Rotary Table Chuck Mount : Let's make one!

bleep hello internet my name is quinn and this is blondie hacks i've got a job coming up where i want to mount my lathe chuck on my rotary table now you can buy adapter plates for this purpose but i wanted to try and make it and it turned into quite an exercise in making parts that are really larger than your machine tools are designed to work with so i learned a lot about pushing my machines to the limit so let's go this is my vertex inch rotary table and this is the five inch four jaw chuck off of my lathe and i would like to mount one to the other thusly so i tried the most obvious thing of course that you would expect to work and unfortunately in this particular case it didn't work quite as well as i'd hoped so i think i'm going to try something different on the back here you can see the backing plate it's got four bolts that hold it on and then there's these three dowel pins that screw into the back and this is what holds it on to the lathe spindle so i can either try to interface with the backing plate or remove it and use the plain back of the chuck let's take a look at my lathe spindle for many years i thought this was a standard called din 55027 which looks very much like this and all of the dimensions on my spindle nose match the c3 variety of this perfectly except this 7.125 degree taper is not on my spindle nose apparently and i never actually checked it until now and sure enough that is a dead 90 degree angle so uh this is not a din 55027 exactly despite all the other dimensions matching this is some sort of weird chinese standard i guess din 55027 is popular in russia and parts of southeast asia but i don't know what this thing is exactly it's din55027ish anyway i can match this easily enough i took those measurements and drew up a real quick fusion model here just to make sure i knew what i was building and then i was able to make drawings from this switcher on my patreon if you have the same lathe and would like to use these this would be a great start also for a backing plate if you want to mount a plane back to chuck onto your lathe so i need to make an adapter plate and i want to make it out of cast iron because cast iron is really good at absorbing vibration in machining setups so i ordered this chunk of durabar from mcmaster this is a drawn cast iron product and what's cool is they sell it in large diameters and very short lengths like this for just such applications and that's going to be crucial however as you can see here it's quite a bit longer than what i ordered three quarters of an inch longer which doesn't sound like much but this is gonna cause a lot of problems here in a bit nevertheless i shall press forward i'm gonna mount it up in my four jaw here with the jaws reversed now this is right at the limit of this chuck i still have about a third of the threads on these jaws engaged but i would not want to go any larger than this this is definitely getting a little sketchy as far as engagement there's about six threads on each jaw so i still feel okay about that but not awesome so i'm gonna dial this in as best i can of course the outer surface of this is rough it's kind of scaly like hot rolled but it doesn't have that really glass hard coating on it that sand casted cast iron does i'll start by facing this off as is tradition let's take this moment to talk about facing tool geometry because i'm going to be doing a lot of heavy facing on this project now normally when you face something you just take your normal turning tool and you just turn it to the side a little bit so that the tool holder and tool post will clear and then you push it through the work and that works okay for light cuts but it's actually not really correct when you do that the tool geometry changes you can see that the side rake on the top surface now becomes what you're pushing through the work and you're not getting the proper cutting angle in the direction of the tool where it's encountering the work so if you've ever tried to take a deep facing cut with a tool like this it doesn't work very well and that's why now with a carbide insert tool you can get away with a lot more because it has a symmetrical profile on each face so if you turn the tool at the right angle you can push it through the work and the geometry that's being seen by the work is the same as if you were turning but if you want to stick with high-speed steel there's another way get yourself a left-hand turning tool i pilfered this out of my fly cutter and mounted on the back of the tool post like so and now when you cross feed it's just like a turning operation the tool geometry is all correct and what this means is you can take much heavier cuts and have good results which is good because i have a lot of facing work ahead of me on this giant slug of iron that first facing cut went well so i'm off to a good start here i decided to turn down the od next and unfortunately i'm not going to have the reach here the carriage is going to hit the bottom of the material there before my tool gets in very deep double checking here with the scale yeah i'm nowhere close to the depth that i need so to get more reach down in there i decided to use a trick that i saw somewhere i think maybe dave richards at old steampowered machine shop did this once you turn a boring bar upside down like so and then you run the lathe in reverse and that lets you get in there with plenty of reach now boring bars are not rigid so you are not going to be able to take deep cuts doing this but it does let you squeeze a little more diameter than you normally would have out of your lathe once again i'm really at the limits of this machine in so many ways after a couple of passes to clean up that scale on the outside and then i started making real cuts and this was going pretty well it was definitely right on the edge of chatter and uh the lathe was working pretty hard the thing about this is i'm having to run the lathe in reverse which you know this is a dc lathe so it can do but the motor does not have full power in reverse so for the same power setting on the speed knob it runs quite a bit slower i'm not 100 sure why that is but it dissipates a lot more current running in reverse which is going to cause me some fun here in a minute now