I Suddenly Have a Clue

I had a somewhat productive day. Costco mission, got some stuff removed from the warehouse (Val Prieto found uses for it), and moved my scrap out of the garage.

I am going to miss that scrap. I kept some bits back; I could not go cold turkey. Life without scrap at hand is unthinkable now that I’m hooked on it. I still have the main stockpile, but it’s a hundred feet from my tools.

I decided arbitrarily to narrow my lathe search options to three: 1) Grizzly G4003G, 2) South Bend 13, 3) Clausing 59xx. The Grizzly gets excellent reviews from gun nuts, and it was apparently a pet project of Shiraz Balolia, the competition-shooting president of the Grizzly company. He made sure it had good stuff in it other Grizzlies do not have. The Clausings elicit soft cooing sounds from other gunsmiths. And the South Bends are supposedly not hard to get parts for, and there are a lot of them out there.

The Grizzly is almost certainly the best choice. The gap in the bed is something the other two lathes can’t match. And since it has hardened ways, I’ll have a hard time wearing it out. And warranty new customer support blah blah.

I really wanted an old American machine, but it’s a throw of the dice, and I don’t feel like gambling.

As for mills, I think it boils down to two possibilities. A rescraped Bridgeport from a guy in Massachusetts, or the Millrite I found in Hialeah. The Millrite has two advantages. 1. Cheap. 2. Less bulky. That’s really it. Other than that, a Bridgeport laughs at it. The table is bigger. It has no end of support from the aftermarket. I don’t know if it has more features, but it probably does. It definitely seems to have more knobs.

I think the motors are the same size, or close to it, so I doubt there’s a big difference in the tooling you can run.

I took notes while watching a Bridgeport video last night. It’s fun learning what all the knobs do, but I took a certain pleasure in the mystery. In any case, now I can go into a machine shop and pretend, for up to thirty seconds, that I know how to run a milling machine.

I can’t wait to start machining. I want to make a list of things I need but can’t buy, and then I want to make them.

Figuring out the garage layout will be a challenge. I think I can make a big dent by discarding my workbench. I enjoy it, but I have a table saw like nine feet long. I should be able to get by with that and the mighty Workmate. I’d need a place to mount my vise, though. I’ll figure it out. Here’s a wild idea. Put one motorcycle outside under a cover. Maybe it’s not really necessary to have three vehicles in the garage at all times.

Man, this is going to be fun. I am finally going to be nearly as weird as I really want to be.