Upgrade Your Import Boring Head

well maybe you've seen one of these import boring heads maybe you're even thinking about buying one and if you are my advice would be don't absolutely do not buy one spend a little more money and get a good american-made boring head or just an equality boring head you can probably spend a slight amount more and get a used good one instead of buying a cheap import that doesn't work well but if you already have one like I do and you don't do a whole lot of boring and you're just going to try and get by with what you got then I do have some tips on how to upgrade this first thing is replace all the set screws the set screws that come with it are just complete junk there's what's left are the ones that were in there and the heads are all worn out rounded out one of them is missing just because the head rounded out and couldn't even be used anymore some of the heads aren't even centered in there it really just poor quality so those go right in the trash so I'll put the park numbers down here for the ones I used but ones I got were an m10 by one and a quarter and m12 by one and a half those are the ones that fit in my import 3/4 inch boring head and there's a good chance that if you do have one of these it's probably just like this it probably is all the same hardware because I think these just run off the same manufacturing line somewhere in China but double check before ordering them but I'll put the part numbers down below in the video description secondly is there's the assortment of hex keys that come with it also junk the they managed to round each other out so pitch those and implement master Carter and got a four five and six millimeter hex key and these are the high torque versions instead of just catching the corners they actually catch on the flats so they're capable Mort working there you really shouldn't have to put all that much torque on there you might on these for tightening them down but you really shouldn't have to torque too much on them so replace the set screws and replace the hex keys and then you're still down to a bit of nastiness if you'll notice underneath the GUID set screws there's a ball bearing in there one amount is missing I was replaced all three with 7/32 ball bearing that's the closest metric the closest to the metric that was in there so get a cut point set screw in there and the way these work is the balls press into the the inner piece and acts like a GUID then it provides friction so when you go to adjust the adjustment screw on the side it has a nice firm adjustment to it and takes some of the slop out of it so just torque those down just you know short use the short end of the wrench and just snug them up you don't need to go too crazy on that and then you'll be able to feel when you tighten up on the adjustment that there's some tension in there you'll always have backlash and these important's have a whole lot of backlash but you're going to be adjusting one way so that shouldn't be too much of a problem and then if you have one of these import boring heads there's a very good chance you'll also have a set of import boring bars there's the larger set have also got a smaller set these are pretty crummy - I found a carbide to be alright it's just a little braised on carbide chips there I found that carbide quality to be sufficient for the steel and aluminum I was cutting but the the geometries are all messed up there's a good video explaining exactly why the boring head import boring head and these import boring bars are time wasting junk I'll put a link to it below but for now shout out to Locke cracker for that and if you want know how boring head works how to use one suburban tools has a good video so I'll put a link out to that as well before warn the lock crackers on 26 minutes he really goes in great detail about why these are not that great but so I would I would recommend not getting the import boring bars I really only need one I think or one or two I didn't use many of those others so I went to Mesa tools and bought this it's a three quarter inch so it fits its into a three quarter inch notice it has a flat on there that's really important the set screw will now torque down on a flat and I replace these with flat headed set screws so the set screw the flat side of the boring bars are flats that flat on flat it won't Mar this and contrast that with what you had going on before a completely round boring bar so if you tighten this down enough that it doesn't turn you've probably marred the round boring bar and then good luck getting it out because you know if you if you marred up the flat which you're not likely to do in this scenario but even if you did there's clearance there on the flat to the round that if you have a round that's a tight fit and you mess it up down inside then it'll never clear coming back out so that's why you want a good boring bar this one of course is a carbide insert so you can flip it flip it pitch it so you get three three turns out of it three cutting surfaces and then just replace that readily available so really that will probably do most of the boring on me to do the only exception is if I need to do some smaller boring a lot of times I like to bore things that are under 3/4 of an inch and this only goes down into a three quarter inch or larger hole so I couldn't bore anything really small with this so what I've done is I've got a little 3/8 boring bar and it's also a carbide insert uses these tiny little CCM tea 21:51 so little tiny inserts in there so I wanted somehow to get this to work with that so the obvious solution is to make a adapter so I turned a little piece of three or four L stainless on the lathe so turn the outside to three quarters inside the three-eighths and then I put a little hole on the side there we'll cross hole so let's go to the down inside and then this goes down in there and the set screw goes through the adapter to clearance hole and then it hits the flat on here so I'm going to tighten that down it's almost self aligning get you the geometry you need and then that when I would snug down a little not a lot but just like that so now what you've got is the set screw goes through the adapter pushes against the boring bar which then pushes against the backside and now I've got to adapter the laminate use a 3/8 boring bar when I ordered from Mesa tools to get the 3/4 I asked Jim about something for 3/8 and his response is now it's too too flimsy and yeah it will have some flex to it so you're not going to take any big heavy cuts with this but I'm not going to be taking big heavy cuts on my import milling machine anyway so this 3/8 works for me he does have 1/2 if you have a half-inch boring head in other words holes here or half inch size he'll have a half inch version of a boring bar for you as well but I think he said he was thinking about making an adapter I suggest you make a 3/8 to 1/2 adapter so you could use a 3 it's boring head 1/2 inch shank and that way you could bore holes that are between 1/2 and 3/4 with that before jumping up to this for 3/4 and larger so those are pretty much all the improvements I've made to this import boring head new set screws good quality all six of them I made a little dapper to get a 3/8 into it about a 3/4 of good quality so now I'm using insert tooling and then you'll still have some backlash and kind of live with that I guess I've managed to do some good work with this even before at doing all the improvements even with the crummy stuff it was frustrating time-consuming time wasting that I was able to do some decent precision work with it one other thing I'm thinking about possibly doing is I have an all right Arbor on here thinking about getting rid of that I sort of standardize on form our tooling system it's a three quarter inch shank off in this case er 20 collet holder so I might turn this down so that this looks like this so make my boring head fit into the tormach tooling system I lose a lot of rigidity doing that you know obviously that 3/4 inch shanks not nearly as rigid is this re pulled up into a spindle but again my milling machine is not very rigid so I think it'll I'll get enough grip on that 3/4 inch shank in the 12-hour tooling system to run a boring head keep it up in there if not you know I've ruined a a really crummy import tool so anyway I might - might turn that down where I might just leave it alright but those are the recommendations I have for you is if you do small stuff make an adapter you might actually be able to buy a drill bushing and just cross your La Crosse drill the drill bushing that you know so three-eighths on the inside and three-quarters on the outside so get a smaller smaller boring head up into your larger or smaller Bourne barf and your larger boring head you know buy a good-quality boring bar and replace all the set screws and replace all the hex keys and I think you'd be a whole lot happier with this then than what you originally got

Channel: Liberty4Ever

Views: 67,030

Rating: 4.4689507 out of 5

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Id: DtNn5_N9wu0

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2015