the thing about a large diameter is that you have to run it really slowly for the surface speed to be correct and the work has a lot more leverage on the motor than with a smaller diameter so the lathe is working much harder on a part like this and well i was working a little too hard the combination of the extra current dissipation of running in reverse and working on a large diameter and running for long periods of time because i'm moving a lot of chips in a lot of small passes i overheated the motor doing this so uh i was making a lot of chips and well i noticed at one point some of those chips were smoke and as i shut the machine down and there was a magic smoke coming out of the back of the machine where the motor is so i let it cool down and i figured that was it the motor was done i ordered a new motor uh but actually uh after it cooled down it started working just fine uh it's making a little bit of a ticking noise so i think maybe i burned off a little bit of the enamel on some windings in there probably not good i think the motor's days are definitely numbered but i've got the spare on hand and i'll keep using it till it breaks as if that wasn't enough drama on the final pass i decided you know what i'm just going to reverse the power feed and do a light spring pass all the way back what a terrible decision that was for some reason this really light cut on the way back caused the boring bar to chatter really really badly and i didn't really notice it in time and i let it finish the cut and the surface finish is just destroyed i really really messed it up and i don't know why i didn't notice it and why i didn't stop it but uh well here we are so a whole lot of emery paper later i tried to salvage this finish these marks were just too deep doing this with emery paper was going to take days so i decided to come back in with a boring bar and run a very very slow cut this is 30 rpm as slow as i can get this lathe to run and a very very light cut to get just under the chatter marks and that gave me a good enough finish that i could then come back in and fix it again with emery paper and so now i've got an excellent finish except for one little chatter mark near the edge there that's going to get machined away anyway so i managed to salvage that luckily there's plenty of dimensional tolerance on the od of this part so i had plenty of thousands to remove to fix this but yeah what a mess i created by trying to do a spring pass next up i need a great big hole in the middle of this thing so i started by pilot drilling that out and i'm coming back in with a much larger drill and i knew this drill was going to be a bit on the large side but i thought i'd give it a shot and see and once i slowed the machine down further and it was cut and okay so i thought okay i'll i'll let this ride the drill was slipping in the jacobs check a little bit as you can see there which i didn't actually notice at the time but the drill was pushing through until it wasn't this was too much for the lathe it blew a fuse so i put a smaller drill in and pushed it through and then i was able to come back in with that larger drill and finish pushing it through so so far on this project i've got one smoked motor and one blown fuse so after the one inch drill went through this is the largest drill i own i believe it's an inch and an eighth so i thought i'd give it a try and there was just no way the lathe was just not having this nonsense so that was not going to work at this point i knew i was done with the drills i don't have anything between the last two sizes i tried so in with the boring bar now to do the rest of this work the hard way i got to open this up all the way to an inch and a half so it's a pretty big hole in the middle of this big slug of cast iron the dimension on this hole is not critical it's just roughly supposed to match the bore in the middle of the chuck just in case i ever need to pass material through this thing it seems like a good idea to have a hole in it and now i'm going to rough in the shoulder the registration shoulder for the actual chuck now this is the really critical feature on this part so i roughed in a location for that and then i remembered that radius and diameter are not the same thing and roughed it in at the correct location and now i got a lot of chips to make so i started turning this down it was going okay there's a little bit of smoke there and then all of a sudden the noise changed and it started rubbing and stopped cutting so i knew i had dulled the tip on that tool so i took it over to the bench and re-ground it and came back in thinking everything was good and i resumed turning down to my rough layout line there so far so good and then i did a second pass with this tool once again it went in a tiny amount on that material and instantly burned the tip off again so the first time i thought okay i've used this tool a lot probably needed regrinding anyway the second time i know this tool was fresh and it immediately burned the tip off it so i may be running the material a little too fast there at the od but i can't really slow it down because the lathe can't drive it any slower with any amount of torque so i switched to carbide the high speed steel just doesn't seem to be up to this job unfortunately which is a new thing this is the first thing i've ever tried where high speed steel has not been up to it but carbide is really really amazing stuff a carbide insert powered through the entire rest of this project on a single corner so it really is amazing stuff now i had a lot of chips to shift here and i had a lot of time to think about all of these things i timed one pass on this at seven and a half minutes and a thirty thousand depth of cut was the absolute maximum so i had about ten passes at seven and a half minutes per pass so yeah this was uh not something you do in a hurry that shape roughed in now i can come back in with an 85 degree tool and turn an inside shoulder here this is the really really critical dimension here so i took my time and on the final pass i also locked the carriage and wound out to face the inside there and line up all of those surfaces nice now this dimension is really critical the tolerance i have on this is plus zero minus half a thou that's really what i'm aiming