Virtual Apprentice Squaring Blocks

[Music] welcome back ox tools on time okay for all you virtual apprentices out there today we're gonna look at how you square up blocks in the mill and without a tool change and no special measuring gear and using only the bottom cutting surface of a of an end mill or a flight cutter this is all you need right here so we can go from a block that's sod on all all sides to one that's square in every direction within pretty close limits so let's see what that seven step process is for creating blocks of all day long all right let's get set up here I just say that I'm gonna use the fly cutter because it's a tool that's pretty much accessible to anybody if you don't have a flight that it's a really nice tool to have and you can cover broad areas in a single pass and you can adjust your tool geometry for different materials so it's just that handy single point cutting tool so let's let's get going here first we're gonna do all this work in the vise and I what I'm gonna do is just kind of get preset here so I'm gonna raise the table and probably get kind of close to this probably actually that's pretty good right there probably so that actually you know what I think I'm gonna go just just a whisker later okay so I get a little bit of clearance between you know with this is up on the parallels I get a little bit of room okay and that's this kind of just rough setting okay now the next thing I'm gonna do is I have a quill quill readout on here so just out of habit I'm just gonna run this all the way down and touch the bottom of the vise gently and I'm going to zero the quill readout so now that what the quill readout is reading is the space here so I can actually actually cut to a dimension or close to a dimension by just looking at the quill readout super handy okay alright first step here is we're just gonna pick a side do to start on here and these are all pretty scroungy here and I think what I want to do is I want to go ahead and do one of the broad faces first okay so fine we're gonna do is we're going to put that side against the Vice what I'm going to do is put a piece of this is welding wire I'm just gonna put this down in the corner and the idea is that they're just raises that back corner up just a whisker and then put a parallel in the front but the parts not going to be under the parallel I'm gonna set this rod and this is that I've been using this for years this is a handle out of my tap branch and I've just been using it for this for this operation you know pretty much forever right alright so what I'm doing is I'm using it in the front to basically press average that rear surface against the vise and and push it up straight against that side so anyway I'm not super fussy about this particular cut other than I just want to get a nice cut on this surface here a little bit okay see it's not quite cleaning up there so I'll come back to fries all right so we got one one face cut there let's go ahead and number them and it's always a good idea just so you can keep track of stuff now now we got to start paying attention here you can see that this edge is pretty scroungy but we don't really care right now what we want to do is establish a perpendicular side to that which is what we're gonna do next so I'm gonna use my little rod in there again and now it's gonna become more more important drop this in there so now you can use a you can use a ball too if you got really erratic stock and this one's just on a stick just to make it easier to position in there okay or you know some you can hold them like this and stick them in too but that's just what this is we'll probably use that but let's keep going with this so the idea here now is this rod is tilting this on this back pivot here and pushing it up tight against that vise job okay that's really what I care about right now is is I want to be up against that up against that vise job in a good way okay so now what we're doing is we're gonna create our first perpendicular surface and what we'll do is we'll go check it and make sure that we're doing what we think we're doing okay okay so we're gonna check perpendicularity between side 1 and side 2 that we just cut and we're going to use squareness comparator here and I'm just gonna double check that it's still set at zero okay which it is and this is this a squareness reference here okay so let's check our part I'm sure I'm still in the frame alright it's pretty close what is it 1 tau half half though all right so about a half that right between those two surfaces so we're just gonna keep going and rotating this part around and we'll just check it each time it's make sure that we're doing what we expect to be doing now this is a really handy tool for this kind of stuff not totally necessary but it sure makes checking your work a lot easier and this doubles as an indicator stand too so you'll see another one in a minute when we check parallelism so all right so we've done one we've done two we got those pretty close let's do three which is going to be this next broad-faced which is going to be parallel with this one okay so we're gonna put a good edge against the vise and I'm gonna go on top of two parallels and you'll see why in a second and I still got a rough a talib rough clamping face but we're gonna be okay because let's see what I'm going to do here I'm gonna set the parallels I'm gonna back up okay so I'm sitting down on the parallel so I'm gonna use this little little ball level or thingy yeah I don't know what people call the either actually and I'm gonna set it kind of low and the idea is that it's going to press this up against this back jaw evenly and down against the the parallel so let's clamp it down a little bit and I'm going to tap this one down check the back parallel and check the front parallel and they're both tight and that's what I'm looking for okay now you can do this on the floor of the vise but you you put pieces of paper underneath each corner and you just tug on the paper to see if if you're sitting down on all four points which is important okay so now let's take a little skin that little monkey come down touch off back up jump down a a whisker and punch it all right so we get side three which is parallel to side one oops chapter mr. wizard see this ed here this is the only indicator that that photographs well okay so I don't know half now something like that let's do the rest okay so we've got two two parallel sides and two perpendicular sides so we're just going to go right in the bottom of the vise on this one here and remember that we've set this off at the bottom of the vise so now I can actually go for dimension as well so let's just clamp that in there we're going to take a skin cut off of that and I'm going to tap this one down too and it feels rock solid which is what you're you know you use your ears and the vibration of the hammer to kind of tell if it's sitting down properly to sew down a little bit you know what I'm gonna take a little more because make multiple passes we'll check the side we just did there so it's just a good idea that to check them all as you're going around that way you don't go too far wrong if your lips if you're keeping track of it I can't pretty happy with that what's it's less than a half at them we'll just call it a half a cow all right so now now comes the fun part this is where the magic happens when we do these end surfaces here because now we've got parallelism and perpendicularity in this direction but now we got