Scrapyard Milling Machine Gets Work Done On A Budget

September 1, 2019 by Dan Maloney 22 Comments

Which to buy first, a lathe or a mill? It’s a tough question for the aspiring home machinist with limited funds to spend on machine tools, but of course the correct answer is a lathe. With a lathe, we are told, all other machine tools can be built, including a milling machine. Granted that might be a slight exaggeration, but [Maximum DIY] was still able to use his budget-blowing lathe to make a decent milling machine mostly from scrap.

Details are a bit sparse in the forum post, but there’s enough there and in the video after the break to be mightily impressed with the build. Unlike many DIY mills that are basically modified drill presses, [Maximum DIY] started with things like a scrapped bench grinder pedestal and surplus steel tubing. The spindle motor is from a paint sprayer and the Z-axis power feed is a treadmill incline motor. The compound table was a little too hard to make, so the purchased table was fitted with windshield wiper motor power feeds.

Therein lies perhaps the most clever hack in this build: the use of a plain old deep 19mm socket as a clutch for the power feeds. The 12-point socket slides on the square shaft of the wiper motor to engage the drive screw for the compound table – simple and bulletproof.

To be sure, the finished mill is far from perfect. It looks like it needs more mass to quell vibration, and those open drive pulleys are a little nerve wracking. But it seems to work well, and really, any mill is better than no mill. Of course, if you’re flush with cash and want to buy a mill instead of making one, this buyer’s guide should help.

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Hackaday Links: July 21, 2019

July 21, 2019 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

Ordering a PCB used to be a [Henry Ford]-esque experience: pick any color you like, as long as it’s green. We’ve come a long way in the “express yourself” space with PCBs, with slightly less than all the colors of the rainbow available, and some pretty nice silkscreening options to boot. But wouldn’t it be nice to get full-color graphics on a PCB? Australian company Little Bird thinks so, and they came up with a method to print graphics on a board. The results from what looks like a modified inkjet printer are pretty stunning, if somewhat limited in application. But I bet you could really make a splash with these in our Beautiful Hardware contest.

The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing has come and gone with at least as much fanfare as it deserves. Part of that celebration was Project Egress, creation of a replica of the Columbia crew hatch from parts made by 44 hackers and makers. Those parts were assembled on Thursday by [Adam Savage] at the National Air and Space Museum in an event that was streamed live. A lot of friends of Hackaday were in on the build and were on hand, like [Fran Blanche], [John Saunders], [Sophy Wong], and [Estefannie]. The Smithsonian says they’ll have a recording of the stream available soon, so watch this space if you’re interested in a replay.

From the “Don’t try this at home” department, organic chemist [Derek Lowe] has compiled a “Things I won’t work with” list. It’s real horror show stuff that regales the uninitiated with all sorts of chemical nightmares. Read up on chlorine trifluoride, an oxidizer of such strength that it’s hypergolic with anything that even approaches being fuel. Wet sand? Yep, bursts into flames on contact. Good reading.

Continuing the safety theme, machinist [Joe Pieczynski] offers this lathe tip designed to keep you in possession of a full set of fingers. He points out that the common practice of using a strip of emery cloth to polish a piece of round stock on either a wood or metal lathe can lead to disaster if the ends of the strip are brought into close proximity, whereupon it can catch and act like a strap wrench. Your fingers don’t stand a chance against such forces, so watch out. [Joe] doesn’t share any gory pictures of what can happen, but they’re out there. Only the brave need to Google “degloving injury.” NSFL – you’ve been warned.

On a happier note, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to print water-clear parts on a standard 3D printer? Sure it would, but the “clear” filaments and resins all seem to result in parts that are, at best, clearish. Industrial designer [Eric Strebel] has developed a method of post-processing clear SLA prints. It’s a little wet sanding followed by a top coat of a super stinky two-part urethane clearcoat. Fussy work, but the results are impressive, and it’s a good technique to file away for someday.

Project Egress: The Hinges

July 18, 2019 by Dan Maloney 34 Comments

A door’s hinges are arguably its most important pieces. After all, a door without hinges is just, well, a wall. Or a bulkhead, if we’re talking about a hingeless hatch on a spacecraft.

And so the assignment for creating hinges for Progress Egress, the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing by creating a replica of the command module hatch, went to [Jimmy DiResta]. The hinges were complex linkages that were designed to not only handle the 225 pound (102 kg) hatch on the launch pad, but to allow extended extravehicular activity (EVA) while en route to the Moon. [Jimmy], a multimedia maker, is just as likely to turn metal as he is to work in wood, and his hinges are a study of 1960s aerospace engineering rendered in ipe, and extremely hard and dense tropical hardwood, and brass.

[Jimmy]’s build started with a full-size 3D-printed model of the hinge, a move that paid off as the prints acted both as templates for machining the wood components and as test jigs to make sure everything would articulate properly. Sheet brass was bent and soldered into the hinge brackets, while brass rod stock was turned on the lathe to simulate the hydraulic cylinder hinge stays of the original. The dark ipe and the brass work really well together, and should go nicely with [Fran Blanche]’s walnut and brass latch on the assembled hatch.

With [Adam Savage]’s final assembly of all the parts scheduled for Thursday the 18th, we’re down to the wire on this celebration of both Apollo and the maker movement that was at least in part born from it.