for here i want a really perfect fit on this chuck registration diameter now my plan was to leave this one thou large and use emery paper to dial it in because i actually don't have a micrometer that will fit on that tiny shoulder so i'm using the guessing meters here to get it one thou large and well it looks like i'm actually right on already so let's do a test fit with the chuck and wow that is just perfect so i was trying to leave it a little large and i was gonna polish it in but well i overshot it by a few tenths and landed dead nuts so i would rather be lucky than good every time i will take that i got a decent finish on that shoulder luckily anyway so i'm going to roll with it and move on and chamfer those edges because champers are what separate us from the animals now remember how i said that it was going to cause me a big problem that mcmaster gave me material that was three quarters of an inch longer than i ordered now that problem has come home to roost i was planning to just flip this part over at this point and face the back side and finish it up but there's so much extra material there and remember seven and a half minutes per pass at least it would take me hours and hours hours to face that down so there's just no way i can do that i need to figure out another way to cut that material off so i figured let's see if i can set up the bandsaw somehow to cut this i knew it wasn't going to be easy but i fiddled around with this million different setups fiddled and fiddled and fiddled again this part is way outside the capacity of this band saw and it's too thin for the vice to hold and well i landed on this initially so the fixed jaw is being extended by the angle iron there's one two three blocks in there to keep the part square to the saw and then i'm using the movable jaw as kind of a backstop to add extra support there and then there's a strap clamp in the middle that's doing the primary supporting of the part and well this probably would have worked but i went in and had some lunch and had to think about it before i pulled the trigger and you know sometimes the right answer hits you when you let your subconscious think about it for a little while over lunch some dark corner of my brain realized the answer and it's very simple an angle plate i don't know why this didn't occur to me sooner but all i need to do is bolt my big angle plate to the bed of the saw i can bolt the stock right to the angle plate problem solved sometimes the simple answer just eludes you until you go for lunch so i bolted that up and i put a clamp on the side there just for a little extra security and to help keep the the slug from spinning under the saw now obviously with a bolt through the middle and the clamp there i can't saw all the way through this part in one pass but i wasn't going to be able to do that anyway because this is quite a bit too large of a diameter for the saw the outermost saw guide there is going to hit the part long before it gets through so what i'm doing is just letting it cut down as far as i can and then i stop the saw lift it out of the way rotate the part a little bit which luckily is very easy to do with this setup i just rotate it around that bolt and then tighten it back up again and then let the saw run down a little further on this new orientation and i just worked my way around i had just enough clearance to where i could get the saw to just start to break into the center bore there so i just worked my way all the way around i could monitor my progress here with a light and just see what areas might still need cutting i was trying to cut almost all the way through all the way around with the big saw and then once i'd done that i moved it over to the vise and then i just used my hacksaw to break through the rest of the way i've got a zip tie around the body of the vise there just as a safety strap because i don't want to drop either of these two pieces they're both very heavy and i also don't want to damage of course the final part so i was able to break that last little bit of material out of there with the hacksaw and then a little bit of wiggling and there we are you can kind of see the interesting pattern created by the way i was rotating the part around through the big hacksaw that worked surprisingly well it took me a while to figure out the setup but once i did that saw did a great job and now it's a straightforward job to set it up and face that down i say this a lot on my channel but those cheap 4x6 bandsaws that come in different colors depending on whose label is on them they are a heck of a good buy i am constantly impressed by how much work that saw will do fans may recognize my shiny new long reach chuck key there that's a cloud 42 special with that dialed in i can start my facing and once again i'm using a left-hand turning tool and carbide to get this done now there's not a lot of material to remove here but what's really critical is parallelism of the front and back surfaces because the chuck needs to sit straight on the rotary table so after a couple of cuts i stopped short of my dimension with plenty of room to go and i measured the thickness at multiple points and you can see that i've got a sixth out discrepancy on one axis there so to correct that before the final cut what i can do is set up an indicator here and put it on the face of the part with the sixth house discrepancy basically one side needs to go down three thousand the other side needs to go up three thou i started by trying to lower the side that's too thin figuring it's probably not seated properly in the jaw but i couldn't get it to move that way so i had to go over to the thicker side and tap it outwards until it was three thou too far out and then you can verify that with the indicator make sure that as i bring it around the thin side is at negative three and the thick side is at plus three and then the other axis is within tolerance and now you can see i've got a kind of a sine wave cut happening and that's because i'm cutting a new plane there the old plane was not in the correct orientation and after that cut more test measurements and i'm within a few tenths of thickness all the way around now so that's excellent and now i can do my final finishing cut and trust that that thing is going to be parallel