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LOL, I was going to mention how it was reacting to the slightest breeze, but I already sound like a salesman for all my hoarded treasures and I thought it would sound braggadocious. It also has a port on the bottom so that you can suspend items from the internal balance into a calibrated...

With the Loctite fully cured I reassembled the spindle with the new P5 bearings and put it back in to the machine without any drama. Pulling out "The Big Kahuna", a Mitutoyo ID-H0530 indicator, I attached the special wheel tip to it. This unit indicates to half a micron resolution and has a mode...

The Proxxon's custom spindle shaft finally arrived today. I've been doing a lot of my usual task churning, with little tangible progress being made, but I've had a few successes. For reasons I don't even remember anymore I disassembled my little used but decently built Mr. Meister TA-350A and...

I can't speak to painting embossed surfaces, but trying to fill in reliefs with paint was frustrating and came out pretty bad. The problem is that 3D printers do not print clean overhangs, essentially what reliefed text is, and so you get a really uneven surface at the bottom that interacts with...

The whole reason I pulled out the Mini-mill was that I had gotten a good deal on a pair of basic Mitutoyo digital scales that I wanted to fit to the bed to help deal with the large amount of backlash and 1.5mm per rotation lead screws, which make dialing in things harder than one might expect...

Surprisingly, it looks like Makita doesn't offer their bench grinders in the US. It is a global product and uses inch based spindles and wheels, I even have an English manual for it. I guess the costs are just too competitive in the US or there is some kind of legal requirements that are not...

I have been looking for a nice old bench grinder, but really wanted one with 205mm (8") wheels. I just never really found one that spoke to me, most of the best looking ones were 3-phase and a lot of them had pedestals, which are great for a shop, but not great for storage or moving outside for...

Frustratingly left blank. Yes, Japanese use traditional Kanji numbers for lots of things. But not typically for scientific or mathematical notation as far as I've seen.

Well I didn't pay close attention, and because of all the optional processing the new spindle shaft will not be here until next month... an eternity that I will have to fill with other tasks. I noticed that the Mitutoyo sells some cone tipped cylinders that clamp to the jaws of normal calipers...

I picked up a couple of used Mitutoyo digital readouts cheaply that I'm hoping are a good fit for my little Proxxon FF230 micro-mill, and so I pulled it out to start figuring out how to fit them, and one thing lead to another... I picked this mill up from a guy returning back to the US. We call...

Okay, we all know I'm a big 3D printer advocate, but I'm an even bigger safety freak, and I'm not crazy about that featherboard. Your safety is the most important thing. The amount of force those things need to absorb if things go wrong, and the way even some commercial ones explode into...

Laziness pays off again! One project I've had on the back burner for years was building a little spot welder for joining rechargeable batteries with nickel strips in order to repair or replace expired battery packs. At the time crappy Chinese made wall powered units were selling for a couple...

Simple is always better :)

It's a bit more complex than that. In order to inlay print on the bottom surface you currently need to treat each color change as a separate print, which induces X/Y registration errors as those end stops that set the zero between prints are not particularly accurate (nor are they required to be...

I tried that first. I put a crapton of paint on it, threw it in my vacuum chamber to make sure it filled the voids as much as possible, then sanded off the excess. The results were not really satisfactory, which is why I tried the other method. I'm sure I could improve on the paint method...

Fixed. The hooks (which are mounted to a shelf, not the ceiling) are just for storage, I drop it down on top of my little granite surface plate when printing. My next printer will likely be an CoreXY type loosely based on one of the Voron machines. The gantry would be fixed at the top of the...

It's hard to imagine anyone older than me... I suppose it's possible. 🧓 I also started computers with the Apple II, I just wasn't into drafting at that stage. I did do a lot of 16 color graphics on it, it's hard for me to imagine it being a very satisfying CAD experience. :) My first Mac 128...

I've been using Fusion 360 for several years now. It has a bit of a front loaded learning curve, and I'm barely scratching the surface of its capabilities, but I've found it to be extremely useful for what I do. I started drafting in Jr. High and learned 2D CAD using an early version of VersaCAD...

Another example of 3D printing heroism is this little Kanetec industrial demagnetizer. These units are used to remove the magnetism from tools and workpieces, which can create a frustrating experience collecting swarf when machining or working with them. When I bought it this unit was covered...

The weather is starting to show signs of making the leap into Spring, and the Tatami room is not quite the ice box it has been over the winter. It will become unbearably hot here soon enough, so I really need to capitalize on the short window to make some progress. I continue to sidetrack myself...