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@@sacriptex5870 this sounds amazing! Do you know roughly what year yours was made? Good luck and getting it going!

@@KevinToppenberg it was made in 1975, Joinville and Sanches Blanes were the two Brazilian clones of South Bend.

@@sacriptex5870 Excellent! Best wishes on the threading dial. 🙂

Thanks. I bought mine here: www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=One%20Set%20Lubricating%20Oil%20Pump%20Hand-Actuated%20Router%20Electromagnetic%20Lubrication%20H

Ha! I think you mean that I need to be the apprentice and have training from 3 experts! I seemed destined to learn things the hard way! Best wishes. 🙂

Yeah, that is a good idea. Next time I have it apart, I'll have to add that in. Thanks!

You are not the first to notice that my oilers were empty. For the life of me, I can't remember to shut them off when I am done with the lathe. So I fill them up, and then come back and find them empty. And *then* I remember to shut them off. :-( It is so cool that you went to HS in Bridgeport. I bet you have some amazing stories. Best wishes. KT

@@KevinToppenberg I forget mine all the time too. Wish there was a better way to do it.

Mmmmm..... blueberry pie! LOL. Thanks for the comment and for watching.

I had to go back and check the video, and you are right. I had the stylus of that indicator at about 30 degrees. I found this video by Joe Pie that talks about it. czcams.com/video/dsWSxpwCPUg/video.html Looks like it is important to have the tip of the indicator as parallel to the surface as possible. If within 10%, it will give error of 1.5% according to wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosine_error 'm still not sure if my error was to overestimate or underestimate how much variance there was with that table. But thanks for pointing this out. I'll try to better next time!.

Thanks for the positive feedback. Who knows what hair-brained job I'll jump into. :-)

Thanks for your feedback. I'm sure I'll find some hair-brained project to start soon. (P.S., if this comes through double, it is because I typed out a reply, but then it seemed to disappear.). Best wishes!

Denis, thank you so much for your kind words. You have been very supportive as I bumbled my way towards completion. Perhaps my experience can be a starting point for others, so they can avoid the mistakes I have made. :-) Thank you also for making the nice starting casting, and for giving me great advice. Best wishes! KT

Uh oh.... you are going to see my alter ego! Lots of grease and foolish mistakes 🙂

I have not seen this series. I know Stefan, and everything he does is complete mastery. I need to watch what he says about scraping. But to be honest, he intimidates me. As in I will never be able to do things as good as he does. LOL. I just need to suck it up and watch it already! Thanks for the pointer.

Thanks! Hope you enjoyed the series.

Very much Kevin

Thanks for the kind words. That power scraper should be working better than it does. I'm still trying to figure out why it seems to only give me chicken scatches. I'll keep working on it. :-)

Can you tell me more about this. I initially wanted to weld mine, but everyone told me that the heat would make the cast iron crack. How did you do it?

@@KevinToppenbergI’m not the one you asked to question to but I’ve welded a cast iron crank with good results. I used cast iron specific electrodes (nickel alloy) in a stick welder. It is definitely possible to weld cast iron but you have to be extra careful to prevent cracking and overheating. The key is to preheat it, which is possible using a torch, to somewhere between 500 and 1200° but not above 1400 Fahrenheit. Cast iron is also prone to overheating so the weld beads has to be quite short, about an inch (or 10 times the electrode diameter) and using the lowest possible amperage.

@@Tidexon This is great information. Thanks. But I'm not sure I have the tools or skills to do that. Maybe next time. 🙂

Maybe I can come back to it when I get a good straight edged surface plate. :-) Thanks for watching.

Thanks for your comment. The jury is still out regarding "dedication" vs "foolish persistence". Ha! :-)

Thank you. There is something about a beautiful landscape that I find quite peaceful. :-)

@@KevinToppenberg I agree my lawn is about 1 acre and I love to just sit with a cup of coffee or glass of tea and soak up the peacefulness of it after I mow it. BTW great job on the Straight Edge scraping. You did the job the way the pioneers of precision had to do it. Surface grinders haven't always existed. In the beginning the seeds of precision started with rubbing two rocks together to make the first surface plate. And on and on. Thanks for such a great video.

@@terrycannon570 🙂 Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks. Now if I could just figure out how to not take 3 months to get such jobs done. Ha!