front to back so that's a good technique for getting accurate results with machines that maybe aren't so good is to just check your work as you go and you can make little corrections before you make your final cuts and you can get better parts out of the machine than it might otherwise be able to produce okay test fit on the rotary table now and it looks good on there but there's a little bit of a rock in it it is not sitting flat on that table and a quick look at the underside reveals why see that little oil spot right there yeah that oiler on the top surface is proud of the surface of the table now vertex rotary tables are very well regarded so this seems like a really curious design oversight i don't know why they would make something that's proud of the table like that but i can correct that by putting a clearance on the back of this thing which i will do later for now i'm going to go over to the mill and set up to put the holes in this thing to mount to the chuck and the rotary table so i set it up in the mill with some strap clamps and some one two three blocks to give me clearance for the drilling and i'm using my coaxial indicator to center up that bore on the spindle now this is an extravagant way to do this you can also just use a dti but i really love this thing it's the fanciest tool i own and it's so much fun i think this was a birthday gift to myself at some point anyway i'm going to go ahead and center drill those holes you could use the bolt pattern tool on a dro for this but because it's a square pattern it's just plus and minus the same values on x and y so it's easy however i do not have the reach on my y-axis to get to one of the holes yeah small mill problems once again i'm making parts that are too big for my machines i will leave that hole for now i'm not going to look gift set up in the mouth i'm going to make the three that i can reach and i'll worry about the fourth one later so i started by center drilling and pilot drilling those then i drilled those out to the final clearance size these bolts are 3 8 16 which i chose just because it's the same as my strap clamp hardware and so i would like to use the same hardware here i think it's always a good idea to use the same hardware in as many places as you can in the shop because someday i'll be able to use my strap clamp hardware with the rotary table or you know other mix and match situations so with all of those holes clearance drilled now i need to countersink them because the bolts need to be flush with the surface here to do that i have a big 5 8 end mill and i wasn't sure if i was going to be able to do this in one cut and the answer is no the mill was very very unhappy about this idea it was chattering and vibrating like crazy it was immediately clear this was not gonna work so i had to give up on that this is also a four flute cutter which plunging with a four flute is a lot of work so i went back to a half inch two flute cutter and i was able to plunge down with this very easily you can see i'm actually feeding with the quill there and then i was able to come back in with the big cutter and once again i'm feeding with the quill which i don't normally do when plunging with end mills but these things were moving material so well that they actually cut much better with a really high rate of feed which i could get with the quill so i think it's just maybe a case of this being cast iron and then i check with the scale to make sure those bolt heads are going to be fully below the surface that's really important for them not to interfere with the mounting of the chuck for that last hole i decided to take advantage of the fact that this is a square bolt pattern and i put a gauge pin in one of my holes and a good fitting drill in the other one and i put a parallel in there and then i was able to use an indicator and just tap it until those two lines were parallel with the y-axis of the mill and then i can drill the remaining hole now some of you might be thinking why didn't you just bolt this plate to the rotary table and use that to drill this bolt pattern i did actually try that and i couldn't find a way to really fixture it to the rotary table because the piece is exactly the same size as the table i couldn't find a clamp or some way to like clip it to the undersides of the t-slots or something from above like there just wasn't any way to fix dirt that i could find so that's why i did it this way but using the rotary table would have been great because it does solve the reach problem that you have with a small mill like this you can rotate the hole under the spindle instead of trying to get the spindle over to where the hole is then i flipped the part and dialed it in again and made the three hole pattern that mounts to the chuck and this should have been a very straightforward operation but did you see what happened right there you see that i don't know if you noticed that i sure didn't in the moment until i went to drill the next hole and noticed that the part jumped as soon as the drill touched it yep i forgot to tighten those clamps oh this could have been and maybe was a disaster but we'll find out so because these are both quarter inch holes i happen to have two gauge pins that size because that's a size that bridges gauge pin sets so i have two of them luckily the way i had oriented the three hole pattern using the bolt pattern tool on the dro it happened to be that the two holes i had already made are y-axis aligned so i was once again able to line up the two holes that i had and once i'd done that and then dialed it in again on the center bore there i was able to double check with the drill to make sure that the two existing holes are exactly where the bolt pattern dro tool says they should be and they are so that's an imperial fist check of victory and then i was able to go over to the third hole and double check that it's going to touch that center drill without moving and it does so success i believe we have recovered our bolt pattern so i'll just tighten those clamps down one more time luckily it didn't move for that center drill so that center drill was in the correct place otherwise it would make the drill wander i'm just going to double check those clamps if this had not worked then what i could have done is taken