Below 265 SQ/FT Tiny Tokyo Shop

[Bakafish]

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 with rescuing old tools, and then subjecting you to the results. Lucky you!

I've actually been using my 3D printer quite a lot, but kind of backlogged on the postings as one of our fine members was having teething issues with his new printer that I had strongly encouraged he purchase. It felt inappropriate to show my successes while he was struggling.

I consolidated my various collections of ER collets in an old cookie tin:



A full set of cheap Chinese ER11. A full quality set of 3R (Swedish) ER16 and the beginnings of an ER25 set, mostly consisting of TRUSCO precision grade units that Amazon mispriced for $5 each. I wanted to finish up some old, almost empty spools of filament, so it resulted in a multicolored print where I changed between them.



I printed a new insert for the wooden case for my 150mm JAM parallels set, the original closed cell foam was badly stained, filthy and full of metal shavings. There was enough space so I was also able to add the extra pair of 45mm units that I picked up cheap. You can see by the seam that I had to actually print this in two sections as it was just a little too wide for the printer to do in one go. Honestly it is really unusual that I hit the space limits of my relatively small (235mm²) Ender 3 printer, I can live with this kind of minor compromise and when I build my custom unit someday it will likely be only slightly larger at 250mm².



Space is such a constraint for me, I printed some hooks so my printer can hang from the shelf above my electronics bench so the space under it can be utilized. I will consider actually constructing the new printer to be fully suspended during operation, you can never have too much desktop surface.

The next project was this lovely retro "Dental Lathe" which I gave a deep clean and basic service, some new wiring and made some adaptors for the brass spiral tapered spindles that allow mounting the more commonly available 5/8" (16mm) wheels.



These nuts use a beefy Acme style thread, one of them with reverse threads so it doesn't get loose from the spindle rotation. I put holes for a standard pin spanner to help with installing and removal. Hours of searching found something similar, only available in the US from an obscure specialty company. Not terribly expensive by themselves, but being able to just print these up any time I need them is a great comfort.

 

[Bakafish]

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 with ancient adhesive tape residue that was (I assume) used to hold a protective sheet of plastic film over the unit. That kept it in good physical shape over the years, but took me hours to soften and scrape it clean. As much as I loathe adhesive tape, the major issue was a badly broken power switch.



I could identify the model, documentation and manufacturer of the original switch, but the unit was long ago discontinued and was a unique size. Because it uses an integrated 'neon' style 100v indicator lamp, it limited the choices for an easy drop in replacement. I didn't want to have to do a difficult LED conversion or lose the pilot light function, so I found a more compact switch (with a lovely green phosphor neon) and printed the snap in adaptor collar you see above.

I've been doing a lot of bearing replacements, so I picked up a nice adjustable pin spanner as I've often been stymied by spanner nuts. It came with two sets of double sided threaded inserts to support the 4 different pin diameters, but made they no provision to store the loose set with the tool. I had seen used units advertized, all of them missing the extra pins.



So I made a little block with form fitted slots in the sides that fit over the legs of the tool and threaded holes that allow me to securely store the spare pins. With the legs clamped on it, they aren't going anywhere.



The last item for today (thanks for staying with me here...)

I've been designing an electric Diamond hone similar to several homemade units that have been posted on YouTube, primarily all influenced by a Stefan Gotteswinter design. The purpose of this tool is to sharpen and polish the extremely hard carbide blades used for the hand scraping process (and touching up carbide inserts and other useful things.) These scraper blades need to be kept sharp, and the angle and curvature of the bevel are both critical to them working effectively. Despite being an arcane and very rare tool, they are not particularly complex so are a great candidate for home building, especially with cheap Chinese diamond abrasive disks being widely available. I had already collected most of the components I needed quite inexpensively, including a small Panasonic 100v reversible gear motor, several nice bearings and some disks.

While I was doing so, an individual posted an item from his grandfather's defunct factory that was pretty clearly to me a small industrial unit. His grandfather told him it cost ~$3000 new 40 years ago when he bought it (I have no doubts that was true, maybe even more) but it gave him a false understanding of its current value, especially as he had put a 'new plug' on the unit that I was pretty sure not at all correct for such a machine. This was the only photo I had to go on:



As I had been deep in the design phase, that picture jumped out at me, I knew what it likely was (he knew it was a grinder, but not much more.) He was asking $500 for it, but a 42 year old machine in that condition, with no details on the motor or diamond wheel, I tried really hard to explain what it was used for, and that his expectations for its value were too high. A difficult message to convey, even in my native tongue, it didn't seem to translate well in Japanese. I didn't want to give him a low offer initially, I figured it was better for him to understand based on the market. Over the course of a month I saw him cutting the price, more and more desperately, I finally offered him $80 (which in my defense was a gamble as it really could have been total junk.)

When it arrived the motor identification plate had been completely worn away over time, although I quickly identified the motor as 3 phase based on the wiring (I'm getting better at this stuff) so I was right about the cord. The switch box was jammed, everything filthy, the paint badly deteriorated and it had a sizable dent in the cooling shroud. But the motor seemed in good shape internally, the bearings were not bad (I replaced them anyway of course) and the diamond cup wheel still had a lot of surface and seemed in serviceable shape.

As I've likely mentioned before, unlike some parts of Europe, 3 phase power here in Japan is limited to large industrial or multi-tenant buildings. I'm limited to a 60A residential split phase service with no chance of getting 3 phase power despite having a pole a couple meters from my house, so running a 3-phase motor, even a tiny motor like this, requires a phase converter or a VFD (Variable Frequency Drive) inverter. So after measuring the coils and determining the motor seemed healthy I ordered a little Mitsubishi 100v VFD inverter unit.

The VFD power rating needs to be very closely matched to the motor or you will damage one or both of the components and without the motor plate you might wonder how I ordered the correct one. Well, much to my surprise, when I searched for the model number of the whole unit, I actually discovered that the company who made it is still selling the same machine! They specialize in diamond grinding wheels and lapping powders, this is the only machine they make at this time, but they've sold this Coelacanth basically unchanged for over 40 years. Their tiny head office is here in Tokyo, I will try and visit them at some point, but on with the story.

One of the really nice things about industrial gear is that most manufacturers offer (to various degrees of difficulty) access to accurate 3D models which can be easily integrated into your designs. In order to retrofit this machine I modeled the existing bracket where the old switch box was located (I cleaned and repaired the old switch box, all the changes I made are reversible in case I ever sell it) and then uploaded the 3D models of the VFD, a compact line filter I had (since VFD's are notorious for creating electromagnetic noise on their voltage source) and the new industrial forward/reverse switch.



In the image above, the existing plate is highlighted in blue. I know that looks like an incomprehensible jumble of lines, but in Fusion 360 it is much easier to grapple with and you are able to change the visibility of the various components to help keep things simple.

I modeled 3 pieces to contain all the wiring and integrate the new switch, using my knowledge of additive printing so that they would print easily. After completely disassembling and cleaning the machine, and pounding the worst of the dent out of the cooling shroud, I drilled and tapped some additional mounting holes in the existing bracket. I replaced the motor feed wire with a new section of shielded motor wire (again, EM noise abatement) and applied some Tamaya epoxy putty to the dented area so that it could be sanded smooth and wouldn't look chowdered after painting.

I gave everything another scrub, and applied some good metal primer, re-sanding some of the more timeworn pieces. I replaced the shield adjustment fastener with a stainless thumbscrew. One of the challenges I've had is that there really isn't a great selection of paint colors here in Japan. I wanted a nice greenish gray that matched the original tone, but the closest I could get after a great deal of searching was a sort of antique green. It isn't bad, but I wish I had access to the custom paint matching and mixing that can be found at every big box store in the US.

Anyway, here she is after all that work. About $300 invested total, but that's still about half the price of the diamond wheel on it, so worth the effort I think.



The VFD seems to work well, the switch is off in the center and runs the motor forward or reverse. It is wired in to the VFD using the low voltage signal connections it provides under the top panel. VFD's have incredible amounts of configurability and control, but this is about as simple a machine as it gets, even the reverse isn't that important. The table tilts on v-ways with the axis behind the grinding surface, it has a small angle gauge that you may be able to see below the adjustment screw, it all seems to work quite well. The table can also be easily lifted off its mounts by hand if you need full access to the wheel and the slot allows you to use a small miter gauge to grind in compound angles.

The diamond cup wheel was pretty glazed and gummed up, but I will get an aluminum oxide burnishing stone to free it up and expose some fresh diamonds. I tested it on some hardened steel and it worked quite effectively! Despite having this, I'm still very much pondering moving forward on the homebuilt init since the advantage is being able to quickly swap grits, this wheel is very fine which may hinder me if I need to regrind the curvature of my scraper blades, but I need to use it in anger before theorycrafting myself into another project...

 

[LeonardY]

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 with ancient adhesive tape residue that was (I assume) used to hold a protective sheet of plastic film over the unit. That kept it in good physical shape over the years, but took me hours to soften and scrape it clean. As much as I loathe adhesive tape, the major issue was a badly broken power switch.



I could identify the model, documentation and manufacturer of the original switch, but the unit was long ago discontinued and was a unique size. Because it uses an integrated 'neon' style 100v indicator lamp, it limited the choices for an easy drop in replacement. I didn't want to have to do a difficult LED conversion or lose the pilot light function, so I found a more compact switch (with a lovely green phosphor neon) and printed the snap in adaptor collar you see above.