This was an amazing reply. I just wrote up a long email to the address given above, but I got back a message that matt.rull@gmail.com was not a valid email address. Is there another address?

Ha! Only if working on said bushel of thyme takes 3 months, starting with snow on the ground. Yeah, the old family stuff is pretty cool. Also, one of the family legends is that when immigrating, they were supposed to travel on the Titanic. Not on the voyage that ended in tragedy, but a planned subsequent one. After the Titanic sank, they traveled instead on the sister ship Olympic. Thanks for watching. :-)

It would be an interesting project to make a spring punch with adjustable spring compression such that one could dial in the desired depth. But I would think one would need a chart of the Rockwell hardness of the metal to factor in. After all, isn't this how harness testers work? The machine has known point harness, and known force, and then calculates metal softness based on divot depth? So if we have ([hardness] with [deformation force] ) ==> [divot depth], then to achieve desired depth, one has vary either the hardness or the deformation force. Thanks for working on this and posting. Best wishes, KT

@@KevinToppenberg The constant point/varying spring compression would be an elegant solution. But it would take me a week to take the punch apart, "engineer" a practical variable compression mechanism and then fabricate it. Most likely at that point I'd find it worked pretty well but needed improvements. Now I'd be redesigning and refabricating while another week went by. And there might well even be another circuit of this prior to getting a workable and reliable punch. I would take the quick and dirty approach and just sharpen or dull the point a bit on a bench stone or grinder and then test it on a scrap. Once it was making about the right hole depth, I'd start poking dents.

@@zekestrom Ha! And this highlights exactly why everything takes me 10x longer than it should. I always seem to do things the hard way. :-)

Yeah, I'm nowhere close to making a curl. You said "larger radius." But did you mean larger curvature? I.e. smaller radius? I would live to try out a real Biax to see what it is about my machine that is not working well. I have tried putting a different piece of carbide in there, with about half the radius of what I showed in the video. And it didn't seem to make much difference. I wish I could attend one of Richard King's classes and really get some proper education on scraping. But I haven't been willing to commit to the expense of time and money to do it. And thus I continue to stumble around in the dark. Ha! Thanks for the feedback.

@@KevinToppenberg Roughing needs a larger radius (bigger circle, almost straight) and you need about negative 5 degree grind on the edge. This will create a wider scrape. The tight radius is for pin-point scraping.

@@MatthewRulla OK. It makes sense that larger circle would help remove more material at a time. But since I am having trouble getting the edge to "dig in," I thought you were trying to encourage me to concentrate the force. But I see what you mean about covering a larger area. Regarding the 5 degree edge, I think I have a much larger angle than that, and thus it might be part of my problem. I'm going to experiment with getting to 5 degrees for next time. Thanks for the info.

I thought you had watched my earlier videos. I used my mill to my best ability, and still was left with that 24 thou'. Either I'm a crappy machinist, or my mill is crappy, or both! Ha! I didn't show it onscreen, but I did try a carbide with a more narrow radius. It didn't seem to do much better. I have been thinking also that I may need to pay attention to the bevel angle on the end of the carbide and see if that is correct. Thanks for the feedback. Sorry for the cringe. :-)

@@KevinToppenberg Truth be told, i might have forgotten the previously seen videos... I`ll check out if i missed out on something, but at any rate, i`ve been a bit swamped with crap and i`m sleeping quite poorly in the last few weeks, so i don`t operate at 100%... I`m fine, just a load of stuff on a metaphorical bar feeder, running me like an automatic lathe, except for the fact that an auto lathe has 0 issues with such regimen, where we organics do... Best regards!

@@camillosteuss Take care of yourself. You are the only one you've got! When I don't sleep well, everything goes sideways. Best wishes. 🙂

@@KevinToppenberg Thanks for the kind words! I`m usually ok with less sleeping, at least in regards to performance, but i don`t remember stuff that i did with accuracy and sense of sequential progression for some time... Tho, i always had a shit short term memory... Once a few months pass, i start recalling everything, but recently observed or learned stuff is just put into the sorting machine and until it gets sorted, it`s lost... Oh well...

