Can I Machine Precision Ovals with a Shop-Made Lathe Dovetail Fixture?

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Making precision oval iris plates without CNC machining is HARD. Especially if you don't have a good precision boring head for your mill. Here's how you can make a ludicrously over-engineered fixture for manual lathes to make arbitrary-sized oval iris plates for very high-performance Microwave Waveguide Antennas.
The shape I'm making isn't strictly a mathematical oval, it's a STADIUM, with two parallel sides and semi-circular ends. The thickness, length and width of the iris determines how the iris plate transforms the waveguide mode and impedance and allows matching between rectangular and round guides for example.
If the diameter of the holes is a standard reamer size, it's possible to make this purely on a mill, but I'm making lots of different sized iris plates, so tooling gets expensive very rapidly. you can use a rotary table, but you have to slide the workpiece along to re-centre the second hole, and work-holding gets challenging.
This isn't the best way to do this by any means, but it was a lot of fun making the dovetail slide. Simplest alternative of course is to make a simple fixture without a slider and use a boring head on the mill to machine the two holes after drilling them close to size, then finish the sides.
Nowhere near as much pointless over-engineering fun though!
An even simpler cheat is to make an iris with four radiused corners. You can make that using a single end-mill, but chatter is always a problem in the corners if you are using a manual mill. It's trivial on a CNC mill or Wire-EDM machine of course.
AIMEE my snarky but hyper-intelligent sidekick makes "helpful" comments about my oversights and shortcomings as usual. After all, there are plenty to go at.
BUY ME A COFFEE? ko-fi.com/machiningandmicrowaves
MY PATREON PAGE: / machiningandmicrowaves
Affiliate links - I get a small percentage of any sales via these links:
Edge Technology Chuck Stop Kit amzn.to/3tcFROH **MIGHT NOT WORK OUTSIDE USA **
In the UK, try Machine DRO. Sorry about this "feature" of Amazon.
Low cost brazed carbide dovetail cutter: amzn.to/3Eyy548
Arrow image by Freepik
00:00 Why are we here?
04:24 Mandrel slider
09:28 Mount
11:39 Haimer self-destruct
13:40 Slitting Saw
16:42 Relief and alignment bore
23:42 First Trial Iris

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22 июн 2024

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Комментарии : 109

@theradiorover 8 месяцев назад

Good one Neil. Amazon Prime saves the day, eh? Nice to see a video where you use just about every tool and bit in the workshop.

@ollysworkshop 9 месяцев назад

Good to see you back! 👍👍😁

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I've been working on two spying projects that have taken up loads of time, plus I'm making five or six sponsored videos for machines and materials that are relevant to my niche, then there's the Day Job and Real Life and all that, but I hope to get into a regular publishing schedule now I've dropped to 18 hours a week at the salt mine

@jimurrata6785 9 месяцев назад

Only yesterday I checked to see if I'd inadvertently unsubscribed. 😅 Good to know you've been just too busy with "real" jobs and interesting projects.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

@@jimurrata6785 Life has been getting very interesting! I'm working on three replica spying device builds plus something else involving radio from WW2 for a TV show. My new lab for 3D printing, lasers and electrochemistry is coming on nicely too. Now I just have to finish all these sponsored vids to make some money to fund all my other projects! I just bought FOUR IBM Selectric II typewriters for a replica build of the Project GUNMAN bugging of the US Embassy in Moscow in the 80s

@jimsvideos7201 9 месяцев назад

The idea of sticking my boring head into the lathe spindle and using for workholding is so profoundly elegant that I feel bad for not having thought of it in the first place. 😅

@jonsworkshop 9 месяцев назад

Never a step too far, that's just impossible. Nice work, and I think you will find countless other uses for that fixture over time so well worth the effort in my opinion. Cheers, Jon

@trollforge 9 месяцев назад

If not Over engineered, then at very least, Oval engineered... ;)

@larss337 9 месяцев назад

😂

@atariks1475 8 месяцев назад

Badumm tss Really not that bad. Your dad should be proud .

