slide in like before and work in the other side the dovetails roughed in both shoulders are too sighs not going to touch these flats anymore I'm just going to keep moving that dovetail in until they match the dovetail a functional holder and to size the dovetail I'm just going to measure across a couple of pins now with the pins it's a bit of a Goldilocks situation not too big not too small if the diameter is you know such that you're hitting about halfway up the dovetail it should be fine so I'm about exactly 2.4 inches 61 millimeters it might be a thigh or two over then now a dovetail measurements usually a job for a micrometer but again in this case the way the dovetails are working in the quick-change tool post I've got a fair bit of margin you know with a sliding dovetail on the quick change tool post holder so it looks like I'm almost a millimeter over almost 40,000 25 you almost maybe 35 I'm just going to keep moving this left hand side dovetail in until I match the dovetail dimensions to the known good holder alright that looks like I'm within a couple of that fingers crossed alright let's give it a try alright I'm happy with that fit I can keep going so get it flipped now in the vise dovetail sides down I'm just going to clean up the back and chamfer the corners now that I've got them all sort of ganged up together instead of chamfering them individually once they get cut off I'm not sure how much I'll show this it's more or less more the same see you in a minute I got the back cleaned up ended up not cutting the champers because it turns out this blocks a little wider than I need so I'll take it the width and then cut the chamfers in the mill I picked out a few tools that i'd like to make holders for it's not necessarily these tools but this size and any rate most of these happen to be right hand tools that I usually don't keep handy loaded in a tool holder but anyway I definitely want to make a new holder for the parting and grooving blade this is just a char's in a three inch and you can see it's sort of a holder inside of a holder I'm just going to replicate the chars holder geometry in the tool post holder and just get rid of this extra part anyway the moral of the story here is the tools aren't as big as some of the other tools so I might be able to get five pieces out of here I'm just going to measure them out cut them off now other than the dovetail fit there's nothing really critical about these one feature I do want to get in there right is this cutout for the tool holder my case I'd like that slot to be perpendicular to the dovetail just so I'm not screwing with any of the geometry of my insert tooling but of course you can make sort of these front features anything you need you could cut this for example at a 5 or 10 degree angle for high speed steel and already give it that top rake so it saves you some grinding now there's a few ways to get that perpendicularity but I think what I'm going to do in my particular case is mount the holders in a second vise with the pins that way I can square this face up and when I rotate it I know it's perpendicular to the dovetails I could have skipped the second vise and just rotated my machine vise 90 degrees indicated that in cut the slot directly or do the same thing and cut the slot with my y-axis but I'd prefer to do this with power feed which I only have left and right and up and down so there it is and now the dovetail should be squared to one face so we've got two reference faces perpendicular to each other and square to the dovetail and that's just like squaring up any other block all the blocks are nice and square now you probably can't see it but I've got a couple of scribe lines now I just want to rough out where the tool goes I'll be honest I thought about doing the over arm support first just so I had an excuse to try one of these guys out that would have been interesting to see how well that did it clearing that slot out but for now I'm just going to go with a rougher so that's pretty much a depth 25 to do the scribe blinds all right that's starting to look the part I was going to go in there with a finish cutter but I think that should be perfect before two older three or four more to go and I'll come back and drill some holes so as luck would have it probably less than two or three weeks ago I came across a tapping head I think it was a new old stock sort of situation guy said he'd give it to me for 30 bucks with whatever it had in it no guarantees and no returns came with a couple of plastic Kaulitz well three of them just one in there now and to be honest I only have tried it once when I first brought it home I put it in the lay that seemed to work okay and faced with you know 20 30 odd tapped holes ahead of me I really wanted to figure this thing out now I'm not positive but I think this is a Spanish might be French I put it in Google Translate and this translates to um go for it Tony and it was right it's it's working out now this thing does not it's not an auto reverse and on top of that when I reverse the rotation of the spindle on this mill it does not reverse the direction of the table power feed so I've got to throw two levers at once there's no quill here and I've set the Machine up so the table is raising and backing away as close as I could