Shopmade parallels - Part 1

so welcome back to a shop today I want to talk about parallels these are part of setup tooling every machinist and every hobbyist and everybody that uses any kind of machine tool use all the time you use it to support pieces up from the table you use it to support pieces in the vise to get above the jaws and so on and so on and you can buy them you can make them I happen to have a collection of parallels here these are all vision a small fraction of the parallels I have I buy them every time I see a used pair of pearls I buy them because you never have the right size this is a set of commercial available for east parallels I bought these about maybe 12 years ago and they are hard when you ground all over and when you check these they're they are quite good let's take one of the this is six millimeter thick and 24 millimeter high they are ground both thickness and height and when we check them with the digital mic these are really grants spot-on twenty three point nine nine nine nine that's not too shabby and on this side twenty three point nine nine nine eight so these are not these are just as good as a we will set our a set from a well-known manufacturers can see this one is also 0.998 and this is boo this one is nine nine seven nine nine eight and this is really they are nice I mean some of them are over the years they get some apprentice marks this one got drilled in and has a few chowder marks from an end mill but that's not a problem you just take your stone stone it lightly to get off any bird that has driven up by the relaxant so this is a commercial set cost about 80 bucks when you buy it through one of the few resellers on eBay or yeah Germany its Polly Mott or optimum in the u.s. it might be horrible Freight or grizzly some of them then I have a whole bunch of shop made parallels here these are I buy these at use machinery dealers these have name engraved and somebody made them for for themselves and then yeah they ended up at the machinery dealer because maybe the shop closed up or here you never know the story behind stuff like this and these are nice and sick match pair when you buy used parallels make sure you check them for parallelism for thickness if you need it I don't care much about thickness I prefer to lower paramount the instead and check if they are bent or dinged or yeah just if they are in good shape I have a set of four matched big parallels these are quite handy from time to time if you have to set up bigger pieces and there are thinner parallels these are also somebody made them in a shop and they are also some yeah this you see the style pretty often low and pretty thick almost square I don't use this very much there but they are pretty nice to block in stuff in the surface grinder the style of parallel I prefer or the thin ones I I just recently made me this set of parallels and these are three millimeter thick slightly over 300 meters and they are harmed and their ground in pairs I got wrong material the raw material I use precision ground flat stock tool steel 124 just one 28 42 that's I think the NZ equivalent of Steel is o2 I cut it up in strips i milled them with some allowance then I hardened them then I straightened them out and then I'm grinding only the the height I'm not touching the thickness because these thin parallels you cannot rely that they stay 100% straight so I don't touch the thickness I straighten them only out so they are somewhat straight maybe wasn't two or three hundredths of a millimeter but I don't use the thickness for anything and to set this step so the highest set of parallels is about 0.5 members below the top surface of my Y so I can clamp parts and device with only 0.5 millimeters of stock left on the underside and as I said these are ground my own shop with my surface grinder and I didn't shoot for a specific dimension because then real matter I just ground in parallel we have 24 point nine eight five and we have 24 point nine eight six so parallel within one thousand seven millimeter that's half that what's that one no five ten thousand but no half a ten thousandth of an inch so that's it or not so that's the barrel as I use and in the reason time I mostly use these because they are just convenient why I like the thin ones is I can get I set them up in device and when you drill apart close to the Jones you have very little chances of hitting the parallel that's a reason why I like these and also the thinner parallels are not as problematic with dirt if you have such a wide parallel in your voice there is a lot of area which can sit on a piece of dirt these thin Perlas the chance of hitting some some small chip or dust is smaller so this is the style of parallel I like and I have a set at work same style from 10 to 40 millimeters in approximately 1 millimeter steps some steps or smaller somewhere only 0.5 millimeter and always six of each size because I have two or three vices in one row at the machine and then I have I can do three identical setups with the parallels so if you have multi Y setups you it's a good idea to have multiple sets of parallels