@zebo-the-fat 9 месяцев назад

So relaxing watching you make it all look easy, all I could do is smash up the tools and wreck the lathe!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

On one of the chamfer cuts, the tool was only about 5 thou from the chuck jaws. "Carefuling" as the totally excellent @SarahnTuned would say

@RyanStone143 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Love Sarah's channel!

@micheledehays2133 8 месяцев назад

Hi Neil , you are definitely the master even if Aimee does not look convinced 73 de Dom F6DRO

@edgeeffect 9 месяцев назад

I've been missing my regular visits to your shed. :)

@daretodreamtofly3288 9 месяцев назад

I find it quite interesting how widely excepted 3D printers are in the hobbyists and home pro. Making everything from table game minis to fully functional parts for rockets. It's really become a tool everyone can get into at various price points and technologies. Surprisingly more so than even mini mills and lathes. Now if only sputtering machines, and SEMs are even half as common

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

The Prusa is a good workhorse, but it needs a bit of care and feeding, whereas the Bambu X1C feels like a finished product and just works without needing any 3D nerdery. Same with the Creality laser engraver/cutter. I'm just doing some detailed dimensional stability tests and mapping the precision of the Z axis with the laser sitting on my big granite surface plate and using a height gauge and DTI to check for variations. Front to back is pretty good, only about 100 micrometres variation. Side to side is a bit less good, I thing I need to tighten things up a bit as it's nodding a bit near one end of the travel, perhaps from belt tension lifting the head. The odd half millimetre doesn't matter, but I like things to be just so. I have a two-stage vac pump, bell jar, Edwards APG and some fittings, but I haven't checked how good a vacuum I can pull yet. Sputtering and plasma deposition are some way off from being implemented here!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

It's certainly more sensible to do this using a boring head in the mill, but I'd still have to do some work-holding to machine the iris to thickness and diameter. It was a bit of fun in the shop instead of doing anything useful! "It's not an OVAL, it's a STADIUM" Yeah, thanks Captain Obvious! Calling it a Stadium Iris is just hella confusing!

@ParsMaker 8 месяцев назад

nice job , I really enjoy the way you record and voice over video, so entertaining😇

@SystemsPlanet 9 месяцев назад

Really impressed you learned all the new tech

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I'm neck-deep in a video about the Bambu X1 Carbon Combo with the four-reel AMS, making Fresnel Zone Plate lenses using filament loaded with TiO2, plus some soluble support material that I'm using to build dielectric lenses, another about a 40 watt CNC diode laser, trying to use it to perforate foil to make cavity-backed slot arrays and Fabry-Perot resonators. Also trying laser-ablation of a resist layer on aluminium sheet, then electroplate gold and electroform copper and dissolve the aluminium to leave the ultra-thin gold-coated copper. That's fun. Back to earth for a bit, I'm making laser-cut wooden cases for the parts I make, complete with engraved logo, filled with fused powder-coating paint. The pure white is a total nightmare. I hope the rotary axis drive for the laser arrives soon, I want to use it to mark my feedhorns and other products with Cermark or similar. So far, it works marvellously on anodised aluminium antenna components that are dyed in deep colours.

@TheDistur 9 месяцев назад

Neat machining!

@JAGFG42 9 месяцев назад

So looking forward to this video

@kalev6663 9 месяцев назад

Hermoso trabajo, saludos desde Argentina

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

¡gracias por ver!

@generaldisarray 9 месяцев назад

Excellent work, as always. Great to see you back in the workshop on the tools, such precision. God be with the days when an old metal coat hanger would make for a respectable aerial...🤣🤣

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I had one on an old car after the telescopic antenna was snapped off. I bent the coat hanger into the shape of a duck, but some local kid mangled it, so I remodelled it into a shark. In the end I scrapped the car and kept the rather more valuable shark antenna.

