Shoot'n The Poop #3 - Variety Show

hey this time we're really mixing it up insert tooling in the home shop TIG electrode selection and my first try at truing a resin bonded diamond wheel it seems like a lot of you folks out there are weekend welders so from one hack to another I thought I'd tell you about my experiences with TIG electrodes maybe help you cut to the chase save you some money and heartache along the way TIG is personally my preferred process but it really depends on the job at hand when I first started out with tick all the options seemed pretty overwhelming it seemed like if I could get you know the right flavored electrode for the job and get that point ground just right that that make all the difference in the world well that led me to buying every and any kind of electrode I could find in every diameter because you know got to have them all and really only made the learning process harder than it needed to be bottom line 2% landed almost exclusively in 332nd pretty much for everything now of course that depends on you know what you do and what you weld but for the average Joe that's my recommendation and in fact you can see my collection here has gotten rather minimal when I first started out there were basically two flavors readily available your classic 2% through reiated for steels and there was pure tungsten for aluminum welding in AC you may recognize the thoriated it's there these red ones over here and I don't even have any Pure's anymore now the thoriated are actually pretty darn good and I do like them but man pure tungsten for aluminum absolute garbage in my opinion particularly if you're running an inverter machine like I am I mean maybe I'm using them wrong but in my opinion money is better spent somewhere else after the Pure's I think I moved to these Sarah Aidid for aluminum I hope I'm saying that right there gray around here anybody looks fit I was welding some pretty thin gauge stuff those are one sixteenths and there's one there's a half of a 3/32 left and I stuck to the good old thoriated for steel now the Syrians I remember bringing pretty good but for some reason I changed to something better for aluminum zirconium a B I think they were brown in the back those were spectacular a little hard to find around these parts but spectacular now when I throw around words like good bad excellent those are very qualitative from my point of view I mean I wasn't cutting my welds up or send them out for chest x-rays I'm talking about the behavior of the tungsten at the business end its ability to hold and control the arc and not do any spitting or splitting or generally start growing warts now about that time a lot of hubbub started about the radioactive nature of thoriated tungsten I guess with thorium being all radioactive and all apparently I was concerned enough to look for alternatives I do have some hybrids here these are supposed to be a one-stop-shop for AC and DC TIG welding I have no idea what's in them they're from arc zone I mean they weren't bad by any stretch of the imagination just not as spectacular as I hope they'd be these are the baby blue hybrids I don't know if it gets any more specific than that they were really good on steel but aluminum so so at least not for me and on my machine now it's not my intention here to downplay the radioactivity thing in the thoriated I mean nobody benefits from being a tough guy except maybe if you shove around people that are smaller than you then it's kind of fun if you can avoid the whole radioactivity thing it's probably for the best but in all honesty for what you're doing in your garage as long as you're not eating them they're probably fine they're not really dangerous to handle the thorium is sort of locked into that tungsten matrix but when you grind them you should really wear some kind of breathing protection or have some sort of extractor actually hold on a minute let's try to check that out what you don't have a Geiger counter so now I'm just going to let this sit a minute away from those three to Tungsten's just to get a level of the background radiation so down here in my garage the background levels are somewhere around point one anywhere from that point on I'm you're seeing two 0.11 now that background noise that background radiation changes depending on where you live where you're located and the safe level you know is decided by your state or government why they're not standardized I don't know I suppose it depends on how well you know your local politician knows the local nuclear guy now when I was a kid radiation was measured I think in rads or REMS sometimes in Curie's you know when we had company Rutherford's if you were from the weird side of town but now apparently were measuring radiation and Mike severs but now apparently we're measuring radiation in micro sieverts let's see what we get with the thoriated tungsten it generates a beep every time it detects like an ionizing particle I'm sure you guys have seen plenty of sci-fi movies so there's the thoriated tungsten so as you can see it's climbed up to about the 0.14 0.15 now I'm no nuclear physicist at least not after that incident in ninety take these measurements with a grain of salt and I put those numbers in perspective did you know bananas we're technically radioactive the potassium in them or something like that anyway I think consuming a banana is 0.1 Mike severs so in terms of banana equivalent dose and I'm not joking I'm not making it up google it banana equivalent dose our solid thoriated tungsten were like eating at an open end and a half every hour and though I'm sure that it probably kill you pretty quick it's probably not because of the radiation now that number does only get worse