Wedg1e
They call me Mr. Bodge-angles
- Messages
- 7,745
- Location
- Teesside, England
I've had my VSL for about 18 years and only ever had a couple of toolholders plus a parting holder.
Thought it was about time to obtain a few more as it gets a bit wearing swapping tools and readjusting height etc.
Then I saw the price of them
OK then: I'll make some. How hard can it be?
The Boxford size holders are 35 x 32 x 73mm but all I had lying around was some 50 x 50mm steel bar.
And a horizontal mill
This 1ES (Adock & Shipley were owned by the Textron group around 1980 so they rebadged them as Bridgeports) came from a college somewhere in Yorkshire and was one of the first things I ever bought via Ebay. It was fitted with this monster slab mill (and a safety guard ) but I'd hardly ever needed it... until I had 18mm of steel to get rid of. I roughed the bars to length with a chop saw and squared the ends in the lathe 4-jaw, then ...
I squared up four, not sure where the other one was in this shot
Interestingly, when I measured all the 'original' holders I had, no two were exactly the same size, so I threw some numbers at AutoCAD and ended up with a working drawing.
For the first one I started by chopping out the main centre slot, but later realised that I should have put the longitudinal slot for the tool in first, as doing it this way didn't leave much material for the vice to grip when doing the long slot last.
In order to put the various 45 degree faces (facets?) I used a nice 10mm wide 36T cutter. The block was tilted in the vice jaws using a combination gauge body and the tool touched-off (no mean feat, trying to wind the knee of a 1ES with precision) on the top corner. I'd used the CAD to tell me how far down and across the faces needed to be; it was simple to do all of them at one end and then flip the block over for the other end:
The observant will have observed that the block in the pic above has the T-slot mostly finished. The pics are out of sequence, as I took them of different blocks. It needs to be a T-slot of course, for the locking 'plunger' to fit in and pull it up against the main toolpost body. Lacking a proper T-slot cutter I had to improvise with a Woodruff cutter and cut each side in two passes. This also necessitated swapping from horizontal to vertical mode by removing the arbor and hoisting the 43Kg vertical head into place. This was another lightbulb moment: what I should have done was left the T-slot milling till last, which was the only task that required the vertical head. Anyway, on the first one I couldn't get the deepest pass to full width as the Woodruff cutter fouled the corner of the centre slot, so I returned to horizontal mode to do the facets. Here's a later block where the slot corners have been milled away and the Woodruff cutter could get in properly (note spare indexable shank acting as a packer):
There are also two slits in the block, right at the bottom of the two outer Vees. I've no idea quite why they're there, on every 'original' block I have they're slightly different widths and depths. Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing and what I should have done (well, on the last two I did) was put them in after the Vees had been milled. To begin with I used a 1.2mm wide slitting saw and cut them to full depth
I thought maybe the idea was that the slot provided somewhere for the corner of whatever tool cut the Vee to go, giving clearance between the bottom of the Vee and the matching protrusion of the toolpost, but that bit has a flat on it anyway, so there is no fouling. I reckon the slits are probably not needed, but answers on a postcard if anyone knows why they're there.
Eventually the time came to release the block from the mill and try it on the toolpost...
Looks promising
The last bit of milling (or the first, depending on which block it was) was to put the tool slot in. Unfortunately I had dyslexia of the hand and inadvertently started the mill in high ratio, so in the space of 2 nanoseconds it ripped the tips of all the cutter teeth off. Doh, I said. Or words to that effect. Luckily I had another cutter (side and face with offset teeth) that made short work of the slot, though as said earlier it had to get a bit close to the top of the vice jaws to cut the full depth, there wasn't much to hang onto. The shredded cutter will be dealt with in another post...
Then it was off to the Perrin for some drilling and tapping...
Thought it was about time to obtain a few more as it gets a bit wearing swapping tools and readjusting height etc.
Then I saw the price of them
OK then: I'll make some. How hard can it be?
The Boxford size holders are 35 x 32 x 73mm but all I had lying around was some 50 x 50mm steel bar.
And a horizontal mill
This 1ES (Adock & Shipley were owned by the Textron group around 1980 so they rebadged them as Bridgeports) came from a college somewhere in Yorkshire and was one of the first things I ever bought via Ebay. It was fitted with this monster slab mill (and a safety guard
) but I'd hardly ever needed it... until I had 18mm of steel to get rid of. I roughed the bars to length with a chop saw and squared the ends in the lathe 4-jaw, then ...I squared up four, not sure where the other one was in this shot
Interestingly, when I measured all the 'original' holders I had, no two were exactly the same size, so I threw some numbers at AutoCAD and ended up with a working drawing.
For the first one I started by chopping out the main centre slot, but later realised that I should have put the longitudinal slot for the tool in first, as doing it this way didn't leave much material for the vice to grip when doing the long slot last.
In order to put the various 45 degree faces (facets?) I used a nice 10mm wide 36T cutter. The block was tilted in the vice jaws using a combination gauge body and the tool touched-off (no mean feat, trying to wind the knee of a 1ES with precision) on the top corner. I'd used the CAD to tell me how far down and across the faces needed to be; it was simple to do all of them at one end and then flip the block over for the other end:
The observant will have observed that the block in the pic above has the T-slot mostly finished. The pics are out of sequence, as I took them of different blocks. It needs to be a T-slot of course, for the locking 'plunger' to fit in and pull it up against the main toolpost body. Lacking a proper T-slot cutter I had to improvise with a Woodruff cutter and cut each side in two passes. This also necessitated swapping from horizontal to vertical mode by removing the arbor and hoisting the 43Kg vertical head into place. This was another lightbulb moment: what I should have done was left the T-slot milling till last, which was the only task that required the vertical head. Anyway, on the first one I couldn't get the deepest pass to full width as the Woodruff cutter fouled the corner of the centre slot, so I returned to horizontal mode to do the facets. Here's a later block where the slot corners have been milled away and the Woodruff cutter could get in properly (note spare indexable shank acting as a packer):
There are also two slits in the block, right at the bottom of the two outer Vees. I've no idea quite why they're there, on every 'original' block I have they're slightly different widths and depths. Again, hindsight is a wonderful thing and what I should have done (well, on the last two I did) was put them in after the Vees had been milled. To begin with I used a 1.2mm wide slitting saw and cut them to full depth
I thought maybe the idea was that the slot provided somewhere for the corner of whatever tool cut the Vee to go, giving clearance between the bottom of the Vee and the matching protrusion of the toolpost, but that bit has a flat on it anyway, so there is no fouling. I reckon the slits are probably not needed, but answers on a postcard if anyone knows why they're there.
Eventually the time came to release the block from the mill and try it on the toolpost...
Looks promising
The last bit of milling (or the first, depending on which block it was) was to put the tool slot in. Unfortunately I had dyslexia of the hand and inadvertently started the mill in high ratio, so in the space of 2 nanoseconds it ripped the tips of all the cutter teeth off. Doh, I said. Or words to that effect. Luckily I had another cutter (side and face with offset teeth) that made short work of the slot, though as said earlier it had to get a bit close to the top of the vice jaws to cut the full depth, there wasn't much to hang onto. The shredded cutter will be dealt with in another post...
Then it was off to the Perrin for some drilling and tapping...