I've been doing a lot of bearing replacements, so I picked up a nice adjustable pin spanner as I've often been stymied by spanner nuts. It came with two sets of double sided threaded inserts to support the 4 different pin diameters, but made they no provision to store the loose set with the tool. I had seen used units advertized, all of them missing the extra pins.



So I made a little block with form fitted slots in the sides that fit over the legs of the tool and threaded holes that allow me to securely store the spare pins. With the legs clamped on it, they aren't going anywhere.



The last item for today (thanks for staying with me here...)

I've been designing an electric Diamond hone similar to several homemade units that have been posted on YouTube, primarily all influenced by a Stefan Gotteswinter design. The purpose of this tool is to sharpen and polish the extremely hard carbide blades used for the hand scraping process (and touching up carbide inserts and other useful things.) These scraper blades need to be kept sharp, and the angle and curvature of the bevel are both critical to them working effectively. Despite being an arcane and very rare tool, they are not particularly complex so are a great candidate for home building, especially with cheap Chinese diamond abrasive disks being widely available. I had already collected most of the components I needed quite inexpensively, including a small Panasonic 100v reversible gear motor, several nice bearings and some disks.

While I was doing so, an individual posted an item from his grandfather's defunct factory that was pretty clearly to me a small industrial unit. His grandfather told him it cost ~$3000 new 40 years ago when he bought it (I have no doubts that was true, maybe even more) but it gave him a false understanding of its current value, especially as he had put a 'new plug' on the unit that I was pretty sure not at all correct for such a machine. This was the only photo I had to go on:



As I had been deep in the design phase, that picture jumped out at me, I knew what it likely was (he knew it was a grinder, but not much more.) He was asking $500 for it, but a 42 year old machine in that condition, with no details on the motor or diamond wheel, I tried really hard to explain what it was used for, and that his expectations for its value were too high. A difficult message to convey, even in my native tongue, it didn't seem to translate well in Japanese. I didn't want to give him a low offer initially, I figured it was better for him to understand based on the market. Over the course of a month I saw him cutting the price, more and more desperately, I finally offered him $80 (which in my defense was a gamble as it really could have been total junk.)

When it arrived the motor identification plate had been completely worn away over time, although I quickly identified the motor as 3 phase based on the wiring (I'm getting better at this stuff) so I was right about the cord. The switch box was jammed, everything filthy, the paint badly deteriorated and it had a sizable dent in the cooling shroud. But the motor seemed in good shape internally, the bearings were not bad (I replaced them anyway of course) and the diamond cup wheel still had a lot of surface and seemed in serviceable shape.

As I've likely mentioned before, unlike some parts of Europe, 3 phase power here in Japan is limited to large industrial or multi-tenant buildings. I'm limited to a 60A residential split phase service with no chance of getting 3 phase power despite having a pole a couple meters from my house, so running a 3-phase motor, even a tiny motor like this, requires a phase converter or a VFD (Variable Frequency Drive) inverter. So after measuring the coils and determining the motor seemed healthy I ordered a little Mitsubishi 100v VFD inverter unit.

The VFD power rating needs to be very closely matched to the motor or you will damage one or both of the components and without the motor plate you might wonder how I ordered the correct one. Well, much to my surprise, when I searched for the model number of the whole unit, I actually discovered that the company who made it is still selling the same machine! They specialize in diamond grinding wheels and lapping powders, this is the only machine they make at this time, but they've sold this Coelacanth basically unchanged for over 40 years. Their tiny head office is here in Tokyo, I will try and visit them at some point, but on with the story.

One of the really nice things about industrial gear is that most manufacturers offer (to various degrees of difficulty) access to accurate 3D models which can be easily integrated into your designs. In order to retrofit this machine I modeled the existing bracket where the old switch box was located (I cleaned and repaired the old switch box, all the changes I made are reversible in case I ever sell it) and then uploaded the 3D models of the VFD, a compact line filter I had (since VFD's are notorious for creating electromagnetic noise on their voltage source) and the new industrial forward/reverse switch.



In the image above, the existing plate is highlighted in blue. I know that looks like an incomprehensible jumble of lines, but in Fusion 360 it is much easier to grapple with and you are able to change the visibility of the various components to help keep things simple.

I modeled 3 pieces to contain all the wiring and integrate the new switch, using my knowledge of additive printing so that they would print easily. After completely disassembling and cleaning the machine, and pounding the worst of the dent out of the cooling shroud, I drilled and tapped some additional mounting holes in the existing bracket. I replaced the motor feed wire with a new section of shielded motor wire (again, EM noise abatement) and applied some Tamaya epoxy putty to the dented area so that it could be sanded smooth and wouldn't look chowdered after painting.

I gave everything another scrub, and applied some good metal primer, re-sanding some of the more timeworn pieces. I replaced the shield adjustment fastener with a stainless thumbscrew. One of the challenges I've had is that there really isn't a great selection of paint colors here in Japan. I wanted a nice greenish gray that matched the original tone, but the closest I could get after a great deal of searching was a sort of antique green. It isn't bad, but I wish I had access to the custom paint matching and mixing that can be found at every big box store in the US.

Anyway, here she is after all that work. About $300 invested total, but that's still about half the price of the diamond wheel on it, so worth the effort I think.



The VFD seems to work well, the switch is off in the center and runs the motor forward or reverse. It is wired in to the VFD using the low voltage signal connections it provides under the top panel. VFD's have incredible amounts of configurability and control, but this is about as simple a machine as it gets, even the reverse isn't that important. The table tilts on v-ways with the axis behind the grinding surface, it has a small angle gauge that you may be able to see below the adjustment screw, it all seems to work quite well. The table can also be easily lifted off its mounts by hand if you need full access to the wheel and the slot allows you to use a small miter gauge to grind in compound angles.

The diamond cup wheel was pretty glazed and gummed up, but I will get an aluminum oxide burnishing stone to free it up and expose some fresh diamonds. I tested it on some hardened steel and it worked quite effectively! Despite having this, I'm still very much pondering moving forward on the homebuilt init since the advantage is being able to quickly swap grits, this wheel is very fine which may hinder me if I need to regrind the curvature of my scraper blades, but I need to use it in anger before theorycrafting myself into another project...

I was thinking about you the other day and wondering how you were doing. It appears well.

I see you have made a lot of progress. It's inspiring.
Great job with the printer. There are so many things that you can fix and make.

What software are you using to do your modeling? I use FormZ and Zbrush.

I have been modeling some of my fixtures for my CNC and printing them. They are like soft block tooling. If I hit one, it's no big deal.

Great find with the grinder. Beautiful job on the restoration. I like the color you've chosen as well.
It's on my list to build one. As so many other things are as well.

 

[Bakafish]

What software are you using to do your modeling? I use FormZ and Zbrush.

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 on a PC-AT with a light pen. I really started getting into it when MacDraw came out, and used that on my trusty Mac II for many years past their expiration date. Doing everything in 2D for so long may have made it easier for me to embrace the Fusion 360 sketch based projection philosophy. I don't ever touch the surface modeling stuff, and I haven't needed to so far, my modeling isn't very organic. I'm really happy with it, it can be tricky to get it to do what I want, but never insurmountable and usually a sign that I'm doing it wrong. The only serious complaint I have is that its development has progressed so rapidly that a lot of the information on the internet is stale in the sense that searching can often lead to solutions for very different versions of the app that are no longer applicable, although I'm at the point where I almost never have to look anymore.

 

[LeonardY]

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 on a PC-AT with a light pen. I really started getting into it when MacDraw came out, and used that on my trusty Mac II for many years past their expiration date. Doing everything in 2D for so long may have made it easier for me to embrace the Fusion 360 sketch based projection philosophy. I don't ever touch the surface modeling stuff, and I haven't needed to so far, my modeling isn't very organic. I'm really happy with it, it can be tricky to get it to do what I want, but never insurmountable and usually a sign that I'm doing it wrong. The only serious complaint I have is that its development has progressed so rapidly that a lot of the information on the internet is stale in the sense that searching can often lead to solutions for very different versions of the app that are no longer applicable, although I'm at the point where I almost never have to look anymore.

That's pretty much how I started. I took four years of drafting in high school but got frustrated when I had to start all over again in college.
I'm sure I'm older than you since I started on the Apple II. I learned 6502 machine code to program it. I designed the chassis for most of the second generation MACs.
I started out in AUTOCAD. Did 2D for years. Funny thing is I went back to drawing by hand because it was faster to convey my designs to the shop guys. Started to learn Solidworks but the CAD manager didn't like the idea of a designer taking work away his guys.
That just pushed me to FormZ and then Rhino. But I work in multiple programs. Using whatever tool set works best.
I been doing all my CAM programing in VisualCAM.
It's tough to learn software when your having to figure it out on your own.
I won't put my work in your thread. But if you interested, here's a project I'm trying to get finished.

ESB AT-AT

Thought I would add a few images of the the head and body together. Yes, there are legs but I did those in another program. I needed CAD files to CNC machine aluminum legs. Thanks for looking.

www.zbrushcentral.com

 

[Bakafish]

I'm sure I'm older than you since I started on the Apple II.

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, bought as soon as they became available, completely solidified my love of computers. It's unfortunate my impostor syndrome delayed my career in IT until much later in life... hindsight, but I still got in early enough that it all worked out well.

I designed the chassis for most of the second generation MACs.

