We’ve been selling the X2 ACME kits for the mini-mill for quite a while now and have had many happy people who’ve been able to increase accuracy, reduce backlash, and provide an easier milling experience. However, it was always at 8TPI. This is generally not a problem since the minimill already uses a 16TPI thread, so it’s really a factor of 2 increase in travel for each tick traveled.
Well, for those with a Micro-Mark minimill or other variant with 10TPI leadscrews, we now are getting ready to introduce a 10TPI version of the ACME leadscrew kit!
Yes, we had special taps made JUST for these kits.
Stay tuned!
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After many months of searching for Mori Seikis, Okumas, Nakamura-Tomes, and Miyano CNC lathes (to name a few), we finally discovered an off-brand CNC gang lathe on eBay. Luckily, we won the auction and had one heck of a time getting it here!
Good news? It’s running a Yasnac LX3 control. Here are some pictures of the machine.
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We started this insert tooling journey for the lathe by buying the cheap and ubiquitous triangle insert 5-tool holder set from ENCO. They usually sell these sets for around $20 and inserts go for around $4. These work OK for the mini-lathe and even up to the 12x, but we wanted something with a chipbreaker, a smaller cutting radius and reliefs that would better suit the smaller machines. After a call to J&L Metalworking, one of the techs recommended the SCLCR holder (from Hertel) and accompanying 21.51 inserts. Although this is an insert with four usable cutting edges, two of them are at 80 degrees and the other two are at 100 degrees. This means that in order to get all four cutting edges used, we would need two separate holders. They, unfortunately could not source the toolholder that utilizes the oblique-angle edges. Thus, we plugged along until just recently and on a whim, we checked eBay. Luckily for us, there happened to be an insert holder made by the “MICRO 100” company that used these other edges for the 21.51 inserts. Great! $25 and a few days later, the toolholder arrived:
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You would think this is simple enough…
Temperature control and rinsing, rinsing, rinsing between tanks is important as is making sure your parts don’t ding around your bucket and knick and scratch other parts. And of course, solid and secure electrical contact is key to a nice anodize.
How do we know? We’ll show you some parts below.
Now, we sometimes just make silly mistakes. One example would be when we left the parts in the anodize tank for over one hour (not the problem) with the leads reversed! (BIG problem!)
This is what a part looks like after we neglected to pay attention to the lead reversal and then continued to send it into the dye tank:
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It seemed easy enough…
We purchased the full LCD anodizing kit from Caswell after hearing good things about their kits. We chose them since they sold a complete package and didn’t want to try to get all the pieces together from scratch. It seemed like a good idea at the time. After waiting three weeks for the power supply, it arrived (a nice unit, btw). We were disappointed it took so long to ship without updates but can certainly understand backorder issues.
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Tumbling aluminum can be a somewhat daunting task when first attempted. After machining your part, you want to keep it nice and shiny but also want to debur the part evenly.
We have tried a few types of tumbling media that claim to polish and debur but have found these (the ceramic and composite style triangles, cylinders, and the combination of those) to be really good at deburring but not very good at polishing. Typically (even when a burnishing fluid is used and the media strictly contains no abrasives) the finish gets dulled, after which point, getting that polish back is near impossible without human intervention.
While we do not claim to be experts in this area of finishing, we’d like to claim that there’s been sufficient empirical experimentation to warrant a few conclusions:
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We keep putting off buying a DRO setup for the Grizzly 12“x36” lathe (G4003), but every once in a blue moon we’ll need to turn parts with a repeatable diameter and counting dial marks simply takes too long.
Turns out that there’s an even simpler way of mounting a dial indicator than those “Mag Dial” magnets for the X-axis. Simply use a length of bar and mount one end on the carriage where the moving/traveling/follower rest is mounted and the other end to the back of the dial indicator with the point touching a part of the toolpost or other component that makes sense in your configuration.
This takes a few minutes to find scrap and drill two holes. Easy! It’s nice to work with larger machines because you can find more space to mount various tools to help your jobs go faster and easier.
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And here’s the result:
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