when you're grinding them to some extent maybe when you're welding them I mean you're breaking them up there's more surface area and you're inhaling them into your body I don't know why people get fixated on the radioactivity aspect of it even if they weren't radioactive you shouldn't be inhaling tungsten dust and welding fumes at least don't make a habit of it so take those numbers in those comments for what you just paid for them like I said I'm no longer a nuclear physicist but the fact the matter is if you walk down to your local welding supply thoriated is likely all you're going to find I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon you know they use it in industry for a reason I would expect just as a hobbyist home shop guy I don't see as big enough an advantage to stick with them instead of just randomly buying something else but if your hip to online buying I'd suggest go in there that route for Tungsten's I mean you should still support your local welding supply sure they'll gouge you on the small stuff but they'll probably more help to you and your welding than Amazon reviews will and what are you going to do mail order your gas bottles and with all that said I've settled on 2% lanten ated for what I do these things work great for everything in both AC and DC I mean just a quick grind before switching just to clean them up a bit to avoid any kind of cross-contamination you know try them yourself see how they work for you but for me one size fits all I don't even have the smaller ones I just grind a finer point on here when I'm working with smaller stuff I mean maybe one day I'll run into something where I really got to step down a size for the low amperages but so far so good these are not radioactive by the way they do cost a little bit more but after years of screwing around with these things I'm down to one type of electrode in one size so even if there's a marginal increase in cost just the fact that I'm buying half as much as before I went out at the end and you know that's why I'm sharing this maybe it'll help some of you out Oh with no offense to the welders out there I know there's a lot more of these Tungsten's that I give them credit for so certainly if you know what you're doing or you're welding in some kind of nuclear power plant ignore everything I just said in the video on the end mill grinding fixture I mentioned that I had no idea how to dress a resin bonded diamond wheel I got a comment from a viewer that suggested just grinding it in and that led to some googling and it sounds like that's the way to do it this is my tool post grinder it's an aeg die grinder and i've got it mounted on the mag truck with some mag transfer blocks and it's just packed in a bit you might not be able to tell by looking at it but it's on there nice and solid the first step would be to true the grinding wheel in the die grinder before we use that to true the diamond wheel as you can see it sort of hacked in the diamond dresser tool it's really the only place on the machine that allowed me to attach anything at all again it might look precarious but it's clamped on there pretty tight this is really just to try to contact out certainly if this works I'll make some kind of a rig that bolts on proper to the grinder you'll also notice I remove the guard I never recommend doing that with the guard style that I have on this machine you wouldn't be able to see anything at all in this video the condition of the wheel is exactly like we left it before I haven't done any more tungsten grinding nor have I actually tried to dress this wheel all right here goes nothing you can see where it's sort of cleaned up and where I have still more to go I mean having never seen this before I don't know if I can really judge how well that's it's turning out I mean it's certainly turning out the surface what I mean is I don't know if I'm you know doing more harm than good by just pushing that embedded carbide around by putting silicon oxide into the service I'm not going to bother to take us all the way because I don't actually have anything to grind meaning I'm going to be taking this wheel off and doing this operation the next time this wheel gets mounted I am getting these strange diagonal lines in the surface I'm going to guess that those are the exceptionally high quality bearings that are in my die grinder well that's that smooths baby's bottom right there not that I'm into that kind of stuff the stone still looks good I mean it's a little darker maybe that's that carbide it's picking up off the diamond wheel it's not the right stone on here I don't know that was interesting to try though so let's talk about using carbide in the home machine shop if I had a nickel for every time I got stopped on the street for my carbide verse high speed steel opinion now in the interest of full disclosure I'm not going to get too deep into this because to be quite frank I don't know too much about it meaning I've never really cared for carbide and if you were to ask me which I prefer hands down it would be high speed steel but I've noticed in the last year or two almost all of my lathe tooling has moved to carbide and my high speed steel is slowly becoming shaper tooling I mean obviously the thread forms or any form tools my cutoff tool is still high speed steel but the majority of my turning has become carbide and I'm really only getting into this because I want to show you a little something on the lathe that I didn't really come to fully appreciate until not too long ago but we'll get to that in a minute so typically the problems I mean carbide is wonderful don't get me wrong problems with typically with using it in a hobby or home shop environment is it's just