I was in a similar boat a while ago. I had a faceplate but no camlock pins. I ended up making them from scratch as they were difficult to find or stupidly expensive. I wrote a thread about it on here.
Checking back, it was @6ply I bought the faceplate from! As I made one extra and its gathering...
If the lathe doesn't run in reverse check out the micro switches on the control shaft in the electrical cabinet. New ones seem to be unobtainable, but when one of mine went dickey I washed it out in IPA and it started working ok.
We now have an end ground like this:
Its looks awful zoomed in on the phone. It looked OK to the naked eye! Next the relief angle setting on the fixture is reduced to 8 degrees, the cutter is touched off on the wheel and approximately 0.12mm ground off to form the primary bevel. The end result...
This morning I picked a hand modified endmill to use as a guinea pig for going through my procedure for grinding the end cutting edges. It's a 2 flute, 1/2" with corners rounded off on a bench grinder, not particularly evenly either:
First, set a height gauge to centre height with the er...
I'll document what I did for the ends of the mills when I've got some pictures. I realised when I started writing this how confusing it was without step by step pics and as luck would have it, I don't seem to have what I need to explain it. As a taster, I rescued this 7/8" endmill with a chipped...
At this point there does need to be travel on the spindle to move the endmill to the left so it can disengage from the finger to allow it to advance to the next flute:
With everything tightened up the axis of the spindle is set parallel to the table again and the top pivot rotated back to give...
Back in 2019 I was given this collection of endmills by a neighbour of ours:
They range in size from 16mm down to 3mm, some imperial, some metric, but they're all decent quality, Clarkson, SKF, Dormer. Some were useable as is, some a bit dull, some "modified". They were a "round tuit"...
Check the pressure angle. 20 degrees is common nowadays. If you can't find one, I'm sure I could cut one, or maybe @Pete. might be keen to give his gear hobbing machine a workout!
Made a couple of replacement buttons for our cooker clock/timer today. The originals have a weak spot and the head of the button cracks eventually. New and original:
You can buy them...
I got the 18" machinist's level completed and calibrated today. These are the bits to put back together:
The end caps press in. A (big, in this case) milling vice makes this easy and fairly precise as the two end caps need to line up and present the vial window on the top:
But don't forget...
The machinists level vials I ordered from Aliexpress finally turned up, so I got them installed. The little side to side one (non-precision):
and the sensitive one in the main barrel:
Both fitted with inkjet photo paper as a backing and spacer and sealed in with plaster of paris. These...
Yesterdays job, replacing my wheelbarrow wheel:
New one was £11, tube and tyre included. Unfortunately the bore in the new on was much bigger, but thats what the workshop toys are for! I found a piece of 3/4" steel rod in the scrap bin, cleaned it up to 18mm ish and cut a 4" length, then...
Not necessarily. My Elliott Omnimill has 440V only motors which I'm running on a 220V VFD. You'll lose a bit of power but you won't blow the motor up by running on a lower voltage. The VFD just needs its voltage vs frequency slope reprogramming so it reaches 220V at 31Hz rather than 50Hz...
Finished off this box today:
It arrived a week ago looking a bit more tatty:
and contained this level:
The main brick laying sensitivity level has been removed (undamaged!) as well as the yellow one at the end, I've cleaned it up and scraped the bottom flat as it was far too far out...
Torque is a function of power and speed. One way to get more out of the motor would be to run it at a higher voltage... but I wouldnt do that.
When you run your grinder, do you take a cut with the full width of the wheel? My surface grinder has a more powerful motor than yours, around 750W I...
If I were running this as a business, I grant you I'd be on to a loser here. But I'm retired, my time is my own but funds are finite, so I'm better off making them.
If I were making these as a business I'd invest a lot more into tooling up with jigs so setup time would be reduced. I guess CNC...
I recently bought this faceplate from @6ply and I thought I'd share the delights I went through to get it mounted on the lathe:
It came without studs, no problem, I'll just buy some. Firstly, I checked the thread of the retaining screw. M6 x 1.0. Neither 1/4-20 UNC (which is what they are in...
No, I use a cup wheel with a couple of keyed bushes to mount it directly to the spindle. I have made an extension piece but it magnifies the runout so I don't use it, but moving the wheel further forward would allow some setups that dont work with a cup wheel.
I did look at this when I took it...