Magnetic Chuck for Surface Grinding on my Lathe? 

I find it amazing how a channel THIS niche is interesting to so many folks out there in Choob Land. Talking of niche, this next video is going to be about designing and machining a "plumbers delight" low pass coaxial harmonic filter for 1.3 GHz. Even I find how it works REALLY spooky, and I make them, dammit. I suspect a thaumaturgical influence from the Dungeon Dimensions. "Probably Quantum", as Mister Pratchett would have said.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Nice reference. I thinking was from "Pyramids"? Not a bad book, but I preferred all the "City Watch" books myself. Something about the whole "I'm doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do...... But I'm still going to do it reluctantly" reoccurring sub theme just sort of resonates with me. :D

@@Reman1975 My favourite could be million to one chances coming good nine times out of ten, or anything Nanny Ogg says. Night Watch or Monstrous Regiment perhaps my favourites of the books, with Thud! a close third

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Oh god, the "Witches" books are funny as hell, but even better if you get the audiobook versions. The lady who narrates them get's right into the roll. :D

@@Reman1975 My late wife used to listen to the audiobook versions after she lost her sight. She would sit in her armchair and cackle madly, listening on earbuds.

Quality, not quantity. My subscribers are a fine selection of the best folks out there in the Internetz. I hope you'll enjoy the next one when I get it finished!

@@MachiningandMicrowaves brilliant video, heck of brit humor, make it happener again

At the last count I had 57 planned, but taking a reasoned view on available time, not a hope of making any. However, weirdly I seem to have made some despite not having had time. I never was much good with spreadsheets. Although I use Visicalc in 1979 on a TRS80 model III and then taught Lotus 123 and Supercalc when they first came out. Still, being able to teach something doesn't mean you are necessarily any good at using it I guess? I'm having a lot of fun messing about with video, but now I have at least three huge trees down in the garden and I have to take time off work and get the chainsaws out instead of working on the next vid tomorrow. Booo. Just hope no more come down, it's blowing a hoolie out there

I have a good supply of "retired" bath towels that I use to cover the ways, and with the vacuum suction and the Noga-Cool mini mist spray, the dust is carefully controlled. One day, I'll get a proper surface grinder.

The vacuum chuck project is starting to come together, but I need a vacuum part that was on back-order so probably next weekend for that one

I must get on with the precision high speed spindle project, but this vacuum chuck for making fractional-step Fresnel Zone Plate lenses is definitely next on the list. Making a rotary vacuum joint is, er, fun....

I'm a total beginner at a million different things, but folks do seem to enjoy watching me stumble along trying to make useful things, even if it is just out of a sort of horrified fascination! Thanks!

It has limitations, but for this very precise use-case, it works OK. For anything smaller than about 32 mm, I'd use a glue chuck, but for washers that are thinner than about half their diameter, and thicker than about 2mm, it seems to be OK

I really wanted to start from the middle size, then make it go away to nothing, then come back much too far, but it was 3am and I was tired. Nice easy set of shots apart from one I messed up, and it was a vital shot that I couldn't repeat, so one frame is actually an overlay mask with another image, both synchronised in a zoom and rotate. That was, er, fun.

Music in videos is something I like to use sparingly, where it adds dramatic tension, or to cover my tracks when I mess up the audio recording, or for comedic effect. I'll try not to over-use it. Thanks for the sub!

More crazy ideas to come in future videos...

If I'd had half a braincell, I'd have knocked the hole in the machine shop wall for the big extractor fan and done a mask on the PiP to make it look like the part flew off the chuck and made the ever-so-convenient hole in the wall. Hmmmmmm, that gives me another idea about that hole in the wall I've always promised myself for holding 6 metre tubes through the headstock using three remotely-sited support rollers, two outside the building. I've used the mag chuck for several jobs now, more useful than I was expecting, but so far, all have been turning, not grinding. I worked Nick G0HIK up on top of Black Combe overlooking the Irish Sea earlier on 10 GHz. Right over the backbone of the Pennines. Even managed SSB. I think he was just using a horn antenna, carried in a backpack. Just over 100 miles over some serious lumps of mud and millstone grit. Love the channel by the way!

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Ah, you do have time to operate in between making stuff! Good effort on the cross-Pennine QSO. For me, that's the most rewarding part of our hobby - a VHF or above contact over some unlikely path. Cheers, Fraser

That phrase was stolen, shamelessly, from the totally wonderful Derek Bieri of @ViceGripGarage He has a stunningly original idiolect that he uses to great effect. "Power Barn", "Lightning Whirler", "Fuel Cell" and lots more excellent and the little gestures around paint spraying and his totally unflappable demeanour in the face of tremendous difficulties is a thing of wonder. His is one of the few RU-vid channels I watch obsessively

"Mockery"? Crumbs! You are going to get me drummed out of my Mindfulness Circle with loose talk like that.... My subscribers may not be legion, but they are of uniformly high quality, bringing additional gravitas and impact to the channel. Aimee, before your binaries emit even a single synthetic phoneme, no I am NOT saying they are fat.