so darn expensive you know certainly if you've got the work or the income to support that to justify that I mean they're the way to go but the ease with which you know someone could make their own high speed steel cutter and how they perform I mean the flexibility and the power of that just I think overshadows having a million different carbide inserts and they're relative to holders now I just said that but obviously you're staring at a pile of carbide and I've probably got I mean not a ton but at least the same amount still in the little drawers I don't know what happened but two three years ago maybe I started stopping at things like flea markets and swap meets and stuff like that a little bit more often than well I never really went to those things I don't even look for them it's just you know you're driving around next thing you know you're arguing over a dollar fifty might just be something that happens as you get older I don't know metabolism or something but anyway I was surprised to find and I still can't explain why I seem to find a plethora of carbide inserts and just in the weirdest places it'll just be some guy standing there trying to sell tape deck from the 80s missing the relied button you know a sock some pastel colored thermos and two boxes of carb I with the position perspective I mean I think these were 50 bucks I believe I got six packs of these large triangular inserts I mean it turns out they're for cast iron but I found that they work spectacularly specifically on the mill and I've also used them as just raw carbide to just breeze on to stuff like scrapers or some you know whatever random tool I might need a carbide tip on the ones I really like there's two in particular and I apologize if I get these names wrong I think these are the W wnm geez maybe wmngs w at any rate these are nice because they have six cutting tips you know you've got three on the top and then flip it three more on the bottom and I tend to find a paramount of those different flavors I mean compare that to these I think these are the C style C mm n CN n M you have to look it up but these only have two cutting tips you can't flip these over so bear with me a minute here but six is bigger than two you get more bang for your buck Granta they cost a little bit more but you know those are things to consider when you're you're investing in a tool holder and a style of insert and of course there's a whole ton of other parameters you'll probably need to be worried about the rake angles the nose radii the coatings that they have the materials that they're for and that brings us to my second point about using carbide in the home shop in the Hobby these little buggers are designed to run at just ludicrous surface speeds the kind of speeds that you're probably not going to see out of your hobby lathe now granted you'll still cut I mean it's still carbide you're just not going to see the benefits that make them so appealing in an industrial environment now I know this stuff you guys probably already know but I just want to demonstrate how you can sort of shoehorn these into your home shop and how I've been using them I don't much I should I know I should but I don't much get into the the calculations you know the feeds and speeds to really make these things sing I'm more of an play it by ear kind of guy I've gotten to know this particular geometry on my specific lathe Oh in case I didn't say this is to the lathe I mean in the mill face mills fly cutters all that stuff carbide heck even the cheap stuff seems to work there but I'm not taking half inch depth of cuts and need to get it done in a half hour let's take this one over the lathe and see what kind of problems we run into at the feeds and the speeds we usually have access to what's what you're about to see here it depends very much on the lathe that you have at home this happens to be a Colchester student MK 1.5 if that makes any difference not a big lathe by any stretch of the imagination but it is built like a tank it may let me get away with a little bit more than maybe a lighter home sized leave let's put it that way but that's the whole point of this exercise sort of push the limits and this happens to be some three inch just medium carbon steel maybe it's actually three and a quarter in diameter doesn't make too much of a difference for the for these purposes I just wanted something to keep the surface speed as constant as I could so if this was smaller and I took away two hundred thousand what the insert surface cutting speed is I mean it's going to change here too but maybe not as drastic but about four and a half inch stick up as you can see I can't going to use a live Center to support this I'm just going to run a blank Arbor in there more force I guess safety purposes some stupid happens there's something between it and my face but here we're almost at you know one to one or one and a half stick out so I think I should be okay surface finish should be decent I think rule of thumb I believe and don't quote me on this is down around the one inch you can be at about a three to one stick out obviously the bigger you go that's not going to hold up if you had a ten inch diameter round you wouldn't want to stick out 30 inches unsupported but the one inch stock could probably stick out three inches before you started needing some type of center to support it so we're all set up and ready to start cutting if you do the numbers according to the manufacturer on how fast you spend the work and how fast your feet is while your depth is they'll usually be astronomical I mean I didn't do the numbers for this but I wouldn't be surprised if minimum starting speed was like two to three thousand rpm at some insane feed