a small end mill and milled a little flat spot on top of that center drill i'm just going to double check those clamps here and then created a new center that was you know a few thousands off maybe from where the current one is but luckily the one that's there seems to be valid and these were drilled and counterbored the same way it's also worth noting that these are just clearance holes so worst case scenario i could have just made them oversized because that shoulder that we created in the center is what's registering the chuck anyway these holes are just clearance holes for the bolts speaking of clearance let's go look at that oiler again so i measured how much clearance i'm going to need around that and i put it back in the lathe and i'll tap tap tap that in and dial it in and then i'm just going to bring in the boring bar and carve out a little recess on the bottom side of this thing what i decided the easiest way to do was just to create a little round shoulder area in here that's going to give me enough vertical clearance to get over that oiler and this way it won't matter what the orientation of the plate is on the rotary table i could have also just you know made a flat spot with an end mill or something but then you have to make sure to line that up with the oiler every time you put the plate on the table so this way i don't have that problem at some point i may take this table apart and figure out why that oiler is proud of the surface it doesn't seem like they would have designed it that way it may not be installed correctly but for now this is going to work the only rock now is rock solid [Music] okay let's do a test fit here so i mount the plate on the back of the chuck first because of course these bolts will be inaccessible once the whole thing is on the rotary table and those bolts get tightened down nice and evenly make sure it's well seated on the shoulder there and then we flip that whole assembly over and bolt it down to the rotary table you can see that i previously made some special offset t-nuts there so that these bolts can go right at the edge of the slots there without sticking out but uh yep not there yet that bolt doesn't clear the chuck so over into the lathe now and i'll just buzz a little bit off the outsides of these bolts i knew it was going to be close but these bolts are a little bit bigger than the mcmaster cad drawing said they would be or i mismeasured or who knows regardless a quick haircut with some carbide just in case they were hardened or at least hard ish as bolts often are and now they are a very very good fit there it's close and i knew it would be but that's looking really good here you can see why i had to make special t-nuts because the clearance is close there on the table locks and other paraphernalia on this thing so there's the whole assembly and that tips up like so and i expected it to be front heavy but actually it's not too bad it will stand up on its own the mass of the rotary table is quite a bit higher than everything outboard there so it's a little front heavy you wouldn't want to leave it unattended but it does stand up on its own so far so good now let's see if we can actually dial this thing in on the mill because for this whole setup to have any value we have to be able to get all of these pieces perfectly concentric so i start by dialing in the rotary table using my coaxial indicator and now i'll put the assembly on the plate here and tighten that down and i thought i'd jump straight to hard mode and i put a gauge pin in the three jaw chuck and i'll put a dial test indicator on this to see if i can get it dialed in so i'm just tapping in the adapter plate there the bolts aren't fully tight and just seeing if i can get that thing indicated in and i could not there was about ten thousand run out that i just couldn't get rid of so back to first principles i took the chuck off and now i'm just indicating the plate and you can see that i've removed two of the bolts because i was able to determine that those two bolts are bottoming out on one side of their respective t-slots and that's preventing me from getting it dialed in i only needed about five thou wiggle room there so this is an easy fix i just enlarged those holes a little bit as for why this error happened it's hard to say you know i might be related to the fact that i had to redo my setup because i couldn't reach the fourth hole i may have lost some precision doing that or this might just be a little bit of error in my drilling who can say and now i can dial it into less than half a thou with all four bolts in place looking good now back with the chuck in place measuring on the chuck body here for starters and getting that tapped in once again and once i've got that dialed in then i feel pretty good that this whole assembly is going to work so again we're within a couple of tenths there on the chuck body so back to the gauge pin now and i've still got about 5 run out on the gauge pin but that's to be expected this is a three jaw chuck and frankly not a very good one so it's gonna have run out in the jaws there but that's okay if i need to do better than this on the jaws themselves i can use the four jaw chuck which will also work on this mounting so there's the final setup now it's very tall too tall for my mill frankly i won't have much space left for tooling but it's mainly intended to be used in this orientation much like a dividing head and that's the final adapter plate i'm really pleased with how this turned out it was very very challenging to make this on my small machine tools i was really at the limit but i learned a lot about how to use my machines at the limit and the end result is going to be super useful i hope you enjoyed watching this process if you like these videos maybe throw me a little off on patreon there's a link down below and you can use the card there on the screen thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 151,141

Rating: 4.9581676 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, diy, home improvement, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, rotary table, rotary table 101, rotary table drilling rig, backing plate, chuck backing plate

Id: 1U4fec7dBNc

Length: 30min 21sec (1821 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021