Second Generation could mean a lot of things in this context. I've owned an awful lot of Mac's over the years, any ones you are particularly proud of?

I won't put my work in your thread. But if you interested, here's a project I'm trying to get finished.

No worries, I'm not precious about my thread. That's a great looking project! All that greebling and details would be a pain with F360 in the way I use it, there are the surface modeling modes, but I've never really been comfortable with NURBS and mesh stuff. I can see you seem to have some degrees of articulation in the legs, is this going to be a fully walking AT-AT? What kind of CNC are you using?

 

[LeonardY]

Second Generation could mean a lot of things in this context. I've owned an awful lot of Mac's over the years, any ones you are particularly proud of?

I did the chassis for the SE model of MAC. I had to design it to be backwards compatible since they want to be able to use in the current models. I also did the FX and and the smaller box chassis. I wasn't working for Apple at the time but for another outside design company. I thought it was funny. I was designing components for the MAC in AutoCAD on a PC. I started on Version 3 of AutoCAD. The last MAC I owned was the VX. It was a horrible.

is this going to be a fully walking AT-AT? What kind of CNC are you using?

It's a stop motion replica. I finished three fully articulated armatures over the lock down.

Uncle Lenny's house of toys and tools

New member. Great information and inspiration here. Posted a few times, Haven't properly introduced myself. I bought my house new in 1996. This is my first home and I did my best to setup the garage. Now, fifteen years later and lessons learned. I've redesigned and started rebuilding the...

www.garagejournal.com

I have a CNC masters Baron.

BARON® MILLING MACHINE - CNC Masters

DESCRIPTION ▼ CHOOSE OPTIONS ▼ TECH SPECS ▼ FEATURES ▼ MX SOFTWARE INCLUDED ▼ VIDEOS ▼ REVIEWS ▼ SEE PRICES & PACKAGE DEALS DOWNLOAD OUR CATALOG New for $6350. One Year Warranty. Used Two Year Old Baron for $3999, in stock. 4 Month Warranty. DESCRIPTION CNC BARON DOVETAIL COLUMN TABLE TOP MILL 3...

www.cncmasters.com

 

[nicholam77]

I've actually been using my 3D printer quite a lot, but kind of backlogged on the postings as one of our fine members was having teething issues with his new printer that I had strongly encouraged he purchase. It felt inappropriate to show my successes while he was struggling.

Link is dead but I think I know who you're referring to

Please don't hold back on my account, I love to see what people are doing with 3D printing especially in a tool-related space. Often the organizational implementations like the collet holder you made are the most satisfying to me.

Printer hanging from the ceiling... wow, I'd never have thought of that. I'm surprised with the way it slings the bed around it doesn't cause unwanted vibrations or artifacts. Mine is taking up a lot of desk space, though. I haven't really found a proper home for it yet.

Really interesting stuff as usual, and I admire your dedication to fixing up older tools.

 

[Bakafish]

Link is dead but I think I know who you're referring to

Fixed.

Please don't hold back on my account, I love to see what people are doing with 3D printing especially in a tool-related space. Often the organizational implementations like the collet holder you made are the most satisfying to me.

Printer hanging from the ceiling... wow, I'd never have thought of that. I'm surprised with the way it slings the bed around it doesn't cause unwanted vibrations or artifacts. Mine is taking up a lot of desk space, though. I haven't really found a proper home for it yet.

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 frame and the bed moves down as the Z axis, so mounting it from above actually may increase the rigidity. I may never get that far though as Nailmaker keeps fighting hard for its place as my only printer. Last night I tried something I've wanted to do for a while, a two color inlay print where you print a couple layers of one color then print another color over the top of it.



This is a little scraper gauge, it has the common grinding radii of the blade profile for scraping rough to fine and the center is the 1 inch square standard you use to count the number of high spots to evaluate your progress (more is better.) Multi color/multi material 3d printing is still mostly a kludge, I'm really waiting for a good reliable and efficient solution.

Really interesting stuff as usual, and I admire your dedication to fixing up older tools.

It's really hard for me to not anthropomorphise old tools, especially when they have experienced serious neglect. I just feel so sorry for them. I told myself I was just going to do a basic clean up of the grinder, but I was soon spending hours (unsuccessfully) trying to find the right shade of paint, I need to just accept it is what's going to happen. I'm ashamed to admit I bought and rebuilt another one of those old Hitachi drills. Did I need it? No. But it was $10 and in great shape.

 

[nicholam77]

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.

Haha, ok that makes a lot more sense. That's... a pretty great idea actually.

My next printer will likely be an CoreXY type loosely based on one of the Voron machines.

I'll be following any sort of future printer build closely, if it happens.

Last night I tried something I've wanted to do for a while, a two color inlay print where you print a couple layers of one color then print another color over the top of it.

I've been curious about this, too. I figured for text (like labels) it might be easier to make them embossed and paint them a contrasting color.

It's really hard for me to not anthropomorphise old tools, especially when they have experienced serious neglect. I just feel so sorry for them.

I can tell

 

[Bakafish]

I've been curious about this, too. I figured for text (like labels) it might be easier to make them embossed and paint them a contrasting color.

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, but it is more fiddly than it seems on its face. The inlay print method is also tedious, but could be vastly simplified if there was direct slicer support that automated the alignment and filament changes so the process could be done in a single print, a very achievable feat IMHO.

 

[nicholam77]

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.

Ah, yeah I didn't really research it very much. I was wondering if it would paint well.

The inlay print method is also tedious, but could be vastly simplified if there was direct slicer support that automated the alignment and filament changes so the process could be done in a single print, a very achievable feat IMHO.

Not sure what slicer you use, but I think you can do this in Cura. Here's an article using a filament change script, and here's a video using a pause print at height script.

 

[Bakafish]

Not sure what slicer you use, but I think you can do this in Cura. Here's an article using a filament change script, and here's a video using a pause print at height script.

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 in normal use.) You also need to ensure that each color (object) is properly aligned in the slicer before slicing, and that isn't easy either. For example, I had to actually join all the numbers together as one object with a large surface that actually is positioned below the print bed before slicing, otherwise Cura treats each number as an individual object and it would be impossible to properly position them. So ideally you would want to do it all in one 'multicolor' print, with the slicer re-zeroing the more accurate Z axis at each filament change, and preserving its X and Y coordinates across the entire job. Lastly, for the first few layers you want to enable Z Hop during retraction, which causes the print head to raise up when moving, in order to clear the existing printed material that shares the same layer heights. Currently Cura can only do that for the whole print which slows things way down and affects the quality of the upper layers where it isn't actually required.

I am pretty sure all these issues could be resolved by a specialized plugin (or g-code post filter) that automates these operations, I'm just way too bogged down in existing projects to think about starting work on such a thing. It would be low hanging fruit if I were a slicer dev though...

 

[kaymccampbell]

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 in normal use.) You also need to ensure that each color (object) is properly aligned in the slicer before slicing, and that isn't easy either. For example, I had to actually join all the numbers together as one object with a large surface that actually is positioned below the print bed before slicing, otherwise Cura treats each number as an individual object and it would be impossible to properly position them. So ideally you would want to do it all in one 'multicolor' print, with the slicer re-zeroing the more accurate Z axis at each filament change, and preserving its X and Y coordinates across the entire job. Lastly, for the first few layers you want to enable Z Hop during retraction, which causes the print head to raise up when moving, in order to clear the existing printed material that shares the same layer heights. Currently Cura can only do that for the whole print which slows things way down and affects the quality of the upper layers where it isn't actually required.

I am pretty sure all these issues could be resolved by a specialized plugin (or g-code post filter) that automates these operations, I'm just way too bogged down in existing projects to think about starting work on such a thing. It would be low hanging fruit if I were a slicer dev though...

I hate to step into this erudite 3D printer debate, but I have a brutally simple solution. When I wanted different colored lettering, I just printed the main body, with the letter pockets, then used a filament pen to top off the letters afterwards. It was quick and pretty easy.

 

[Bakafish]

I hate to step into this erudite 3D printer debate, but I have a brutally simple solution. When I wanted different colored lettering, I just printed the main body, with the letter pockets, then used a filament pen to top off the letters afterwards. It was quick and pretty easy.

Simple is always better

 

[Bakafish]

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 hundred dollars, and I really only needed it for a few projects (and wanted something smaller.) I had all the parts, lots of beefy copper, a high current Lead-Acid battery and an Arduino that I had programmed to work with an LCD display and rotary encoder to control the duration. It all just sat in various boxes waiting to be put together, never quite high enough on the list. Well a couple days ago I saw someone review the latest little death boxes out of China and they are now making much cheaper, smaller and quite effective little LiPo spot welders. So to Amazon I went!



The number one job for this was my old Fluke 190 Scopemeter, portable oscilloscope. The 7.2v NiMH battery was dead when I got it, and although it worked fine on the AC adaptor, there are many situations where running it totally isolated on battery power is both safer and gives a cleaner signal. The replacement batteries are available from Fluke, and there are even third party replacements out there that are not too expensive, but at some point I had bought all the replacement cells, so I really wanted to do this myself.



Those little marks are the only trace of several hundred amps of low voltage current taking a few fractions of a second to melt the metal together. The bond is surprisingly strong, requiring you to literally tear the metal apart usually with the welds themselves staying firmly attached to the battery.