of the same size and what about the hobbyist or the home gamer or Thea or just the guy who wants to make stuff his own what can he do to make his own parallels the cheapest way is to buy cold rolled steel there's a piece of flat bar 3 by 20 millimeters cold drawn mild steel with a carbon no nothing nothing special and when you take a piece of cold drawn steel it has very clean surfaces is sharp edge and it's very precise along thickness and width I already stoned it so there are no burrs and when we check it now for parallel we hang out 19-point ah let's let's zero let's take this our zero that's zero I'm going to go down here we do the same check again we are within five thousands of an inch we go down further we are looking for thousands of an inch then we go a bit further and we are within five thousand of an inch so cold strong steel is very precise about parallelism it's not very good on a nominal dimension it's eight hundreds of another undersized doesn't matter for this purpose if you want to make your own parallels now you just take a bar of Collbran steel cut off two pieces the length you need for example the length the width of your wise if you have a hundred millimeter wise I would cut the parallels to about ninety nine millimeters slightly shorter than the jaws of device clean all the edges just chamfer them lightly may be machined into lengths so it looks nice jumper at all clean up all the surfaces with Emery cloth and yeah you made you made a set of parallels and then use it it's for 99.9% of all milling applications this is absolutely good enough and if you drill into them you just damage your soft parallel and not your drill bit or your end mill that cost de box so that's that's a very good way to get to very cheap parallels I'm not going to show you how to cut off a piece of flat steel milli - link have to trust networks we did that work for there in the apprentice shop we just had cold drawn steel cut off cleaned up and used as parallels for especially on the drills on the drilling drill presses on the milling machines we have harmed what you can also buy is precision round flat stock this happens to be two locks 44 that is pre hardened to 44 Rockwell's but 44 Rockwell's is still so you can machine it with normal tools you can saw it with a hacksaw or a bandsaw and as I said the stock is Blanchard ground ice can see by that again circular grinding marks Blanchard drum and it's the same thing as the cold ground steel you just stone it to clean it up chamfered yet just lightly cut off to pieces then you of course you check check it before you do any work to it and we start here at 0 okay 0 - mm plus 2002 thousand so this is even a bit more precise than the cold drawn steel and looks a bit cleaner but this is also a good alternative and if you use the two locks you also get pearls that are pretty resistant against things or scratches because the cultural skill will be messed up when you use it well they are thing that scratch and you have always to be careful that is stoned lightly so don't have any burrs but if you want to make a set of parallels and you won't need to buy a bar of pursuing run steel for every size of parallel this gets quite expensive and then you can already buy a set of hardened commercial parallels because the tool steel comes in half meter and one meter sections and I think this bar here cost about 30 bucks or 20 bucks something like that is pretty expensive stuff I didn't buy it for parallel sigh I bought this for a certain application causes harp so good thing you can do you can ask for asking a machine shop or to die shop for scraps of tool steel share them gauge plate or precision ground plate or something like that Oh two is a very good choice because it's very easy to harden in Europe or in the the ice oval that's one 28:42 easy to harden easy to machine gets and it's great grind very well so that's a good choice for cars in my mind you can also use 120 the 11.4 379 that's steel for punch punch and die plates and that stuff really just gets hard as pricketts it jumps up to 67 something rockwell hardness and those parallels are quite indestructible but the o2 is a good choice in my mind and when you have some scraps you can also buy of course a she'd of precision ground flat stock not a problem every steel supply should have that stuff on and storage then you fan saw or cold saw or use an angle grinder to cut it up into strips that you want for your pieces you want and then you have to decide what options you have can you harden and grind them or leave them soft and just mill them I will show you both options first we're going to make a pair of soft parallels we're just going to take them clean them up the burden and then we're going to mill them in a pair parallel after that we will make a set that is hardened and hard milled so will pre machine them to be somewhat parallel or as parallel as we can and we're going to harden them then we're going to yep we need to straighten them out because these thin parallels will work slightly when we harden them and then we will take a carbide end mill and make them