I believe Steve Watkins quoted Richard King as saying if there was more than 5 'thou to remove, to just send it off to be ground. So starting > 25 'thou called for drastic measures if I was going to do it in my little shop. Also, I think my power scraper must not dig in as well as a real Biax one, because it only seems to take off a fraction of a 'thou each pass. So that is what led to the use of a belt sander -- which is terrifying. Anyway, it is great to hear that your father has reached 90 yrs! Those are the kind of genes you want to inherit. Thanks so much for your feedback. :-)

Thanks for the thought you put into this issue. I do understand what you are saying about picking one end to be the "good end" and working towards the bad end. Right off the bat, I don't understand how that would result in less overall metal being removed. But I may just need to think about this some more. You idea about using a spring-loaded center punch is very interesting. My concern would be to calibrate it, i.e. how to know how deep the divot was. In the end, if there is a lesson to be learned here, it is that I should have machined it with the mill, on it's *side*, as you pointed out. That way, as the table drooped, it would not have affected the cutting plane. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you like the next video when I get it all completed. :-)

​@@KevinToppenberg Concerning the question of reducing the amount of metal removed by allowing the plane to hinge on one end: The volume of metal removed is more or less represented by a rectangular box 36" long, 3" wide, and .020 high in your case. In that case, plane simply slowly descends equally on all corners until the surface all prints, about 2 cubic inches of iron has to be converted to powder. It's easier to imagine the volume difference if you exaggerate the box, though, and make it 2 inches high rather than .020.". Now look from the side and draw a diagonal line from the top good end corner to the lower corner of the bad end. Imagine you remove metal down to the diagonal rather than removing the entire box of metal. Scraping to the diagonal would require half the metal removal compared to scraping away the entire box. Still you need to remove a lot of metal considering you are powdering it either by abrading it or scraping it. To calibrate the spring punch I think I would start by rounding the tip to look like a ball-point pen tip. Then, using a piece of 1/2x2x3" scrap soft steel (it is close to the hardness of soft cast iron) I would mill off the surface and make a bunch of divots. Then I'd mill off the surface in small increments to see if this system did in fact make more or less uniform dents and to see about how deep they might be. The tip profile could be adjusted to get about the depth desired. One caution would be to be sure to back up the steel by placing it on a heavy steel or cast surface as you want to simulate the mass of the casting and not just a small piece of steel floating in space. I am half-tempted to try that out in my shop just to see if the idea is at all practical. I kinda think it would work. Anyway, I mam looking forward to the next video. Denis

I see what you mean about the best plane to aim for. And regarding calibrating the spring punch, that is a pretty good idea. Thanks for the helpful pointers!

I would love to have a surface grinder. I'll need to tell my wife that I just have to get one, "for the channel." Ha! I have an old drill press that belonged to my wife's grandfather. He was a man of many talents, one of which was helping start up the Little Debbie's (snack cakes) factory by helping build their machines etc. The problem with the drill press is that it doesn't have a crank for raising and lowering the table. So I don't really like it. But it would be easy enough to clean up, paint, and get looking nice. I'll have to think about this. Thanks for the feedback!

I have it on good authority :-) that the creator of Wooly Willy was using metal shavings from the shop floor. It only seemed right. Ha!

Thanks for the kind words! I hope that, after seeing me bumble along, that it will give encouragement for others to try to do something similar. Your castings are a great option to get into this with. Thanks again so much!

Thanks! :-)

But a decent one

yeah, at the end of the video I tried one, and that didn't work either. My favorite saying is that "I can't learn from my mistakes until I make my mistakes." My brain told me that my hair-brained flycutter wouldn't work. But I still had to try it to be sure. :-) Thanks for your feedback.

I am hoping I got that edge thin enough to reach all the way into the corner of the dovetails. We'll see. How long was the straight edge that you machined?

I think part of that appearance is that floor. It is all nice and shiny. The problem is that shiny floors are not really what you want when you need to start welding etc etc. But thank you for the kind words! :-)

They say you can't learn from your mistakes until you make your mistakes. Ha! I had hoped that with the soft cast iron that I would get away with it taking a light cut. But you are right, way too sketchy! Thanks for watching!

Thanks for hooking me up with the raw casting!

Yeah, it does kind of look like those mobile islands that one can have in a kitchen. But I just a touch heavier! Thanks for watching.