As a complete aside, when looking through every box and bag of electronics junk trying to find the nickel strips I had bought several years ago to join up the batteries, I saw a little glimmer of gold at the bottom of one plastic tub. I knew immediately what it was, an absolutely tiny little mystery contact that had flung itself from my disassembled Mitutoyo calipers into the void. At the time I was in a panic because I had accidently spilled a large quantity of glue on the poor things and I was trying to get them disassembled and clean before the glue started to harden. All I saw was out of the corner of my eye, a golden flash, heard the gentle tinkle of it bouncing off several things on its way to who knew where. I've literally been searching for it for years now, every time I vacuum that area or clean my desk, I do so with extra lights, reading glasses, and on my hands and knees in hopes of it turning up. I never gave up on finding it, even though I had no idea what it was even for, because crazy thing was that it had no perceivable impact on the functionality. The calipers worked just fine when I reassembled them without it. I assumed it was some kind of reset contact or something. It turns out, now that I was able to see the shape and location, it was the grounding contact for the optional recording interface that I never used and didn't even remember it supported. Have you ever lost something and been totally unwilling to give up on finding it?​

The old Fluke came back to life as happy as a clam.



It doubles as a pretty nice multimeter as well. The newer ones are color, have higher resolution and better bandwidth, but I've never had anything that this couldn't handle. I'll get a bench unit someday, but they are expensive and I just don't do enough of this kind of work to justify it yet, waiting for laziness to do its magic yet again.

 

[LeonardY]

Have you ever lost something and been totally unwilling to give up on finding it?

Yes, Just recently the ferrule on my feed tube for the 3D printer popped off. I heard it hit some wood and then a tinkle on the concrete. That was a couple of months ago. I have swept the garage and moved a bunch of stuff out the way but didn't find it.
A couple of weeks ago I moved my printer. Like you, I saw something out of the corner of my eye on the floor. There it was, in plain view.

I was taught a trick to find something that you put down and couldn't find. You sit down ,close your eyes and relax. Think about the item you misplaced and just relax. When you start to nod off, you'll see where it is. Yes, it works.

 

[Bakafish]

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 it a "Sayonara Sale" when people return back to the US and unload all the junk they bought here that isn't worth the high cost of shipping back, and usually there is nothing but cheap housewares. But he was selling a Miller TIG welder, unobtanium over here, and when I went to pick that up I saw this tiny mill and a little lathe and bought both of them too. He hadn't advertised them, both were in need of repair, and I got the feeling he wanted to get them working better so he could charge more than I was offering, but his wife gave him a look and he relented. They were my first metal working machines over here and I did my best to clean them up and get them working again.

The mill was suffering from the quill return spring not properly engaged, and the Saddle and Table were both very inconsistent in travel and would stick or become very loose over their range of motion. Lots of sloppy backlash from the lead screws as well. I cleaned it, oiled it, adjusted the ways as best I could, and repositioned the set screw for the quill spring which made the unit functional again, but I knew I'd need to do more work to get it back to fully working condition.

That was like 6 years ago, so I guess it was time to really look critically at the machine. The #1 issue for me has been the gibs just never could be adjusted well, I was constantly having to adjust them, even during cuts to get them to slide but not to have excessive slop. It was unusable at the ends of travel, you basically had a small sweet spot in the middle that kind of worked. I tried to only move in one axis at a time, locking the other two to prevent any unwanted movement, and the locks doubled as one of the gib adjustments so locking it meant blowing up any of the finicky adjustments that were made before. It was a real pain in the ***, and it lead to me not using the machine as much as I would have wanted to.

Disassembling it once again, and looking at it with far more experience and knowledge than I had when I first opened it up several years back, it was clear that the gibs (small strips of metal used to adjust the fit of a dovetail sliding joint) looked home made out of mild steel. They were crudely built, and showed very small contact patches of wear at the edges, which explained why they were so inconsistent it their movement. They were also way too thin and narrow, so they were only supported by the set screws on one side and the sliding surface on the other, with no other faces helping with registration. Total garbage.

The good thing was that the factory machined surfaces seemed intact and showed little wear. I used one of my smaller hand scrapers and some bench stones and carefully matched the factory surfaces of the two dovetail slides, just knocking down the worst of the high points to help improve the feel. Then I ordered some 3mm brass stock to make some new gibs. The main complication being the chicken and egg situation where I need the gibs to work so I can use the table to make the new gibs... The only solution to that was that they had to be made by hand.

Brass is actually a really nice material to work with. If you've ever enjoyed Clickspring's YouTube channel, you can see how wonderful it can be manipulated. For my needs it is a decent material for gibs as it is softer than the cast iron so it reduces wear, and it is naturally pretty low friction. Bronze is harder and stiffer, making it better suited for this purpose, cast iron is another great material, but both are more difficult to find in the appropriate basic size, and harder to work by hand. I figured I would start with Brass and hopefully make something good enough to use to make the more difficult materials if needed.

The stock I got was oversized, 15mm x 3mm and the first thing I needed to do is cut it to length. Some time ago I saw that knifemakers have a tool called a "filing guide" which is a little clamp that sandwitches the part between two parallel straight edges that are made from Carbide. This Carbide surface is too hard for a steel file to cut, so it allows you to file the workpiece down to the point where you clamped, giving you a precision edge with simple hand tools. I haven't built one of these (yet!) but I did buy a bunch of surplus square Carbide inserts very cheaply. These big flat, perfectly square chunks of Carbide are not commonly used anymore, so they are sold very cheaply, I got 20 of them for about $10, but they are super useful for all sorts of things. Getting to my point, I clamped one, aligning the edge to the scribe line of the brass stock and used it as a guide for my hacksaw to quickly cut clean and accurate lengths.

A high quality "Engineering" hand file is surprisingly flat, but using it to establish an angle, especially along a long edge of a piece of metal, requires a lot of skill and experience. As you should well know by now, I like to substitute hackery for this kind of craftsmanship whenever possible. No disrespect for the guys who spent 40 years perfecting their techniques, but I am going to hit the easy button if I can. Entering from stage left, one of my recent acquisitions, a Magnetic Chuck. These big lumps of metal have the cool ability to turn on and of their strong magnetic fields, and are primarily intended for surface grinders and other machines that need as unfettered access to ferrous parts, they hold firmly without getting in the way. I picked this up to ease my ability to hold small parts (like the mill's Saddle and Table) for scraping, it's really easy to reposition and remove them, something that is constantly required. But it also worked great to hold these files in place so that the part itself can be manipulated, making it much easier to establish the bevels and flatten the faces. It is a lot easier keeping a small part flat and properly registered to a big file, than vise versa. This only makes sense for soft non-magnetic materials like brass or aluminum, but it sure helped me keep everything true.



The Proxxon uses a simple gib design, which is supposed to be shaped like a parallelogram in cross section. Larger machines often use "tapered" gibs, which add a taper to the entire length that matches the taper machined into the backside of the sliding dovetail, that allows a single adjustment to loosen or tighten the gib. This helps to simplify the adjustment as the gib wears, but makes all the parts more complex due to all the compound angles involved. Fortunately I didn't need to deal with that complexity, but I still had to hand file 60 degree angles on the top and bottom, and get the heights dialed in. You can see the crappy steel ones incorrect shape next to the Brass parts I made in comparison.



One unexpected surprise was that the gibs were actually very different dimensions. The garbage that was there before were both made from the same piece of steel, so I had assumed they would just be different lengths of the same cross section, but the smaller gib was 0.5mm thinner and 2mm shorter than the other one, requiring a lot of time getting it filed down to the right thickness. I have to say, fitting them in place for the first time, even without the adjustment screws in place, it really impressed me with how well this little machine could slide with properly fitted parts. It made such a big difference, it is just rock solid and smooth across the entire range and adjusting it is easy now.

With that out of the way, I moved to the next thing on my list which was the gib locks. As I said before, the design used one of the adjustment screws to also act as a lock. This meant that any setting for it was lost as soon as you used it, that it could potentially drift since it wasn't fitted with a lock nut, and it required a Hex wrench (of a different size to the adjustment grub screws) to manipulate it. The obvious solution was to drill an additional hole for a dedicated lock, and use one of the adjustable lever type screws so it could be locked by hand.



One of the things that always pokes at my OCD is measuring the distance between holes. It is something that I do a lot of, and there are some tricks that you can do, measuring to the outside of the holes and subtracting the width of the hole, and so forth, but it always feels inaccurate. Trying to line up the calipers with the imaginary center or edge of a small hole, when they are at some odd angle where it is hard to see straight on, it just drives me up the wall. It is especially frustrating when I get a measurement that isn't a clean distance, was it manufactured poorly, or am I measuring wrong? I ended up getting a special caliper that is made with conical tips that automatically find the center, and an adjustable jaw in case they are different diameters or on a different plane. Game changing! Now I could lay out the new holes for the gib locks and be sure they were well centered and looked good.



In order to drill the holes, I could do some 'self surgery' where the Proxxon could machine its own parts. I fixtured the saddle to my JAM angle plate and clamped the whole thing in place. One of the issues with the Proxxon is I got it with only one of the proprietary collets that it came with originally. They only make 3 sizes, and fortunately I had the most useful 10mm and a matching drill chuck, but the other ones were quite expensive to replace so I had instead made my own adaptors to use ER11 and ER16 style collets. I rarely used the chuck because it seemed to have a lot of runout (wobble where the drill bit it is holding doesn't rotate straight along its axis.) But I had noticed that the ER adaptors I made seemed to be bad as well, which I at first attributed to their cheap origins, but after carefully measuring them in isolation, I started to suspect the Proxxon's spindle itself. So before I drilled these new holes I did a runout measurement and found that the issue was as I had feared, the spindle was over 0.15mm of runout. I drilled the holes I needed undersized, and hand reamed them to size before tapping them, but after installing the two orange locks successfully I would need to tear into the heart of the machine.