1 year later, he has 38,000 subs

Welcome aboard! Things can only go downhill towards a pit of mediocrity, VPN sponsorship and product placement from here on in! [Spoiler for any VPN providers out there: One is a network and firewall engineer and security architect daaaahling, so take away your snake oils and never darken my doorstep!]

My father worked as a tool and cutter grinder in the 1970s, using a Oerlikon floating arm grinder. Terrific piece of kit. He was the expert in making cutters for machining gas turbine blades. If he was still alive, he'd be making RU-vid videos about stationary engines and live steam and fancy 3D printing and metalcasting He did patternmaking for the foundry in the 1960s. He'd just love the possibilities today.

It's a beautiful sunny day so I don't think the next video is going to get edited today, as I have fallen trees to finish chainsawing and dogs that need walking and outside chores to do! Much of the footage is recorded, just a pile of voiceover to write and record and some animations and design stuff to illustrate. This is a COMPLICATED project. Next one after that is technically super simple, just a Laval Nozzle vacuum generator, rotary vacuum union, pneumatic bits and pieces and a machined 200 mm x 25 mm disk to make a vacuum chuck. No EM solver modelling or fancy testgear needed for that!

I'll be making some more thrust washers in March, I'll get them on the surface plate to see how it looks. I won't have the precision spindle made by then, but if I balance the wheel, it should be acceptable. The tricky part is dealing with the distortion from heat-treating. I don't want to use the mag chuck on the first side if the washer is bent after it's hardened. I have another job to do where the part will be held in that little toolmaker's vice and moved between the lathe and mill for different operations.

Yikes, that means I have to get on with editing them!

Thanks, it's proving to be quite useful. I'm just puzzling out the detailed design for a vacuum chuck next. It's going to be 200 mm diameter with internal chambers, vacuum orifices and grooves and used to support thin disks of plastic dielectric material and a Laval Nozzle venturi vacuum generator. Should be a whole lot of fun!

Thanks for the sub!

Just bear in mind that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, across a huge range of subjects. My head is full of almost entirely useless information. That probably explains a lot about my videos. Next video was supposed to be out tomorrow morning, but I have to go to WORK that day instead of making a fool of myself messing with this video editing program. Oh, the iniquity!

@@MachiningandMicrowaves You have a great go-getter confidence and a wonderful methodology when exploring new subjects then. Time away is just more time to think under a different environment. Cant wait to see the culmination of those experiences in your future videos homie.

I had fun making it, the vacuum chuck video should be an interesting one, but getting the rotary vacuum coupler/union right is proving to be a challenge. The Laval Nozzle vacuum generator works really well, but I need a clever way to hold the union steady without applying any twisting or axial forces to the bearings and seals.

Welcome aboard. I'm more of the Singleton and Noakes era, with influences from Jack Hargreaves, Jon Miller, Bunty James and Fred Dinenage, James Burke. Also, I have no idea what I'm doing, but grant myself permission to fail. It seems to be working so far.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves 😂 Ah, Go with Noakes started me out on a love of Border collies and outdoors. Permission to fail is excellent; fear of failure is ruinous.

I did some calculations and checks so I was pretty sure things were going to be fine, but I still hid behind plywood and polycarbonate and wore a helmet and face shield , well out of the plane of the chuck because I don't fully trust my maths skills any more!

In mildly related news, I see that Myanmar and Liberia are going metric soon. Must remember to buy half a pound of mushrooms and a kilo of tomatoes tomorrow.

The forces on that little block at 750rpm are impressive, but making something big enough to get to a peripheral speed high enough to reach escape velocity seemed mad. Max-Q at T=0, it would be like that rail gun that makes a shock so powerful it turns the air into a burning trail of nitrogen oxides. Now I want a spin-launcher. Nearest to that was the Trebuchet I made with the grandchildren 15 years ago. Never got it supersonic, but reached well over 400 mph. Hmm, spin launch at 800 mph, 360 m/sec, only 7200 rpm at 1 metre diameter. That sounds safe.

Next day, I remembered I had a 6 inch square cast iron surface plate that would have worked fine to clamp it to. If I wasn't in the middle of a long production run, I would have removed the big vice from the mill table and fixed the mag chuck directly to the table. That would have required Forethought and Planning and similar scarce commodities though. Next tool I make will be the vacuum chuck, using a venturi vacuum generator (Laval nozzle) and a rotary vacuum joint Lots of fun ahead. First though, I need to finish the next batch of tiny microwave antennas

Awesome, thanks!