@generaldisarray 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves 🤣🤣🤣 Was it one of those fancy automatic aerials? When I was a kid, so many years ago in the 70s/80s, my friends farther got a new Nissan Bluebird with one of those and we were fascinated at the fact that turning on the radio made the aerial pop up and vise versa. 🤣 🤣 🤣 We were easily entertained

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

@@generaldisarray Austin Allegro. manual aerial. Second-worst car I ever drove. Only 1st and 3rd gears worked and it sprayed oil if you went over 45mph

@generaldisarray 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves what was the worst? I gotta know.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

@@generaldisarray Lotus Europa. Truly appalling car. Steering from a Morris Minor, impossibly unreliable vacuum headlight elevation, 1930s-style gearbox, worse rear visibility than a Countach. Bits fell off all the time, body fell apart regularly, engine had flat spots and misfires and weird mixture problems. Few of the gauges worked. A front wheel eventually collapsed sideways when the Minor steering bits fractured. And the brakes? What brakes? Terrible. I've driven better Zastava Yugos and ancient Ladas.

@stanmacdonald1073 9 месяцев назад

Great job! I too had questioned as to why the job couldn't be done on the mill. It would have been a good excuse to get a good boring head:-) A quick question, why are the dimensions so critical? A fractional change in frequency changes the structure's relative size.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I really REALLY must get a good boring head, but I have a Syil X5 CNC mill on order, and I've spent all of my tooling budget on shrink-fit holders, ER25/ER16 collet chucks and toolholders. Now I have my eyes on a really nice Gerardi modular vice, and I need a new quiet air compressor. The size of the oval is not quite as critical as the thickness is. The iris and the stepped section of the horn are critical to achieving the best possible return loss in the horn assembly as a whole. I ran a LOT of E-M simulations to determine the sensitivity of the various dimensions. Sort of a human-mediated genetic algorithm approach to optimisation. I want to ensure that the side-lobe performance and return-loss are as reproducible as possible, so chasing precision on thickness, parallelism and orifice size are worth it when I'm looking for effects at the -30dB level (around 0.1% or tighter). The iris and the round stepped section are inherently narrow-band structures, and I'm aiming for peak performance over a few hundred MHz at 10 GHz, so perhaps 3% bandwidth. The effect of all of the tolerance variations added in the usual root of sum of squares for total error needs to be well under 1%, and some dimensions are WAY more sensitive than others, so aiming for perhaps +- 5 micrometres in the width and diameters and spacing, and even less in the thickness of the iris should help with getting repeatable results. Once I have a good sample size, I can check the effect right out at the margins to make sure the sidelobes are well-suppressed, and that needs a delicate control over the relative phase and phase velocity of the two different waveguide modes generated in the horn. I can then check for any outliers and see which of the dimensions has the most effect. Models can only do so much, and once you get to effects at the -30 dB level, the precision of the measurements starts to impact the accuracy, so I'm chasing shadows really below about -25 dB

@joell439 9 месяцев назад

Nice job 👍😎👍

@ferrumignis 9 месяцев назад

I've definitely never used an end mill in a chuck to spot face a hole, and any rumours to the contrary must be ignored. Beautiful job as always, though I'm not clever enough to work out why the ends of the waveguide slot couldn't have have been cut using a boring head on the mill?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

You haven't seen my janky old cheapo boring head. I need to buy myself a decent one

@ollysworkshop 9 месяцев назад

I had a giggle at around 7:53, turn the collet 359° to find the key!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I thought I was being so clever with knowing where the keyway was, but I couldn't have been more wrong. I left that in the edit just in case someone with sharp eyes would spot it! You win the internet for today!

@Churchill250267 9 месяцев назад

DMC Micrometer - one previous owner, never used...