The spindle cartridge is a pretty simple affair, an outer tube (#2) that supports two deep groove ball bearings (#36, real precision spindles use angular contact ball bearings, often in multiple sets, but it requires a more complex design in order to control the preload they require and I don't object to the simple design they used here given the intended use.) The Spindle itself (#3) runs through the two bearings, and is threaded at the top to allow a multi-groove belt pulley (not shown) to screw on, clamping the spindle between the bearings. Inside that tube, a large spring (#11) surrounds the spindle, and is engaged by two screws (#17, #86) that poke through two slots (#2), which create the return force, so the spindle cartridge can act like the quill of a drill press, and automatically return to the top when the precision height adjustment (not shown, an optional part that covers screw #17) and quill lock (#51) are disengaged.



This return spring was one of the original issues the machine was suffering from when I originally got it. I had discovered that the two screws were somehow engaged at the middle of the spring instead of the bottom, limiting the quill travel and making strange springy sounds when moved. I was able to quickly fix it and it gave me no trouble at all since that time. But when I disassembled the spindle for inspection I saw some really bad damage. This is after I filed all the big gall marks, keep in mind this is a hardened steel shaft.



The guy I bought it from said he got it from his job because it was broken, I had assumed he meant the quill spring issue, and later suspected his company had junked it because the gibs didn't work, but now I saw evidence of some serious 800lbs Gorilla action. The #17 screw that engages the quill return spring, is a set screw to provide clearance so it can fit under the optional precision down feed, which hides it. There is nothing limiting its depth, and what had apparently happened is that the screw had either worked its way further into the spindle, or someone not understanding its purpose had over tightened it, and it had come into contact with the inner spindle shaft itself. This is not a super powerful machine, and even minimal contact would have brought the machine to a stop. So the only thing that could have torn out the big chunks I found was that someone had proceeded to 'free' it by brute force, rotating the spindle with a wrench until the screw carved enough of a groove in the shaft to free it up. This seems to have happened several times, as the depth of this groove is quite significant, and the multiple tracks showed a couple such events. The torque required to free it in this way, likely caused the spindle to bend or twist, causing the excessive runout I was seeing. The bearings were of course shot as well, but replacing them had little effect on the wobble.

One of the good things about the Proxxon brand is that they do have parts available, even for older machines like this one. But the proprietary collet is a real limitation, there is already limited Z height and having to put another chuck in only compounds the issue, so my decision is to replace the spindle with an ER16 chuck. The threads for the pulley are an unusual fine pitch M10x1.0 but I already have a die for that. I was able to order a 12mm hardened steel shaft that is custom configured with the correct overall length, 10mm shoulder area where I can thread it and machined flats on the other side for the collet's set screws. All for about $20 delivered which is very cool. I already had the ER16 collet chuck that fits a 12mm shank, so I will thread the new spindle and permanently mount the chuck to it with retaining compound when it arrives. Even though they are deep groove bearings, I paid a little extra to get high precision P5 rated ones, as every little bit helps.

More to come...

 

[nicholam77]

Nice work!

I ended up getting a special caliper that is made with conical tips that automatically find the center, and an adjustable jaw in case they are different diameters or on a different plane. Game changing! Now I could lay out the new holes for the gib locks and be sure they were well centered and looked good.

That is pretty neat, I had no idea such a thing existed

 

[Bakafish]

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.

That is pretty neat, I had no idea such a thing existed

I noticed that the Mitutoyo sells some cone tipped cylinders that clamp to the jaws of normal calipers that basically do the same thing. Seems like it might be a useful 3D printed tool if you weren't chasing microns...



Speaking of which, in preparation for the spindle rebuild I was searching for a better set of V Blocks that I use on my inspection plate. These are used to measure the concentricity of cylindrical objects. Searching for somewhat esoteric items in Japan is always a challenge since the name doesn't always translate, they may have adopted the terminology of another country, or some colorful local term. Then there's the issue that the person selling the thing, doesn't know what it is even called (or what it is used for) which are often the most valuable and underpriced finds.

So my strategy is to just search lots of different keyword combinations, look at the results that are closest to what I'm trying to find, and use those words to seed further searches. There is a ton, and I mean a ton of by-catch that clutters the search results. Lots of clothes, anime trading cards and figurines. The brand names and terms often overlap enough that whatever you are searching for is likely going to be hidden in a sea of very Japanese clutter. Lack of results might mean that there are none of what you are looking for, but is more often that you are searching with the wrong terms. Getting close, and cycling the results in a feedback loop is the best chance.

These hunting sessions often lead me down completely tangential paths, and can uncover unrelated but unexpected stuff I never knew existed. The unexpected gems are often more rewarding than what I'm actually looking for, so I've become attuned to spotting the unusual. In this case, the my search had narrowed down to some serviceable V-blocks, but no great prices, nothing really appealing. I really was searching for something precision ground or hand scraped, and in a matched set. As I was scrolling through the depths of a particularly fritless search term, I saw a picture of a simple wooden box, listed in the 'antiques' section of my favorite Japanese 'marketplace' site.



I would expect a lot of you know the name, famous over here for toilets, bathrooms and housewares. But that box really seemed an odd thing to be TOTO branded, curious I clicked through. To my complete astonishment, what was revealed was that this was a pair of white ceramic v blocks! What? WHAT?

I did a few quick searches, I had no idea that TOTO had ever made anything like this and got zero results. There was nothing. No hits on the model number. No historical hits on Yahoo auctions, no stores selling them, just no hits at all. So they were either very old (pre-Japanese internet) or very rare, but likely both? The price was a no brainer, they looked intact and little used so I bought them straight up, even if they weren't what they appeared to be, I love me some rare knick-knacks.

Once they were purchased, I continued to dig knowing they were safely on their way, and discovered a dead link to the TOTO advanced ceramics group. No wayback machine, but the Google Cache still had some text I could translate. The page primarily focused on custom semiconductor and LCD display fabrication elements, how they used their unique advanced ceramics for some of the most precision components used in those industries. Things like giant air bearing support elements, electrostatic chucks (for manipulating silicon wafers) and components that leverage the incredible stiffness or thermal properties of the various ceramic formulations they created.



Oh, and they also made a limited line of ceramic meteorological tools, only lab grade, made to order, and if you have to ask the price... no one buying these were doing price comparisons.

They arrived this morning, and hidden under the foam in the lid of the box was the factory certification, showing all the critical measurements of the blocks as they left the facility. Being ceramic, they are incredibly wear resistant and stable. The Japanese are always ridiculously conservative when doing these sorts of measurements. Those numbers are in microns and I would bet good money that every error was at least doubled before recording it on this sheet. That's just how they roll over here.



So Bakafish is going on insufferably again about some stupid toilet blocks, I know... I'm sorry that I'm always doing these show-and-tell posts, but I'm just so thrilled to have found these!

Oh, on a hunch I searched for everything being listed by the same seller. Lots of childrens clothes, some anime stuff and:



An incredible four faced square of the same provenance... for even less money than the blocks. What a day! Thanks TOTO!

 

[Half-fast eddie]

Two questions on the v-blocks. Can you tell from the documentation when they were made?

Second … interesting to see that they use arabic numerals for numbers. Is there a character in their language for numbers?

 

[Bakafish]

Two questions on the v-blocks. Can you tell from the documentation when they were made?

Frustratingly left blank.

Second … interesting to see that they use arabic numerals for numbers. Is there a character in their language for numbers?

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

 

[LeonardY]

Very cool find.
I love stuff like that.

Mcmaster has several tip assortments for calipers.

And this! I might need to make one. Because I can't afford them.

 

[Bakafish]

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 use. So I just ordered a Makita GB801, which looked pretty plasticy and lightweight compared to the cast iron beasts I'd been looking at, but seemed well reviewed and was said to be very quiet.

When the grinder arrived, I was surprised by how sturdy it actually was. The main body is actually a stout casting, and the panels that looked like plastic were all sturdy sheet metal. The guards and tool rests on the other hand, were junk, I was expecting that though as the reviews all complained about that. I had ordered a small offcut of mild steel so I could make better tool rests and needed to break it down into smaller pieces. There are a lot of ways to do this, professionally they use Lasers, water jets or plasma cutters. A smaller shop that didn't have a plasma cutter or liked to do things 'old school' might use an Oxy-Acetylene cutting torch or a metal cutting band saw. Having none of those tools available to me, and a pretty thick (12mm) chunk of steel, I had the choice of a hacksaw, a jig saw, a reciprocating saw or an angle grinder.

We had a nice spring day, so I decided to break the tranquillity with a bit of outdoor angle grinding. In truth, the idea of laboriously sawing through that much steel by hand seemed daunting. Sawsall's are the antithesis of precision, and I didn't think it was fair to subject the jig saw to that much cutting. Neither of those saws would seem well suited to a clean straight cut. The angle grinder seemed like it would be the best choice, but it was a lot of metal to get through, and I wasn't sure how straight I could keep it.