parallel in the hardened state so hard milling and then we will make of course a set that is hardened and ground on surface grinder oh let's go to a milling machine and start with the soft parallels okay we're over at the milling machine and is set up to mill the soft parallels after two rough sawn blanks deeper and then I clamped them onto a narrow apparel parallel that's below the two parts I do this so I can come in with on a smaller mill and sight mill them then I will go over to the other side and side molding too and then they will come out as precise as the machine geometry is without any additional setup work or aligning or filling around okay I use the four flute for Melhem the carbide end mill dry at the pub thousand rpm and we get a nice finish in both parts I did one finishing cut in conventional milling and then without adjusting the depth of cut they did a spring pass back climb milling and that's resulting in a very fine very very clean cut now we will step over and we'll clean up the backside without disturbing the setup at all I set up the cutter behind on the rear side of the parallels I rearranged camera of course so you can see what's happening and we're going to clean up this side too okay this is how the parallel looks now it didn't shoot for a specific dimension in this direction and yeah should be good now we can take it off and give it a check on the surface plate look what look like parallels already of course before we check them we have to deeper them and I'm going only to put a very light chamfer on the edges with with fine stone well there we go now we can check them out okay we're over the surface plate and we do our inspection now I have both parallels here and surface plate everything is cleaned and I numbered them this is one this is two and I'll look right down the results over here parallel one let's draw parallel number two and we will take the center of the first parallel as zero and I already have the indicator zeroed here now we go over to the extreme left and go down - yeah - two - two thousands we go over to extreme right and we are at minus two now we jump over together parallel okay this is not as good this is minus six minus 2 and this is minus four - - this is all - so we are within six thousandths of a millimeter just by milling without any real precautions the setup I clamped on the extreme ends and we might have warped the pieces slightly the end mill was not new this is a used end mill and yeah as I said I didn't take any special precautions but for what we did this is quite good and I would say this is these are perilous that you can use any day for most of the milling operations on the drill press knees are almost too good for surface grinding of course they are not suitable but if you have a surface grinder you can make better one any anyways so just by milling taking some some flat stock and milling it to width we got a pair of pretty good parallels and also these cost about nothing especially when you can get scrap steel from you from a local mold or Die shop anybody who works with some better Steel's will have a box with cut offs that you can can tray for some coffee money and if not you can always find this stuff on eBay there is always somebody who found this stuff in a dumpster and sells it on eBay okay before we go on to the next style of parallel I just took these milt parallels and a random over some 240 grit Emery cloth on a piece of ground steel just to lap down the the waviness from the end mill and they improved so we have again zero here and we go over we have zero and we have yeah zero over here which is quite good for milled and we have zero on this one we have a hollow here in the middle this is minus six again and over here we have yeah let's say yeah minus 2 so only by wrapping it down on some Emery cloth to hit the tops after the waviness of the end mill curve and milled surface always looks a bit like this and when you hit it with yeah Murray cloth you end up with something like this yeah you know you get the idea and just by that we we made this a pretty good set of pearls except for a little bow here in the center which might be from the setup because might have warped the pieces slightly but as I said I didn't take much cautions to to get it super precise I want to show you a way that everybody that has a milling machine can do and this is this is the way to do it my my mind milling them in a pair in one set up in both side milling you get better results as by face milling and flipping it around and to the other side then you have always the air or from the the danger of getting an arrow from setting it up on the other side I tried that too and I found it very hard to do in the milling machine yeah at our knees our music parallels of course you would have to dress the ends to make them nice and square but that's it

Channel: Stefan Gotteswinter

Views: 73,834

Rating: 4.925117 out of 5

Keywords: parallels, parallelleisten, flachstahl, toolox, fräsmaschine, opti mb4, optimum mb4

Id: P-sc55tCunc

Length: 28min 0sec (1680 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2016