Here here! Everyone notice that this is the creator of the casting! Thank you so much for your comments. Yes, this was a learning process. I have had others recommend putting it on it's side and using a large endmill (which I have). If you were able to get to 0.001" on a bridgeport, then well done! I think if I did it again, using everyone's suggestions, I'd be happy to get to within 0.005" Regarding dealing with the 0.014", I ultimately succeed. Stay tuned for future videos (if you want). :-)

You are right! When I finally get it done and onto the surface plate, I'm off by about 0.015". But never fear, I ultimately succeed. Stay tuned!

Good eyes, and you are right. If I tighten up the gib further, I don't have range of travel, so I have to leave the gib loose and then constantly put the lock on that x axis. That has been part of my motivation to get a straight edge, so I might be able to try to fix it (big job that I am dreading). Thanks for watching!

@@KevinToppenberg I have a Clausing Kondia mill with a similiar issue and am also currently working on a straight edge to fix the issue haha. Good luck with it!

I am Christian, but I like to think that the appeal is because it is also just good common sense!

I hadn't even thought of running an endmill along the face. I'll try to keep that in mind for next time. Thanks for the feedback and for watching!

Yes, by the end of the video I had gotten tired of hand cranking and installed a power feed. Much nicer!

Thanks for your reply. We are a bit like family. It would be fun to meet at a get-together. If you think .002" is a lot to scrape, wait until we get to the scraping part. It is more like 0.014" ! Ha!

@@KevinToppenberg It looked like a very generous .002 to me also. LOL

I think if I were to do it again, I would depend more on turret rotation than table movement. When I would move the table to the end of it's travel, I think I was getting quite a bit of sag. If, instead, I had kept the travel more to the midline, and divided the milling into 4 parts (i.e. 4 turret positions), I think it would have been more even. And thanks for the friendship! Best wishes.

3/4" SC variable helix, unequal spacing, 4 X D minimum. 3.0" LOC in a solid holder, no collet.

I'll show some more details in upcoming videos, and I appreciate your kind words, but the surface plate is not really in very good shape. The edges have quite a bit of wear, and the material that they used contained some softer material (quarts?) that has flaked out in many places, leaving surface imperfections. I think the high points are still flat (I hope they are), but its not "pretty." Having said that, when I get to scraping, I make sure that I move the straight edge all around the surface, so that if there is one area that is low, it will be compensated for. Thanks also for your advice about making that stand better.

@@KevinToppenberg I expected issues, the chipping notwithstanding, but a plate like this is somewhat easily fixed, or rather, with enough effort and time... Look up Robin Renzetti`s video on his surface plate work... Now making such large charged laps may be troublesome, but it can be done... Even if you can only make small laps and have to deal with the issues one detail after another... I`m always glad to offer any insight that comes to my mind, should i perceive that it might be of help... I may come across a bit assertive, but yeah, it`s only because i don`t like seeing abuse or poor treatment of worthy things... Best regards!

@@camillosteuss I always appreciate your input. You are clearly passionate and knowledgeable Best wishes!

@@KevinToppenberg Most glad to have something to offer... I do agree with passionate, as i have been zealously learning all that i can regarding and related to machining for over a decade with no hope of ever getting a single machine, let alone all the other fields and subjects of my maniacal researches and studies, but i would say that i am well read/informed... Knowledge is more solid and backed by some experience in the very least, where most of my passions were up to now - a relentless devouring of literature... I guess that the actual lack of application is what drives the desire to share with others who are in a situation where they can do it at present... Kinda like the overcompensating parents who live their unfulfilled dreams through their kids... Except i do it with hairy men from across the globe - rather than kids... But, we`ll get to it, in the next year or so, i`ll likely have a proper shop built next to my house, and then the application will begin in earnest, and the learning might just become consolidated knowledge... All the best and warmest regards!

Thanks. I need to get started on editing the footage!

Thanks for the sub! I hope you enjoy the series. Drop a comment if you have any questions. Best wishes.

That floor is a bit too beautiful for its own good. Ha! I put it in there to increase floor strength. The installer got a good deal on "cabin grade" flooring. And now it is a shame when I mess it up with stuff like welding. I should be more careful, but I just want to be able to use my shop! Thanks for watching.

I found an online calculator that took the dimensions for granite and come out about 1,000 lbs. Its probably right at the limit of what they can handle.

Now that you mention it, I think someone told me that once. But I didn't think about it. It would have been safer for sure!