I cut the piece in half, then half again. The good thing is that none of this needed to be precise, I was just making a pair of tool rests. But the angle grinder and the thin 0.8mm cutting wheels I was using, made easy work of it. The cuts were quite straight, but it was difficult for me to get a perfectly parallel cut, so I had to do some additional grinding and filing to get them within a millimeter of each other.

I probably could have hand filed them to a really true edge, but the spring rain came this morning, and I don't grind indoors, so I decided to bite the bullet and see if the Proxxon was healthy enough to do some heavy (for it) lifting. The first thing I did was tram the head perpendicular to the bed. It is designed to be able to tilt the head, which can be useful for certain cuts, but mostly it just means you have one more axis of adjustment to worry about. I used a 10mm ground rod and a small blade edged square. I have a jig I made so that I can use an indicator, but doing it by eye was as much effort as I wanted to spend. Before the gib replacement, even cutting Aluminum was giving the machine trouble, so I wasn't expecting things to go so well.

As I mentioned before, I only have one native collet for this machine, if I want to use smaller end mills I need to use one of the adaptors I made that allow me to use ER collets. But that means there is a lot more tool stick out, and with the bent spindle that means that the tools don't spin concentrically, which causes them to break or at least cut poorly and leave a bad finish. So I decided to just put in a 10mm carbide roughing end mill and hope for the best.



I squared one of my smaller JAM vices and clamped it down (I added more clamps after confirming I could reach everything with the end mill.) The steel I bought was an offcut, it looks like it was from a waterjet which is nice because lasers and plasma cutters can harden the edges and complicate things. The edges were close enough to straight and square to use as a reference, and the surface of this plate is silky smooth, I don't know if this was some special grade or that steel quality is just really good these days. I still have a lot to learn about this stuff, but really happy with a $10 chunk of steel.

I started as small as I could, with everything but one axis locked, and maybe 0.2mm depth of cut. Because of the prior grinding and filing I really didn't need to take mutch off, I ended up having to remove less than a half a millimeter, but man did it improve the visual appearance of accuracy! It just looked so much squarer, even though it was such a small amount.



That's the result of the two edges cleaned up, I'm really pleased. It means as long as I can get close with grinding and filing, and the part is small enough to fit, I should be able to clean things up nicely with the little Proxxon. I have one of those swarf magnets, I spent just as long collecting all those little chips as I did making them. I will need to take out some notches in these rests, and finalize the details of how they will be mounted. But my trapezoidal tap for the worn and damaged lead screw nuts just arrived (from China) and it looks quite serviceable. Golden Week holidays are coming up and I will need to bring out the mini lathe and start making all the parts, including some new nuts, that I've been postponing for so long.

 

[LeonardY]

I've never seen the Makita bench grinder. I don't think they sell it here. I did look it up and I would have assumed the same. It looks plastic. Just due to the Makita blue color. Glad it was a sturdy beast.

Really nicely done.
If your interested, here is a German blog on modifications he did to Proxxon tools.

Anleitungen und Bauberichte zum Thema Metallmodellbau

www.metallmodellbau.de

 

[Bakafish]

I've never seen the Makita bench grinder. I don't think they sell it here. I did look it up and I would have assumed the same. It looks plastic. Just due to the Makita blue color. Glad it was a sturdy beast.

Really nicely done.
If your interested, here is a German blog on modifications he did to Proxxon tools.

Anleitungen und Bauberichte zum Thema Metallmodellbau

www.metallmodellbau.de

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 worth dealing with. I'll post some pictures when I get deeper into the project.

Proxxon is a quirky brand. I have more of their tools now, but when I bought this mini-mill I'm pretty sure I didn't know about them. The quality is good, German made and all. And they fill a pretty tight niche of hobbyists with bigger dreams than workspaces. But the pricing and proprietary choices they make can be frustrating. I mentioned the non-standard spindle collet size, the table likewise uses a non standard T nut size that means you have to make your own nuts or buy the pricy (but good quality) fixture kit from them. I suppose it makes sense to create lock-in on profitable accessories, but here in Japan, where these items are even harder to obtain, the choices they made are more frustrating. That said, I understand why they have some fanatical adherents.

They make respectable Dremel substitutes too. I've got a couple of them.

 

[Bakafish]

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. The two units also came with USB cable interfaces, which in the case of Mitutoyo's application of them, are not nearly as useful as they could be. The main limitation is there is no real-time output from them like an encoder. Instead, they emulate a keyboard, and 'paste' the current value in response to pushing a little button on the cable itself. It is great if you are trying to record a series of measurements, but fails as a useful application of a DRO system. But the cables are expensive to buy, work with many of my instruments and I may be able to use them for other projects where their limitations are not important.

After getting the cross slides into better form, I went back to the fitment, and discovered that now that the gibs were healthy, that actual useful travel in the X axis was about 20mm more than these scales could support. I would actually need the next size up if I wanted to use the whole travel, and it isn't like I've got travel to burn. But since these entry level scales are basically just standard calipers without the jaws, it occured to me that I could just get a clapped out set (or sacrifice one of my own) and use the scale from that with the electronics from one of the units I just got.

I found a heavily used 200mm set of calipers for $50, the jaws were worn, it was dirty, but the part I needed was the passive capacitive strip and the metal bar it is recessed in. They worked, but it intermittently lost power, not a big deal since I didn't intend to use the electronics, but after opening it up I realized it had a different pattern on the capacitive pickup on the back of the circuit board. So despite looking basically identical, this was an older version, and a little more research showed that the latest units all use an improved AOS system that changed the pattern of the capacitive layer and number of reading pickups. Swapping the boards, despite them both being basically the same size, the newer board could not work with the older strip. So the longer scale wasn't going to work with the newer electronics and clean cases... bummer.

So rather than throw more money at it (the longer scale was $150, so I was already regretting the $50 gamble to save $100) I decided to do a full cleaning of the old module, cleaned up and resoldered a few areas of corrosion on the battery terminals, and it became nice and stable again. So with that out of the way, I ground off the rivets on the tail and punched them out allowing the disassembly of the two jaws. I cut the little lock screw so it could be unthreaded as well.



I then pulled out the big angle grinder to cut the jaws and the depth quill off. I left a few millimeters of jaw attached as I now had a bench grinder, and I was hoping to be able to really get a clean result with it.



When the grinder came, I noticed that the flimsy looking balance plates were both set to a default position. (These are not shown in the picture above as I had an oversized 3M deburring wheel mounted. See schematic below.) The machine was quiet and had little vibration at speed, but I decided that now was as good a time as any to figure out how to balance the wheels. There are very fancy wheel balancing jigs, but for a bench grinder you can get 99% of what you typically need with a nice rod and some parallel surfaces, or a couple really free running bearings. The problem for me is that 5/8" rod to fit the standard hub sizes these use, is not something one can find over here. Some of the more common imperial sizes show up if you really search, but 5/8" seemed particularly elusive. But I was able to find some open bearings that had a 5/8ths inch outer shell and bought a handful of those.

The manual doesn't cover how to balance the wheels with the wheel balancers, which is a pretty awful omission. Even the Japanese one left it out, so I dug through the depths of YouTube and didn't really find direct instructions for this design. I found enough theory and practice for generic grinding wheel balancing that I could figure it out though.

The balancer is two main parts, a thick dished disk that transfers force from the nut to the wheel itself (#7), but is presumably balanced. It is there to contain and protect the inner disk (#5), which has the two weights (#6) attached to it. The two weights are each attached to the inner disk with a single screw (#4), and that screw rides in its own slot that runs almost halfway around the disk. This allows you to slide the weight to some arbitrary position in the slot. The weights being positioned exactly opposite each other (as shipped from the factory) cancel each other out and do not contribute to the overall balance in that position (assuming they are of equal weight and everything is precision, which it certainly isn't.)



So the major problems to balancing this system are, that the plates #5 & #7 are not secured to each other or to the wheel unless they are all screwed together with the bolt #3. If you have everything apart, and you are balancing the wheel on a rod or a bunch of bearings, then you have to figure out a way to lock everything together so that any weight adjustments you make are transferred to the wheel. In my case I used double sided scotch tape to get the big plate #7 attached to the wheel first. These only need to be attached strong enough to transfer a few grams of weight during balancing, they will be clamped together hard in use. Then I spun the wheel and the adhered plate on the bearings riding on a leveled rod, several times, noting the 12 o'clock position with a pencil. It hit the same place every time with both wheels, good progress.

The next step was to reposition the weights in the inner plates so that they were located directly opposite each other, but in the middle of the adjustment slot. This is important as in order to balance the wheel, we need to clock both weights the same amount in opposite directions. As shipped the weights are both at the extremes of travel, which is balanced but leaves no ability to adjust anything.

Then with the wheel in its resting position, meaning the heavy side is down and the light side with your markings are up at 12 o'clock, you attach the inner plate with the weights at the 3 and 9 o'clock positions. I used some very small strips of masking tape to attach the #5 plate to the #7 plate. Now you very incrementally move the two weights towards the light spot (where your mark is) and spin the wheel. As you move the weights closer and closer to the 'balanced' position, the wheel will have a less and less tendency to stop with the heavy spot at the bottom. Eventually you should be able to get it where it is roughly random where it stops (make your marks on the face of the wheel where they will be ground off.)