@smash5967 9 месяцев назад

Is there a reason you couldn't have just machined the whole part in the mill using a boring head rather than the fixture to hold the part in the lathe?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

My boring head is terrible, but I could certainly drill the locating pin holes and finish the outside and faces in a simpler version of the fixture, on the lathe, or if I got the mill trammed in really well, I could get a good enough surface finish with a decent flycutter, if I had one! It was a bit of fun really. Once the CNC arrives, I could do the whole thing on it, although it's simpler to finish the outside of the finished horn assembly by using the fixture (or just the slide) to hold the entire assembly. I'll probably make a collet-mounting version of just the head with locating pins and bolts for finish machining and polishing the assembly ready for anodizing or Cermark or paint and laser labelling

@tolkienfan1972 9 месяцев назад

I was waiting expectantly for a "wheee!". But when it came it wasn't the thrill I hoped for! The smell of burning money. I know it well. My kids smell like that all the time.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I've used the Haimer hundreds of times and that's the first time I've ever snapped the probe. Pity I wasn't filming at 100 fps for that full-effect slow-mo

@occasionalmachinist 9 месяцев назад

Neil, there's some technology that some of us use called 'a cheap paint brush'. Saves blowing chips everywhere, as well as saving the cost of running a compressor

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

While I have heard of this new-fangled technology, and I have a bag of fifty such devices an inch wide, I always forget to pick out a new one after flinging the current one in the bin. That leads to anointing the walls with chip slurry. Not even Simple Green will shift that. The compressor is there for obscure and mysterious purposes anyway, but I really must put the brushes and wiping rags and blue roll in more convenient locations and leaving the airline elsewhere.

@occasionalmachinist 9 месяцев назад

You need another mysterious technology then - a nail in the wall by machines to hang the brush on.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

@@occasionalmachinist I could certainly try that, but the badly-made bricks in my ancient barn are held together with what appears to be sand and sawdust, so extreme care is needed when making holes. It would be most inconvenient if the barn fell down. It doesn't have clever modern conveniences like damp-proof courses or foundations. Of course, I SHOULD fabricate a cantilever brush-holder that hangs from the ceiling and can be repositioned as required, perhaps with a counter-weighted and speed-regulated retraction cord, so if I put it down at random, it will slowly return to the home position without sloshing me in the face. Hmmmm

@pariskennard4540 8 месяцев назад

Lol lol lol.

@Mike-H_UK 9 месяцев назад

Good to see you back. Did you ever take any measurements with those 3d lenses that you made with Rogers?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Yes, and I've made a load of fittings to support the lenses on a sort-of optical bench so I can do some proper experiments with focus slides. Also I made a mount for that giant flashlight to fit and protect the lens. I'm trying to finish off those results videos after sitting on them for ages, but the originals were made using an editor I no longer have a licence for, so I'll have to restart the entire edit in Davinci Resolve Studio. I've printed some similar gradient index Mikaelian lenses and Luneburgs using some TiO2-loaded high-Dk filament and some in polystyrene and polypropylene, but they were tricky on my Prusa MK3S+, so I asked Bambu Lab for an X1 Carbon Combo and I'm now making that video as a sponsored gig. Also I'm trying to print radomes for feedhorns using PP filament. That's a whole different level of "fun". The Bambu machine is a serious tool that worked right out of the box with no faffing about needed. It does most things as well as or better than the Prusa, and at 2 to 4 times the speed. I enjoyed building the Prusa, but getting really high environment temps inside the Prusa enclosure isn't simple, I use a warm air blower to get the temperature up in the 50s, but I worry about the dimensional stability and creep. The Bambu seems to warm up much better and so far I've not had to use external heat. When the new CNC mill eventually arrives, I'll be able to do much more complex lens and reflector assemblies

@Mike-H_UK 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Looking forward to the videos when you get them out.

@1crazypj 9 месяцев назад

I find it pretty amazing and kinda funny that people still use EN numbers for steel as they were supposed to be 'obsolete' by 1960's and were actively discouraged in 1990's (when I last used them, although 'everybody' knew what they were) In case anyone reading doesn't understand, they are 'Emergency Numbers' (EN) designed during WWII so different allied countries would use same materials. As an aside, 25 years on, I still regret selling my Colchester lathe

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

My supplier does at least label it with the correct designation, although their orders and invoices and website refer to EN24T or EN8. Same with 1080 and 4140 AISI or SAE . Somehow 080m40 doesn't trip off the tongue. See also waveguide size WG16, which "Everyone" knows, hut uses WR90 to be modern, even though that was also superseded ages ago. UG-387/U for flanges, C109 for Tellurium Copper and so on.