get to the pitch times the RPM the feed rate of the cutting thread pucker factor was high on the first one but I'm slowly building confidence here last part I need to make is this low knurled like thumb screw for the height adjust I'm going to need five of them I'm just gonna do a straightener all across drill it through part them off and I'll press them onto the screws all right so that pretty much does it for the tool holders the only thing left to do or I like to do as I mentioned in the other tooling video is to cold blue them now I got a lot more interest than I expected I didn't expect any to be honest on the cold blue in the last tooling videos so this time I thought maybe I'd talk through it a bit more I usually buy the cheapest blue that I can find and in fact this last batch just showed up in a drinking water bottle this was an eBay Buy I guess somebody makes this fills bottles and sells it on eBay but as you can see I'm out of that stuff and I picked up this Philips professional cold blue if you're looking for it just search for cold blue and you'll usually find May I think it's meant for firearms little touch-ups you wouldn't want to do probably a whole gun and certainly also have a look around I know mr. Pete just did a really good bluing video he did this cold blue stuff and Heat blue like an oxide blue I'd call those rather exhaustive so certainly if you're interested have a look at that one and while you're at it be sure to watch us on there 6000 videos anyway this Philips stuff recommends three to one mix so three parts water one part blue there's no ingredients on this bottle but it's my understanding that this is selenium dioxide if you're wondering what's in here so probably the most important step before hitting it with the cold blue is cleaning the parts I'm going to do that off-camera but I'm just going to scrub them down and wash them down a bit with some acetone now the other big thing to get really good results with this stuff is a good surface finish so the higher the polish the better the cold blue tends to turn out as I mentioned I'm not too worried about the aesthetics in this case it's more for corrosion resistance but what I did was I went ahead and I ground one of these if you can see that on camera this one is a ground finish I did the top and the front and the others are just right off of the mill and we'll compare those once we've glued them all right so that's a hundred ml of this Phillips stuff I'm going to try it according to the instructions again I've never used this but to be honest I don't trust it I've usually had to go to like a one-to-one mix to get really good good looking blue but we'll try three two one and you just drop the part in it usually doesn't take very long it's been in there five minutes I'd probably leave it another five but I found what helps us once it's sort of halfway started to turn I get some really fine steel wool and just rub down the surfaces so these have been in here about I don't know 20 minutes I'm not that impressed I did up the concentration to a two-to-one so one part Phillips two part water as you add it right to this soup here and now it's like a nice gunmetal eyes polish but it's not really black I think if I pick up this stuff again I probably choose it straight out of the bottle I'll see what they look like oiled up put a couple more in here the hardware this is just some like three in one oil basically now from what I understand the cold blue the selenium dioxide creates a very like a porous oxide layer and the oil is really what does the corrosion resistance it sort of permeates into that porous layer kind of like oil in a sintered bronze bearing if you know what I mean alright well not overly impressed with how this stuff is working out here are two oiled blocks with the Phillips this is one that I haven't even done yet it's hard to even tell the difference compare that to the black from mill tooling I think I'm going to try some of this fill of stuff just straight out of a bottle all right here's some straight blue not watered down and this you may recall I didn't have a vice handle for a little ROM vy7 the milling machine this was a fun little project I'm going to try to blue this with this straight 100% concentrate so I'd have a container big enough for this place handle I'm not worrying about it coming out splotchy because I'm pretty sure it'll still work and it notes I mean it's better than before I'm sure there's guns myths out there right now watching this probably tearing their hair out I'll tell you what all told didn't turn out too bad it's not as dark maybe as rich as the stuff I've used before this but it's got this nice another like a lead gray a gunmetal gray going on looks fancy even now I don't know if you'll be able to see the difference between the ground one on the right and the milled one on the left looks really sharp nothing left to do but put them to work you

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 917,105

Rating: 4.9369545 out of 5

Keywords: QCTP, lathe tool holder, shaper, metal shaper, cutting dovetails, tapping head, cold blue

Id: ZNWkhxKNHGM

Length: 28min 6sec (1686 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/nill0c]

Thats some decent editing, now I gotta watch his 6000 other videos...