rate now those numbers are spectacular in a production environment you know someone who's got a 500 horsepower lathe and time is money but the fastest this lady will spin is 1200 rpm so I'm going to set that at max 1200 rpm my feed rate I think is about 10000 I found that that just happens to be a good number you know any faster and I started to thread the part any slower and I risk falling asleep at the lathe now this isn't super round I'm just going to take a quick tenth out up pass that's not quite cleaned up yet and that interrupted cut essentially is working as a chip breaker I'm going to take another 10 off I cleaned up nice I'm going to start again at ten ten thousand to cut in each successive pass I'm going to increment that by ten until things either get really scary or my lathe Saul's out so know if you saw that my insert started sparking out this stuff might be a little tougher than that I thought it was but anyway watch what's happening here I'm going to flip this insert that'd be just my luck that I've started this test with a dull insert all right let's see what happens at twenty thousand thick cut all right it's cutting pretty good in surface finishes is nice but it shot one of these big rats nests out the back of the lathe and again this kind of stuff is very dangerous in fact when I first started out with inserts I used to keep one of these long sticks in my off hand I'm sure you're familiar with this just the hook on the end and while I was cutting I'd be fishing around my spinning chuck and my tool posts trying to get that build up of long stringy chips out of there I mean it still comes out every now and again when you maybe run into some weirdo materials but something like this is is really a bad idea I mean is it worse than a spinning nest of razor-sharp stringy chips flying past your face at 1,200 rpm probably not but let's try to fix both these problems let's go to 30,000 up the cut all right did you see what happened there we're starting to transition into more manageable chips if I call them chips but it's a lot better than that long continuous stringy stuff I mean they still stink when they go down your shirt but it at least slot less dangerous of course you have your safety glasses on right let's go to 40,000 step the cut all right so now we're talking take a look at those chips that's a lot safer to deal with I don't know if you heard it but my lathe started to break a sweat pushing that four teeth out the cut let's see what 50 does all right not bad nice blue chips all the heats coming out these things are really hot leave is starting to put up a fight let's go to 60 now the lady that was really slowing down it doesn't have the power to push that and you could really see that insert sparking out and depending on the material that's really as hard as I push this whole thing now these beautiful blue chips was really the whole point of this exercise if you're using carbide on your lathe you really shouldn't settle for anything less but you saw what it took me to get to these blue chips that transition started to happen at what 40 45 50 55 now up the cut now if you can't pull something like that off and you're already maxed out in your spindle speed you could try going a little bit faster in your feed rate but even that here we're at 10,000 at 12,000 rpm that's what 12 inches per minute I mean it's not lightning-fast what is that a an inch every 5 seconds but still if you're only turning 1/2 inch one inch one and a half inch shoulders that all goes down relatively quick so now what happens when you're within 20 or 30 foul you're finished diameter and you obviously can't take 40 50 60 thought the cut well either increase your spindle speed which we would have done a lot earlier if we could but like I said we're maxed out here already or you switch to a smaller insert and so lately that's what I've been doing I mean I've got these two styles figured out I rough it out with the larger insert and that gets me down the size and blink of an eye and then I'll either switch over to this I think that's eight millimeters across or if I've got very little take off I'll switch to a very sharp high speed steel finishing tool now these inserts also require more cutting pressure so compared to high speed steel you'll see a lot more heat buildup and your spring passes tend to be bigger so unless I get really lucky you know my last few passes get exponentially smaller trying to creep in on that dimension I found that using high speed steel those number of passes is smaller just because it does it's sharper essentially so it does a better job at those final spring passes all right that about does it for what I had to say about carbide in the home shop they said I feel almost embarrassed I didn't really get the courage to really push my carbide until somewhat late in life and I really wish I would have known that earlier yeah I would have had so many near misses with giant flying bushes of razor sharp chips or trying to get in there with my fishing pole clean those things out constantly so I think it's worth experimenting to see what you're comfortable with if you get into that sweet spot you know close to the chip loads your the inserts that you like are designed for carbide is spectacular you

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 448,058

Rating: 4.9591379 out of 5

Keywords: tungsten electrodes, tig welding, thoriated tungsten, lanthanated tungsten, radioactive tungsten, carbide tooling, carbide insert tooling, dressing diamond wheel, resin bonded diamond wheel, surface grinder, lathe, mill, metalworking hobby, metalworking

Id: 3VAUB_qJIKk

Length: 24min 8sec (1448 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2016