So, after balancing my two wheels, I have to say that the grinder is frighteningly quiet and smooth. Even without tool rests I was able to get very satisfactory looking grinds on the stainless steel parts. Much better than I would have been able to do before with the tools I had. I'm very happy with the core of this machine, and hope my modifications will make it even better.

Back to the scales, after getting everything ground in. I had to add a pair of M3 threaded holes on the back where the electronics can be fasten to either the fixed or moving element, depending on how you use it. There were already two convenient center marks in the inside of the part for some variant that needs something attached there, so I drilled those with a 2.5mm cobalt steel bit and then tapped them by hand..




Still wondering if spending another $100 would have been better, but hopefully I gave some clapped out calipers a second life and it will work out well in the end.

 

[Bakafish]

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 replaced the bearings, twice. The first time I put in some angular contact bearings to replace the high quality and still clean running deep groove bearings it was shipped with 20 years ago. But they just couldn't stay preloaded accurately as the headstock just wasn't rigid enough and the bearing spacers are plastic, so I put in some precision P5 grade NSK deep grooves and it seems happy enough. The secondary shaft bearings were toasted, so those were replaced as well which quieted it down a little.



The lathe looks a lot like the ubiquitous Chinese mini-lathes, but they were actually made in Taiwan and use an unusual extruded aluminum bed bolted to the cast iron frame. It is super hard anodized, and immune to rust, I have mixed feelings about it, but I think anyone expecting much from any of these little lathes is bound for disappointment. Other than a lot of improved parts, it is basically parts compatible with the Chinese units and so even though the maker has moved on long ago, I can still get parts that can be made to work if need be.

A long time ago I had ordered a steel quick change tool post, and I have wanted to make a solid block to replace the compound (a common mod to increase rigidity.) So I ordered a block of S50C high carbon steel and gently fed it to the Proxxon, who despite the wonky spindle, managed to make all the holes and counterbores I needed without much complaint. I cold blued and oiled it, then mounted the quick change post.



The new spindle shaft was ordered with a 10mm section that needed an M10x1.0 metric fine thread. I was hoping the die I had would be able to thread it directly, but it was just too large to get a good bite so I used the lathe (for my first time with actual steel!) to reduce it down a little. The main 12mm shaft is case hardened and ground, but the core is tempered and not unduly hard, and the lathe made respectable work of it.



I then mounted the die in a little Japanese precision chuck I bought in a lot of Morse Taper 2 lathe accessories in order to make sure the threads would go on straight. I recognized it in the collection of various live and dead centers being sold unmarked, so I was excited that I was getting a deal as they are coveted by watchmakers and are ridiculously priced. When everything came, there was an even more hidden gem in the hoard. It wasn't the expensive diamond sputtered cone that allows you to regrind a damaged center hole back into true, it was the Swiss made Gepy precision live center which are very hard to obtain and are considered by many to be the best out there.



With the threads cut, I used a little Schmidt hand press and Starrett 129 bench block to disassemble the Proxxon's spindle cartridge again and then to press on the lower bearing and ER16 12mm collet chuck onto the new shaft. I used Loctite 601 retaining compound on the chuck and set the two set screws on the opposed flats that I had specified to be machined on the shaft. It's still kind of crazy that paramitized manufacturing where you can just input some numbers on a website and get such a thing made to such tight tolerances delivered for so cheap. We live in miraculous times...



In between all of this I've been continuing to work on the big Magnetic drill which I am working on a more conventional table top 'drill press' stand for it. The thing is, after finding the improved Morse Taper 2 model intended for metal work, and restoring it to like new condition, I just didn't have the heart to make the modifications to it that I really had planned. I didn't pay very much, but the value it held to me wasn't as tied to what I paid as I would hope. The solution? Just buy more of course...



The second one (those keeping count know that the real first one was the "wood" version, which means I actually have 3 of these lumps) was a mere $10 and was in almost new shape. The catch was that the Morse Taper chuck adaptor was seriously stuck. It could not be persuaded, even when I pounded on the built in ejector pin with my largest 5 kilogram hammer. Heat, dry ice, every penetrant I had, there was just no budging it. Then I remembered there was a hole cross drilled near the tang side of the spindle shaft. I had wondered what the purpose of it was, since it seemed to allow contaminants into the gearbox and grease into the taper area. But whatever its purpose, it allowed me to fit two little 5 degree wedges (designed for pulling chucks off of Jacobs tapers) in there and with a lot of very frightening hammering I was finally able to eject the arbor which flew quite some distance as you can imagine.

The inner taper on these drills is a hardened steel part, but despite that there seemed to be several very thin concentric rings of raised material that had somehow been created and had deformed the arbor in its vise like grip. Most morse taper tooling has a tang on the end that prevents it from rotating, even if it isn't fully seated, so it wasn't clear to me how something could have spun in there to create those ridges. I don't know how this could have happened, it's quite the mystery to me as the surfaces were otherwise clean and smooth.



I bought a cheap MT2 reamer set to try and clean up the hairs width raised ridges, but the taper body was of far higher quality steel than the reamers which wouldn't 'bite' at all, so it took a lot of time and pressure to make any improvement on the finish. I knocked down the worst of the ridges, I may revisit it at some point with some kind of hone, but it actually seems to work quite well now and a fresh arbor doesn't stick so I'll see how it goes.

The modifications I'm making is to remove the giant handle and to rewire the motor using a relay and industrial switch to add reverse rotation. Because of the power and gearing I don't think that reverse was ever something that these drills were required to do, 'just keep drilling...' but I have a tapping attachment I want to use, and that will need a reverse or I'll have to back the tap out by hand (which defeats the purpose of automating it.)

 

[Bakafish]

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 that automatically calculates the total indicated runout (TIR) of a rotating object, which is a time saver.



The results were not great, but not terrible.



33 microns of runout on the outer surface of the chuck, about twice that on a ground 10mm shaft 50mm from the chuck. I may be able to improve on that with a better collet nut, but honestly the more significant improvement is that it is converted to ER16 instead of the inflexible factory collet. Going from 150 microns to 33 is an improvement and with these small machines you can flex them with your hands to the point that chasing down every last micron is really a complete waste of time (although it is still tempting I know.)



There were a few other projects I completed, one was a teardown of a popular series of Big Daishawa tool height setters that I posted on the Practical Machinist forums rather than subject you guys to more deep dives on niche tooling. The signal to noise ratio is really bad over there, GJ is a much more supportive and wholesome community, but I thought it was a more appropriate place to document it since there are some common failure modes and they are expensive enough that most would hesitate to open one up out of curiosity.

I also picked up a few laboratory items sold as "junk" (the word calls to me like a siren song) that I need for some upcoming plating adventures. Specifically a nice A&D counting scale with milligram accuracy that was lifeless but so cheap it was worth attempting the repair. Disassembly and inspection showed a blown fuse, but I suspected there was more to it than that. Using one of my H/P lab power supplies in current limiting mode I powered up the unit and could see it was attempting to draw way more power than it was rated for. Given the age of the unit the electrolytic capacitors were the usual suspects, and desoldering them and testing with an Agilent U1733C LCR meter confirmed they were gonners. A quick dash to Akihabara and some pocket change later (literally less than $1 worth of parts) the scale was brought back to life. Counting scales have a mode where it statistically tracks the weight of items so it can dynamically calculate how many there are based on a representative sample. So you place the number of parts it requests to set the baseline and then it will just count however many you put on it while constantly honing the calculation if there is some minor variability. Neat trick for an old dog. It's still super accurate too, I got a couple of precision weights for calibration and it was spot on already. They build things pretty well over here, just remember that Electrolytic Capacitors are always worth replacing as a first step even if you don't have fancy test gear. Cost $20, a trip to Akihabara and $1 worth of Nichicon caps.



The next item was an Ika magnetic stirring heat plate. These are clever and useful lab machines that are designed to maintain the temperature and stir liquids by combining a closed loop heated surface with a motorized magnet under it. A coated stirring bar, available in innumerable shapes and sizes is placed in the liquid and the magnetic field captures it and spins it at the speed you set, helping to dissolve solids and keeping the liquid from stratifying thermally or otherwise. The unit was also marked as JUNK and the photos showed it stuck in an obvious error mode, but this machine just needed a lot of cleaning and someone who could read the manual. The error code it was throwing was because it was in the default mode that required a PT100 thermal probe to be plugged in, changing the mode by holding down the button in the knob (which was loose and needed to be remounted to actually depress properly) when powering up allowed it to use the sensor built into the heat plate. Here it is happily vortexing some warm water it had heated.



I liked the idea of a temperature probe though (it would have been supplied with it when it was new), since it would give far more stable and accurate temperatures, but the price for a factory replacement was pretty steep at about $150. PT100 probes are standardized though and very simple to wire, I found a new one for a different brand of stirrer being auctioned very cheaply and Ika's technical support was kind enough to provide me the pinout of the probe interface on the back. I 3D printed a standard 5 pin DIN connector and made a couple pins out of some brass wire I had, and after a bit of soldering the probe and closed loop mode works perfectly. That thick ceramic plate heater is serious too, it can maintain up to 500℃! So I can use it for more than just heating liquids, it should make a great circuit board SMD soldering plate as well. I have a total of $70 invested in it including the probe, and it is being sold new for about $1000.



There's one more major distraction I've been working on that is a little bit more tangentially related to the CNC project, but I will leave it for later once I've made more progress on it. (Inscrutable teaser shot added!)