@1crazypj 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves LOL, right on about 'official' classifications, I had forgotten just how ridiculous things get when various government agencies get involved. I know and understand just about nothing when it comes to an form of radio/microwave, (an internet friend in Washington state has been trying to get me interested for at least 10 years) I only watch your machining video's which are always interesting (and just realised I'm no longer subscribed for some reason?) Oh well, hit the button again 🤭

@dtnicholls1 9 месяцев назад

That seemed like a lot of effort to go to. Boring head is an obvious choice there... But even if you were dead set on doing it in the lathe, popping a couple of centre drill holes in the appropriate locations and then indicating a dead centre with the job in a 4 jaw would also give good results. Many ways to skin a cat as they say.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I'd need to buy a decent boring head, then there's the question of repeatability if I need to make 20 or more identical parts. I could probably drill out two holes then use the boring bar for the final cut and get good repeatable diameters, and the spacing would be easy enough. Life is going to get a lot more interesting when the CNC mill finally arrives and I can do much more complex shapes than I can do manually. What I REALLY need is a Wire EDM machine so I can make rectangular holes with sharp corners,

@MartinMaynard 9 месяцев назад

Sent coffee. Can I ask what your camera set up is for the lathe work.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Thanks! It's usually a Sony a7s II with a Sony 90mm FE G macro or a 300mm Sony zoom, sometimes an a7 IV with a 40mm prime on a gimbal or on a mount with an extension macro ring. Lighting is one LED panel and a 100W LED spot with a big umbrella softbox. Usually fixed manual focus using peaking and manual speed and aperture, 800 ASA 25 fps at full 4k resolution. I need a small highlight spot and a tiny backlight really. Lights are on overhead booms fixed to the walls

@malcolmspann7315 8 месяцев назад

A Stadium is also called an Obround.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 8 месяцев назад

I'll take that as my Today I Learned factoid!!

@pariskennard4540 8 месяцев назад

The edge technology chuck stop kit link is wrong... just FYI. Thank you!!!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 8 месяцев назад

There's a weird "feature" where if I post an affiliate link to an amazon.com address for something that can't be shipped to an address ion another country, Amazon very helpfully show a link to something completely different that IS available. Instead of a Chuck Stop Spider from Edge Technology, in the UK we get a spider catching device. Infuriating! I'm working on a solution using an amazon storefront, but I can't see how to disable that ridiculous "helpful" feature. (or as we call it, a BUG!) I've added in a note about it.

@johnnycomelately6341 9 месяцев назад

Is there a digital readout on your mill? No spring cut on the Colchester??

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I never do spring cuts, I just do two or three balanced cuts to hit the dimension under identical chip load, so I don't have to factor in tool deflection. The mill and lathe both have DROs although I sometimes use an indicator as well. I usually manage to hit tolerances without having to creep up on dimensions (then miss them like certain YT machinists do!)

@johnnycomelately6341 9 месяцев назад

OK, thank you @@MachiningandMicrowaves

@Rustinox 9 месяцев назад

Over engineerd? Absolutely! But that's, of course, the fun part of it.

@nf4x 9 месяцев назад

Didn’t you have a larger slitting saw you could use to cut that 8mm deep slot?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

That comedy-sized slitting saw is the only one of that thickness that I could find to fit my shop-made low profile arbour. The little ones are a weird mix of metric and inch sizes but all of the small arbours would hit the vice and all the ones with right sized holes were too thick. I'm making another low profile arbour with a smaller spigot!

