Mill Suspense
July 1st, 2009Next Week?
I have no milling machine. STILL.
I got a message saying it had shipped. Then I got a message saying it was about to ship. Then I got radio silence. People have a way of running off and hiding when they sell you something and then can’t provide it. They know that if they pretend not to see your emails, they can ship whatever it is you bought before you can formally cancel the order. I guess that’s what happened here.
I don’t care; when you get a good price on the exact thing you want, and that thing is something which is a horror to shop for, a couple of weeks’ delay is not something that scares you.
Today I was told the mill will ship–for real–tomorrow. Probably. Maybe.
We shall see.
Sadly, I have a rotary table DVD now. And I can clearly see that without a rotary table, life will never be anything more than slow torture. It is better not to be born than to be born and be unable to acquire a rotary table. At least it looks that way in the video.
A rotary table is a turntable you can bolt parts to. It will turn the parts in tiny angular increments. Or big ones. The table in the video breaks a circle up into 129,000 parts. That seems like a lot. You can use a rotary table to position cuts at the correct angles. Say you’re machining a gear, and you want 34 teeth; the rotary table will let you move the gear just the right amount for each tooth. You can also make curved cuts.
Here’s a video of a guy using a rotary table. Before you look, let me say WARNING! AMATEUR VENTRILOQUIST ALERT! I didn’t know you had to have a dummy in order to machine properly, but coincidentally, I was planning to get a hat exactly like his. In my dreams, this is me in six months.
I don’t know if I’d watch the whole thing. The problem with this video is that the thing you want to see is way over on the other side of the room.
Ordinarily, you expect a ventriloquist dummy to talk. I thought that was the whole point. But I am not an expert.
Here’s a video where you can see a rotary table turning an object while a mill faces it.
I don’t even have to explain why it will be impossible for me to live another week without one of these things. And I blame the shipping delay for this. Instead of fooling with the mill, I’m goofing around online, where I am subject to temptation.
Oddly, rotary tables seem to be available for relatively little money, compared to other insanely expensive items, such as taper attachments. Horizontal tables are cheap to begin with, but horizontal/vertical tables cost a whole lot more. New. On Ebay, used ones are not too steep.
Maybe I’ll snap one up in a month or two. Looks like the smart buy is a used table that does both horizontal and vertical. They say you should get the biggest one you can find, but when you go over 10″, they weigh a ton.
I’m pretty much ready for the mill, except for utterly failing to finish the wiring. I should get on that. I already have the VFD. It’s moldering in a box. I paid extra for fast shipping when I thought the mill was on the way. There’s 22 bucks Obama will never get his hands on.
You can see I need that table, can’t you?
July 1st, 2009 at 7:54 PM
Believe it or not, a Haas indexer or a Yuasa indexer is not horribly expensive. Here’s one on ebay
http://tinyurl.com/mv93tg
And they give you CNC control. Lets say you wanted to make a nice, slotted wheel with arc-shaped slots to mount oin a motor face to make a belt sander with. Turn the plate in the lathe, chuck it on the rotary, and machine those slots. Easy peasy. It’s a common thing to put a CNC rotary on a manual machine.
July 1st, 2009 at 7:57 PM
Now every time I use my rotary table, I’m going to have that image of the Dummy in my head! It was like some sort of Machining Twilight Zone Episode.
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Did anyone else think that this was copied off a local cable access channel? Just has that feel to me…
July 1st, 2009 at 8:08 PM
Oh, and find the biggest Rotary Table you can lift onto your Mill without giving yourself a hernia. You may also want to get another Lathe Chuck for the Rotary Table or maybe just another adapter/backing plate that’s modified to use the Chuck off your Lathe…see:
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http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/index.php?topic=5289.0
July 1st, 2009 at 8:55 PM
“You can see I need that table, can’t you?”
You need an intervention. You WANT the table.
How can you NEED the table, when you don’t have the mill?
July 1st, 2009 at 9:05 PM
The R.T. was one of the first accessories I bought for the mill, and I use it quite a bit. You’re right that a 10″ is better than an 8″, but the latter is what I have, and it’s all I can do to move it from the shelf to the mill and back. My cousin has the 10″, but has a bench immediately adjacent to his mill, so simply cranks the knee to the proper elevation and slides the R.T. over. You’ll need a T-slot clamp kit for the R.T., as it has 1/2″ slots instead of the 5/8″ slots of the mill, so you can use the same stuff. While you’re at it, get the tailstock and dividing attachments. Watch Enco, they have the Phase II R.T.s on sale all the time.
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:46 AM
When the wiring is ready the mill will appear.
July 2nd, 2009 at 4:06 AM
A rotary table is good for milling circles but you’d want a “Dividing Head” for gears and the like, it’s like a rotary table but with the addition of some disks with holes in to get the angles more exact. You can also machine an arc by having a simple linkage and a pivot, either on the lathe or mill, this is the only solution if your radius is very large.
That facing operation video seems a bit pointless, why do they not just use a lathe? Perhaps they did not have one big enough.
For the “ultimate” in rotary tables you should check out the “division master” which attaches a stepper motor to the handle of the rotary table and you can simply key in the angle needed. A great idea if you are going to be making lots clocks.
There are a few people who can supply kits or castings for rotary tables, I’ve been thinking about making making one.
July 2nd, 2009 at 8:49 AM
Ed, can I at least buy that hat?
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Og, $2500 seems expensive to me.
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I figure anything up to 150 pounds can conceivably be useful. Beyond that, I think I’m looking at a second hoist.
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I have been thinking of making a little jib hoist for the lathe. The 4-jaw chuck is hard to hold up while I screw it on. Not sure how a hoist would help, however.
July 2nd, 2009 at 5:42 PM
Expensive is relative, when you can push a button and make a curved slot in steel any length you want.
The manual ones are quite versatile. But I’d keep my eyes open for a CNC.
July 4th, 2009 at 12:12 AM
dodecahedron #2?
Cheers