 

[wasfast]

You may consider adding a wind shield to the scale if you truly want milligram accuracy. Amazing how little force from air it takes to make results vary.
Your attention to detail is amazing on all the projects (and write ups) you do.

 

[Bakafish]

You may consider adding a wind shield to the scale if you truly want milligram accuracy. Amazing how little force from air it takes to make results vary.
Your attention to detail is amazing on all the projects (and write ups) you do.

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 container of water, so you can calculate the specific gravity of things. I had to stop myself from modifying a shelf with a hole in it... I actually have a lexan box I can put it in if I ever need to do more than count screws or ball bearings

 

[LeonardY]

That's going to make some awesome Macha tea.

I bow to your ability to make such informative posts.

I thought it would sound braggadocious.

Naw, you're good.

 

[Half-fast eddie]

What are the volt and current requirements to heat to 500*C?

 

[Bakafish]

What are the volt and current requirements to heat to 500*C?

They say in the spec's I linked above, 270 watts at 100v (which is 2.7A) It is available with other countries voltages of course, Ika supplies globally. I'll note that it came with a IEC C16 style 15A receptacle which I replaced with the more common C14 since it is nearly impossible to get a high quality C15 cord for it here in Japan. I'm using a 14 Gage, high current, Enterprise class server cord for it. It may not be as highly heat tolerant as what it shipped with, it didn't come with the OEM cord, but I don't intend to push it anywhere near that hot anyway.

 

[Alcology]

Nice repair on the IKA! I work in a research lab, so I see IKA products frequently. I received a broken IKA plate shaker (supposed to be brand new and working, and it was marked inspected) that probably broke through shipping to go with an instrument from a different company. The different company just shipping a new one and said throw the broken one away. I repaired it for $26 and flipped it for $300. IKA is great for supplying parts for their products!

 

[Bakafish]

Summer heat is here, but I've been trying to get off my *** and do some of the long abandoned tasks that have been piling up. Our second story balcony floor was painted at some point with a thick rubberized coating that I think was applied incorrectly as it had massive bubbles everywhere and was very unpleasant looking or to walk on. Last year my wife and I spent a day getting half of it stripped off, but it was such a tedious job (a heat gun and scraper to get the main layer off, then scrubbing with IPA to get the slimy uncured under layer) I gave up before finishing. Removing it exposed a sturdy hand laid fiberglass pan, and once I knew that the water wasn't penetrating it went much lower on the priority list. But it still needed to be done, so I contorted my old limbs and proceeded to slowly get it all stripped. I still have some tricky bits under the doubled sliding glass doors, that requires me to lay on the floor to reach, but I'm almost ready to apply new primer and paint which will beautify it quite a bit. I actually intend to float an Ipe wood deck over it, but want to get it smoothed out and sealed up first. Working out there in summer has made it clear that a retractable awning is another addition that needs to be made.

As all of my gentalreaders well know, I've been on a tool hoarding tear for a while now, and the sheer mass of tools has been constraining my ability to actually get any work done. Clearly the right thing to do is to stop buying so much stuff and get rid f the things I'm not using... so I bought a big storage cabinet for the third floor patio to safely store things. Ha ha! I don't have a problem! That patio is another seriously underutilized area of our house. It has these modular mats of 10cm composite tiles, laid on top of a thick neoprene underlayer over the same fiberglass pan as the lower balcony. The tiles have degraded over time and the coarse sand they are covered in comes off easily causing instant contamination of the house when coming inside. They also get as hot as the surface of the sun. The whole experience is unpleasant, and this is compounded by the flimsy and inadequate, aluminum safety fence that is literally inset by a meter from the edge of the roof, wasting easily 1/3 of the total space. I suspect this design was driven by the shadow codes and the ridiculously under built nature of the fence (its posts are set in small cement blocks epoxied to the tile mats, which are not fastened to anything!) Anyway, it needs a real guardrail built, something that won't cast shadows on the closely situated neighbors house, and removal of the horrible tiles (also found on a section of the roof of the 3rd floor, accessible via a fixed ladder that will make a great view spot with an appropriate guard rail) and the 3rd floor bedroom veranda. The patio will also need a sealing paint job and a deck, and I hope it will cut down the amount of heat that pours through the roof during these ever escalating summer temperatures.

On the CNC front, I've finally got almost every part required. I got stalled on a somewhat arbitrary point where I want to level out the old surface plate that is the base of the machine. Having everything built up from a reference plane will make dialing in all the motion axes much much easier, so I wanted to start with a good foundation. The problem is that even a small 500x750 plate is still a lot of area to hand scrape. I spent far too long trying to obtain an elusive Biax power scraper, having seen them appear only a few times and always being out bid by the same guy (who I have to assume was selling them overseas at a premium.) Finally I managed to get one a few weeks ago, and I've just been psyching myself out to start the learning process of this tool and technique.



I made a s'hort type' insert blade adaptor (the black one) for it by sacrificing a hand scraper, a far more affordable option than the factory part. These things are so specialized that everything about them is crazy expensive, and then you need to double the price, because Japan.



You've seen the specialized grinder/sharpener I rebuilt, I will need to reprofile some of my inserts to suit the Biax and work on some smaller practice parts (a cast iron angle block and some other old fixtures) I bought to get some practice with before attacking the big plate.



I've also managed to accrue piece by piece a complete Nakanishi high speed spindle set. These are the premium quality micro spindles used by many of the best manufacturers as active accessory tooling. This unit is a brushless motor with a ceramic bearing spindle capable of 50,000RPM and up to a 6mm end mill. I have an E3000 controller and the expensive custom cabling as well. A setup like this is about $4000, but I did quite well at auction shopping the parts. This is best suited to very small precision work, it has 1 micron or less of runout, and is not very powerful, but I'm hoping it will help me bootstrap some of the parts I will need for the big boy spindle motor that I still am planning to be the primary drive. These little spindles require pressurized air cooling, so I picked up and refurbished a Jun-Air 6-4 silent compressor, replacing the internally rusty tank (drain your tank every time people) with a new, slightly larger 5 liter unit from my favorite surplus shop.



I guess these are popular in dental clinics, it is really quiet, obviously not intended to be used for a nail gun or any kind of power tools, but it should be perfect for cooling the spindle and maybe running a small mister too if I'm lucky.

I did a few posts over at the Metrology forums at Practical Machinist as I'm really reticent to share myself geeking out over stuff that is even more off target than my self-documented shopping activities, but if you are interested I have a few links that you can follow below:

BIG Daishawa BaseMaster BM-50 and BM-50G Teardowns
Mitutoyo OMM-25 (109-101) Micrometer teardown
Mitutoyo Museum Virtual Tour

As a community, you guys are so much more supportive and sympathetic, visiting over there opened my eyes to how poisonous some communities can become, a lot of gatekeeping and e-peen swinging happening out there, but I worry all the time that posting this kind of thing here will both alienate my visitors and maybe not be the right place to help someone trying to find the specific information I've attempted to provide. Maybe I'm overthinking it?

Anyway, the sun has almost moved to the spot in the sky when I can scrub in shade, so back to work I go!

 

[kaymccampbell]

Share away. You're not going to upset anyone here by oversharing your journey into madness.

 

[LeonardY]

As a community, you guys are so much more supportive and sympathetic, visiting over there opened my eyes to how poisonous some communities can become, a lot of gatekeeping and e-peen swinging happening out there, but I worry all the time that posting this kind of thing here will both alienate my visitors and maybe not be the right place to help someone trying to find the specific information I've attempted to provide. Maybe I'm overthinking it?

I truly enjoy your posts. The in-depth information you provide. It's always fun to see other's obsessions and share in it.
And it brings back memories of living in Tokyo.
BTW. I've been looking at height setters for a while. I have an Fowler one that works OK but I would like something that is more accurate.

I've been part of that community and seen first hand some of the toxicity. It isn't exclusive to that one either.

GJ members interests are wide ranging and the cross pollination is what makes this community. I second, Kay's comment. "Share away..."

 

[Bakafish]

I truly enjoy your posts. The in-depth information you provide. It's always fun to see other's obsessions and share in it.
And it brings back memories of living in Tokyo.
BTW. I've been looking at height setters for a while. I have an Fowler one that works OK but I would like something that is more accurate.

I've been part of that community and seen first hand some of the toxicity. It isn't exclusive to that one either.

GJ members interests are wide ranging and the cross pollination is what makes this community. I second, Kay's comment. "Share away..."

The only issue I have with these Big Daishawa's is the lack of some sort of sensor output. It's all CNC these days, so being able to automate tool height setting would seem to be worth the ~20 cents it would cost to put in a waterproof headphone jack and a simple circuit. I do have a prototype add on trigger that uses a photo-diode to signal when the led is lit, but I will need to do some latency testing and perfect the mount (it will integrate a separate emergency stop microswitch to prevent over extension crashes.) I will document that and put the files up when I'm confident it is workable.

I actually have quite a collection of these height setters. I got a little low profile BMM-20 unit that has a magnifying glass integrated into the cap. Really tiny and usable in tight setups. They are all rated to be within a micron. The new ones have more LED's for a 360 degree indication, but are likely no different internally, so the older models are a great value used. I explain them more extensively on the PM post linked above.



Was trying for an artistic shot here...

 

[zanyad]

I'm with Kay and Leonard. I got excited when I saw your thread come up on my Watched list this morning.