@ivanlam1304 9 месяцев назад

So it's an impedance matching and mode changing device?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Yes, it matches between the simple TE10 mode in a rectangular guide and the basic TE11 in a circular guide. There is also dome impedance matching going on. In this antenna, the TE11 mode is then disrupted by the step at the end of the short round guide and that excites another mode. They then combine at the horn opening to cancel any edge currents that would cause sidelobes in the pattern. I really should make a video about the exact mechanism

@ivanlam1304 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Thanks, please do make a video, it's got to be better than my microwaves and optics course at university which I failed

@Rob_65 6 месяцев назад

And the only time you ask her, Amy keeps het speaker shut ... I was wondering how you would make a true ellipse on the lathe, just to figure out that this is not an ellipse. An ellipse is sort of a flattened circle, this is a slot but I still had a good time watching the whole process. To ease the pain of the broken Haimer tip a bit, let me point you to Stefan Gotteswinter's latest project: ru-vid.com0Ua7DcFJWLU a nice indicator holder to find the center of any round piece. The most expensive part is the indicator and that one is, most likely, even less expensive than the ceramic Haimer tip.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 5 месяцев назад

The interesting thing about oval irises is that they can be stadium shaped (Two semicircles joined by straight line segments) or elliptical (conic section) or almost any shape intermediate between a circle and rectangle. When my new CNC mill arrives, I'll be able to experiment much more easily. I saw Stefan's video and I think I need to get making!

@Rob_65 5 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Can't wait what to see what you'll be able to do with the CNC mill 🥰

@wiju 9 месяцев назад

Wouldn't wire EDM be perfect for that job?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Pretty much ideal, and one day I'll build a wire EDM machine to make square cornered waveguide flanges and other parts that can't be machined any other way. Kind of expensive to get a commercial machine and even a BAXEDM style home-brewed version is a serious piece of work

@sideswipe147 9 месяцев назад

You have a milling machine... so... this was what, just to see if you could come up with a way to do it on a lathe instead? I mean if you have to use the mill at all mightn't it be simpler to just mill the whole thing in on the milling machine?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I don't own a decent boring bar, so I'd have to buy one but my new CNC mill will be arriving in November so I wanted to find a precise and repeatable solution until the CNC arrives. I'd have to make a fixture to machine the outside and chamfers on the lathe, so I would need to make the mount anyway, so why not have some fun making a dovetail at the same time. Once the new machine arrives, I'll probably never need this again, but in the interim, it's made $500 worth of parts and saved me buying an unnecessary tool I guess?

@sideswipe147 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves seems to me a simple end mill should have been able to do a simple slot like that. Maybe a misunderstand what problem you were trying to overcome.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

@@sideswipe147 Chatter at the ends, plus the impossibility of finding an off the shelf cutter of the right diameter. It might be possible to use a rotary table with a slide and end mill, but a good boring head is probably the simplest solution, except that I'd have to drill or bore the holes incrementally, and that's ultra-simple on a lathe with a DRO, but adjusting a mill boring head manually in several steps is a major pain and repeatability issue. CNC is 100% the right way to go, plus that give me the option of having other iris geometries.

@sideswipe147 8 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves AH... UNUSUALLY SIZED HOLE... MY OLD NEMESIS... I see. Yeah pain in the ass. It all looked pretty standard at a glance and it just didn't make sense til now. Either way it still yet another way to do things which will sit somewhere on a back shelf in my mind until the time comes I may have need of it.

@sideswipe147 8 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves having milled an accurate od circle, BY HAND, ONCE upon a time (never again I hope), no DRO just the wheels and the accuracy of the machine, I can confirm that doing it the "old fassioned way" sucks giant flaming donkey n... I mean, it's hella stressful and ad tedium.

@ptonpc 9 месяцев назад

Ohhh pretty....

@Mireaze 9 месяцев назад

Why didn't you just use an oval shaped drill bit?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I cannot believe I didn't think of that. I'll never be a Proper Engineer

@MrBeaach 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves have you ever considered generating ,ellipses for antennas and the like ,by having the head of your mill off at a angle with a round tip(lollipop profile with relief) on a boring head, and cutting by moving the z axis up and down?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I wondered if I could do that using the lathe somehow, but the inside-out geometry defeated my spatial imagination. When the CNC arrives, I'll be able to so arbitrary shapes and surfaces, so I'll be able to go wild with laterally-displaced ellipsoids and hyperboloids and totally aspheric reflectors, as well as things like cosecant-squared dielectric lenses. I'm doing a lot of experiments with 3D-printed lenses that might be easy enough to make on the CNC or even on the manual machines. 3D printing is mind-numbingly slow and clunky, even on this new super-fast unit I'm working with

@thecasualengineer99 9 месяцев назад

I am beginning to think you only turned the work to get a comment from Amy!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I feel so SEEN! Heh heh...