to do it this way so how do we do that because we got no good reference surfaces and what we want to do is we want to establish perpendicularity to these these phases as well in a different direction so let's go see how we're gonna do that there's a couple ways we can do that all right so we get four sides they're in pretty good shape here and now we need to do these end surfaces so there's several ways you can do it but I'm gonna show you the cool way okay so all the cool cats do it this way you know you can hang it out of the side and you could use a long end mill on that to me that's a tool change I'm not interested in that what we need to do is we need to set it up this way but what we need to do is we also need to set it up square this way and I told you up front that we're not going to use any special measuring tools and we don't need any special measuring tools to make this side perpendicular to these four sides here in two directions by the way okay and I'm going to show you how we can do that so I'm going to show you the way that we're not to use it's actually a cool way to do it and that is you can use a V block okay now that to me this is cheating a little bit all right so we would stick the V block in there like that and then you would put two sides against air at once okay I'm just gonna clamp it gently so you can see and these are up against the V and so now we're square with the world and we can dust that off and and all is good okay that's boring I don't like that one so we're gonna do the clever way so let's set that aside what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a cut in this direction let's see where over here one now let's just do this in here okay let's just do this so we're gonna turn it 90 degrees alright and I'm gonna show you something and to demonstrate this I'm going to purposely tilt this a little bit in the vise okay so that it is clearly out of square okay and I'm gonna clamp it nice okay I'm just gonna put this up here so you guys can see it so it's massively out of square right which everybody agree yes everybody agrees so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna take a cut all right we're going to cut in a different direction to cut about half way attached right there back up your implant and you can see [Applause] yeah we're gonna have to take a couple passes on that now I don't need to clean up the entire surface it's going to come down a bit let's do a little more [Applause] and then I'm gonna take one more real light one all right so here's what's magic about this so even though we cut this at an angle okay and you saw the angle that we leaned it over this edge is perpendicular okay and there it is that edge is perpendicular and that's what we care about in this case all we need is an edge to establish the opposite side so even by cutting that off at an angle because this is perpendicular to this we've created a straight edge okay or perpendicular edge I should say okay and it looks good from here looking at that all right so what we're going to do is we're going to take that out now you got to be careful you don't want to deburr that okay heavily right what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go over on the surface plate just to take any fuzz off of that I'm just going to put it on a little paper in both directions and then that's it I'm not going to deburr that edge okay so I'm gonna go do that I'll be right back so I papered that edge and now we're gonna label this this is cut five but it's also going to be cut seven okay and now let's what we're gonna do is we're gonna rotate that around and we're gonna put our square edge against here okay and in this case I think I'm gonna I'm gonna prop that up off at the bottom on my little rod there okay like so it's a kitchen on something oh I need to go higher huh well I put too much angle in it so my this rod is not big enough all right let's just use a parallel yeah okay so our nice square edge is sitting on that parallel how do you like that huh that's pretty cool huh gently put it in there parallel snug so now I can do this surface here and it's perpendicular and perpendicular with that edge and then we just recut the opposite side to finish the job so let's do that [Music] all right so there's side six that we we just cut there's our funky five five seven side so we're gonna put this side down let's check our comparator make sure we're we're still zeroed looks pretty good let's go against here share them in the frame and dupes it's pretty tasty okay so and now you can see that we just need to recut this surface until it cleans up and then we can bring it to dimension as well okay so five seven now becomes seven and we go we go to size between these sides with these two faces so let's go let's go finish this little monkey off okay so side six goes down make sure I'm in that I'm spinning the little step in the bottom of the curt vise all right snug it up and then this one I'm going to tap down as well all right and I'm feeling it for that nice solid you know it feels like it's in column there okay and then we're just gonna reach up this guy and once again we're sitting in the bottom of the vise so we can use our our quill as dimensional we can measure directly now [Music] take a couple passes all right there you have it the seven step method for squaring up blocks okay and you saw we just use some real simple stuff here that pretty much anybody has access to so some things to note it works best on kind of blocky pieces like this that are kind of squarish if you get into narrow plates and stuff like that with you know differential aspect ratios that are high it doesn't work as well so it's kind of for chunky blocky parts like this but you know once you kind of get the hang of it you can you can motor through a pile of these pretty quick and and do a really nice job of it okay and it's a great technique it reinforces good vise work where you're clamping and checking parallels and seating things properly in the vise it just reinforces all that stuff and it develops those really good habits so try it out and and see what you think so anyway thanks for watching and see you later [Music] you [Music]

Channel: oxtoolco

Views: 98,301

Rating: 4.9589915 out of 5

Keywords: Milling, Geomety, Apprentice, Squaring, Squareness comparator, Parallism, Toolmaking, Machine work, How to square a block, Flycutter, Vblock, Vee Block, Kurt Vise

Id: -lgMcDOkeg8

Length: 21min 50sec (1310 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Orwellian1]

Please! lots more elegant, smart, basics videos like this!. I despise using exclamation points, and I just used 2(3)! That is how much I appreciate this video.

I bet there are a bunch of hobby hackers on this sub like me who never went to school for machining, and have to kludge our way through doing things that the pros take for granted.

Very well done video. No wasted effort or talking. Clear and concise. Perfect for those of use who still have only the basic tooling and measuring stuff.

Was that block PVC? I know there are several prototyping materials out there that machine nicely, anyone know what this one is?

[u/CheckOutMyVan]

I watched this video knowing full well how to square a block on the mill but watched the whole thing anyways. I did not know the trick he used to square the ends. Learn something new every day!

[u/Retireegeorge]

It's great being a virtual apprentice - thank you for making the effort to share your knowledge and experience.