Note: the assembly started at 11:00 Eastern time, and there’s a live stream at https://airandspace.si.edu/events/project-egress-build.

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Assembling A Lathe From Not A Lot

June 9, 2019 by Jenny List 36 Comments

Most people have a piece of equipment without which they consider their workshop or bench to be incomplete. For some, it is an oscilloscope, for others a bandsaw, but for many metalworkers, it is a lathe. Lathes are expensive if you are seeking a good one, quite cheap if you don’t mind a bad one, and sometimes even free if you can deal with a good one that’s very old and needs six burly friends and a forklift truck to move.

There is another way to acquire a lathe, and it’s one that [Sek Austria] demonstrates in the video below the break: build your own. It’s a fascinating demonstration of how machine tools evolved with each successive generation made by the last at every increasing precision. He achieves good-enough construction from a welded steel frame with little more than hand tools, and though his result is by no means a perfect lathe it does allow him to achieve the next level of machining precision. Off the shelf come a set of optical guide rails and linear bearings along with a chuck and tool holder, but the rest is all his. And the washing machine motor driving it is a touch of pure class, even though he is embarrassed enough to cover it with a glove for filming. Sometimes in our community, we adopt the sledgehammer to crack a nut methodology, using CNC or similar techniques to fabricate things that can be made more speedily with less accomplished methods. We couldn’t help wincing at his hammering in the vice to create the lead screw nut bracket, though.

As homemade lathes go, this one is surprisingly conventional. Others have been fashioned from engine parts, or concrete.

Thanks [Xavier] for the tip.

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Benchtop Lathe Gets An Electronic Leadscrew Makeover

April 17, 2019 by Dan Maloney 51 Comments

The king of machine tools is the lathe, and if the king has a heart, it’s probably the leadscrew. That’s the bit that allows threading operations, arguably the most important job a lathe can tackle. It’s a simple concept, really – the leadscrew is mechanically linked through gears to the spindle so that the cutting tool moves along the long axis of the workpiece as it rotates, allowing it to cut threads of the desired pitch.

But what’s simple in concept can be complicated in reality. As [Clough42] points out, most lathes couple the lead screw to the spindle drive through a complex series of gears that need to be swapped in and out to accommodate different thread pitches, and makes going from imperial to metric a whole ball of wax by itself. So he set about building an electronic leadscrew for his lathe. The idea is to forgo the gear train and drive the leadscrew directly with a high-quality stepper motor. That sounds easy enough, but bear in mind that the translation of the tool needs to be perfectly synchronized with the rotation of the spindle to make threading possible. That will be accomplished with an industrial-grade quadrature encoder coupled to the spindle, which will tell software running on a TI LaunchPad how fast to turn the stepper – and in which direction, to control thread handedness. The video below has some great detail on real-time operating systems on microcontrollers as well as tests on all the hardware to be used.

This is only a proof of concept at this point, but we’re looking forward to the rest of this series. In the meantime, [Quinn Dunki]’s excellent series on choosing a lathe should keep you going.

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Hack Chat: The Home Machine Shop With Quinn Dunki

March 18, 2019 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the Home Machine Shop Hack Chat!

Even if you haven’t been here for very long, you’ll probably recognize Quinn Dunki as Hackaday’s resident consulting machinist. Quinn recently did a great series of articles on the “King of Machine Tools”, the lathe, covering everything from the history of precision machine tools to making your first chips. She’s documented the entire process of procuring and setting up a new lathe, pointing out all the potential pitfalls the budding home machinist may face. You can get a much deeper dive into her machining adventures on her YouTube channel, Blondihacks.

Flinging hot metal chips around is hardly all Quinn has accomplished, though. Long before her foray into machine tools, there was Veronica, a scratch-built 6502 machine Quinn created as an homage to the machines that launched her into a life of writing software. We’ve featured Veronica on our pages a couple of times, and she’s always made quite a hit.

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

How developing software and machining are alike, and how they differ;
How social networks have changed the perception of machining;
Best practices for getting started in machining; and
Are there any new machine tool purchases in the pipeline?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the Home Machine Shop Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, March 20, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

Become The Next Fabergé With A Rose Engine Lathe

March 13, 2019 by Bryan Cockfield 12 Comments

The basics of a skill may take a long time to master, but there is always something else to learn about regardless of the craft. Building a piece of fine furniture out of hardwood or being able to weld together a bicycle from scratch are all impressive feats, but there are fine details that you’ll only learn about once you get to this level of craftsmanship. One such tool that will help with these intricacies is known as the rose engine lathe.

This tool is based on an average lathe, typically used for creating round things out of stock which is not round. A rose engine lathe has a set of cams on it as well which allow the lathe to create intricate patterns in the material it’s working with, such as flower type patterns or intricate spirals. One of the most famous implementations of this method was on the Fabergé eggs. While this might make it sound overly complex, this how-to actually shows you how to build your own rose engine lathe out of a piece of MDF and a large number of miscellaneous pieces of hardware.

We recently featured another build which performs a similar function called engine turning. While similar, this is the method responsible for creating overlapping spirals on a piece of metal. Either way, both projects are sure to spice up your metal or woodworking endeavors.

Thanks to [PWalsh] for the tip!