@Sqwince23 9 месяцев назад

Why not just use a boring head in the mill and skip the whole fixture all together?

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Absolutely, but that would be practical and sensible and not over-complicated...

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

I'd just need a simple fixture with alignment pins so I could machine the OD and face to thickness on the lathe and do the drilling and boring and flats on the mill. I'll need to make a pallet fixture to do these on the CNC when it eventually arrives. I'm sure I'll find ways to over-complicate that as well

@jimurrata6785 9 месяцев назад

This IS a boring head, except it's being used as a fixture... 😂

@opieshomeshop 9 месяцев назад

*_So, I'm at a loss here. You made a fixture in order to mill a slot on a lathe, yet you have a mill, and the entire process could have been done on a mill without a fixture for the lathe.... What am I missing here........_*

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

My boring bar is terrible and I don't own a decent flycutter. I needed a fixture to hold the completed assembly for finishing on the lathe so I went a bit mad for fun.

@quillclock 9 месяцев назад

thats not an oval its a "discorectangle"

@theblobewab6844 9 месяцев назад

32nd!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

My lucky number! Huzzah!

@AlexHamre 9 месяцев назад

First!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Heh heh!

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

This was supposed to go out last night, but I made a disastrous mistake with frame rates in Davinci Resolve and had to repair 380 edits between frames after regenerating it. I was up until 6 AM local doing the repairs. I won't make THAT mistake again. I took a VERY long summer break from RU-vid to catch up with my other work, but I'm back now

@AlexHamre 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Glad to hear that you're back

@skwerlz 9 месяцев назад

So was there a point to wasting hours of your time and 30 minutes of mine other than self-gratification? Drill 2 holes, bore them to size, use endmill to connect them, problem solved.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

You missed out the "Buy an expensive and long-term unnecessary boring head" step. Also the workholding issue with machining the OD. so needing a fixture for that anyway. Hindsight is always 20/20. Soon as my CNC mill gets shipped to me, I will be able to make these easily, but then I could have just ordered the parts from a CNC fab. Ultimately, I do what I enjoy, there doesn't need to be a point to it. For fun. Time spent messing about in the shop is never wasted. Time spent as a wage slave at my day job is the very definition of wasted.

@skwerlz 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Seems like you just gave yourself an idea for another project - make a boring head. edit - I'm sorry for you that you feel that badly about your career. If you feel like that it's a good sign you're either in the wrong field or at the wrong company.

@MachiningandMicrowaves 9 месяцев назад

Nah, I've just been doing this day job for WAAAAY too long. It used to be interesting and challenging 30 years ago, and it ought to be cool and interesting, but being a cybersecurity systems architect and doing forensics is mind-numbingly dull. Still fighting the same battles I've been facing for the whole of this century, with terrible software and terrible IT folks doing silly things. OK, chasing the bad guys doing fraud is still fun, catching a few and getting them jail time is mildly satisfying. All of the joy has been squeezed out of the work now. I could have retired some time ago, but they keep paying me wads of cash to fight the good fight, which enables me to do things like buying shiny new CNC machines. Only working part time for 18 hours a week now, and I should be able to get some more interesting projects done. I've worked with computers since the mid-1970s, so I'm a little jaded and burned out. Company is actually great, but yeah, I've been in the wrong field for 45 years!

@skwerlz 9 месяцев назад

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I hear ya on that, I dodged that bullet before it started. Biggest lesson I learned in college was that I'm allergic to collared shirts, cubicles, and paperwork. I'm much happier in trades and making more than I probably would have in tech. It's so much more satisfying at the end of the day when you can see exactly what you've done rather than just a line count.