Base-60 counting systems are appealing, but tend to indicate time-loops going back to the Sumerians or Babylonians. 60 is much better than 10, it's divisible by SO many other numbers, and it's the lowest common multiple of 1,2,3,4,5 and 6. What's not to like? Calculator keyboards might need a bit of a rethink and the top row of a PC keyboard would be four feet long, but that's a mere technical detail. Being able to express SO many values as proper fractions would be great. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexagesimal

@@MachiningandMicrowaves A 48in long keyboard, what's not to like.

It is kind of specialized, designed to solve a fairly specific problem, most of which could be solved by a glue chuck or a real surface grinder, but this is WAY faster than using a glue chuck and I need a CNC mill and six other things more than I need a surface grinder! The next chuck I'm making is even more specialized, it's a vacuum chuck to hold thin HDPE and PTFE sheets so I can machine them into Fresnel Zone Plates to act as focussing lenses for mmwave radio signals. In other news, I just burned my finger while using a superglue chuck to make coaxial resonators with a very precise thickness. Burning propane makes brass very hot. Who'd have though it? That's for the video I'm trying to get posted this weekend.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Yeah, I know all about needing other things more... Main reason I haven't finished anything in years, there's always something you need to do something.

I ran my Mahr Millimess over the harmonic marks and they are well under a micrometre deep, but still a significant proportion of the wavelength of light. From the movements on the gauge, I'd guess around 250 nanometres. I'm sure I can do way better than that with a good quality wheel and the new spindle. The special quality 48000 rpm bearings for it are furiously expensive, but I'm not ready to try making air bearings yet. Now of course, I want to make air bearings. AAAARGH!

I've tried the 750 watt servomotor on the cross-slide and it works well, but ideally I want to connect it to the back of the carriage where the copying attachment would fit. It's simple enough to fit a servo to the leadscrew

@@MachiningandMicrowaves How are you going to account for backlash? Only forward cuts on z axis. I have seen a conversion done on a slightly smaller Chinese lathe that had a small air cylinder on the cross slide to pre load the cross slide nut, this was said to work well but only for light ish cuts. Or use backlash comp in software?

@@stevensmart8868 I'm thinking of fitting a ballscrew on the cross-slide as the leadscrew is worn in the middle, and using either a weight and pulleys, or an air-spring, on the carriage to take out most of the backlash. First thought was to use LinuxCNC. The initial use is for making parabolic and hyperbolic reflectors, so all cuts are unidirectional and I should be OK without additional compensation apart from dealing with the wear in the cross-slide leadscrew, and in fact I can do it with just a PIC microcontroller. I'd prefer to go full CNC though, including chuck spindle speed control

Shamelessly stolen from the endlessly-wonderful Derek of Vice Grip Garage, coiner of words and adopter of a breathtakingly-fresh idiolect. Lightning-hoses. Spark-o-laters. Fire-maker-putter-inner. Digickles.

Thanks!

Heh heh, I need to talk to Lance Baltzley! 26acremaker@gmail.com Maker of fine precision-ground flatstones

Awesome! Thank you!

I think that was from Drill Service of Horley www.drill-service.co.uk/products/threading-tools/taps-all-thread-forms/ring-taps/mmyel-yellow-ring-taps/ but could be a YG-1 from Cutwel.co.uk

EBay..👍

Shamelessly plagiarized from Derek at Vice Grip Garage!

Good tip, yes, I've used surface grinders in the past and always added blocks for parts that were small. It is a little trickier with the rotating chuck as the parts I'm making are already thin and they are round, so no sides to press against, but I'll bear it in mind to prevent any attempts by the parts to go into orbit or fly across the shop, spinning and looking for any soft, squishy human to inflict injury upon

There was a David Attenborough in my junior school class. He became a plumber though, not a TV star. I must do a video in the style of the other David A about the secret life of End Mills in the wild...

@@MachiningandMicrowaves can. to what to see that....Bravo.....

That one came from Arceurotrade, but "Wiggler Set" should find one on Amazon or any hobby tool supplier like RDG

That sinking feeling when I scratched the chuck WHILE LOOKING AT A BOX OF TREATED PAPER SHEETS was quite intense. Head--->Desk and Face--->Palm moment. The sheets were VCI anti-rust paper and I didn't make the connection at the time. Actually it didn't matter as that was *before* I faced the chuck off, but yes indeed, I ordered some thin waxed paper after someone else pointed out that it would be a great idea. I use the VCI sheets to keep rust at bay, but they would have worked well as a stop-gap if only I was thinking These waxed sheets I have now look like translucent Kraft paper, I must check the thickness

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Just common waxed paper such as cooks use In the kitchen is what I use.

I think that's what this stuff is meant for. I've transitioned to using foil-lined parchment for lining cake tins and I use silicone sheet for cooking meringues and biscuits and scones. Now I want scones.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Use whatever works on your grinder to prevent those ugly scratches. The paper needs to to waterproof and consistent thickness. If the part is thick enough to fasten a C Clamp on you can take the part of that way without scratching.

Ooooh, I could use a magnet to remove the part! Oh, wait....

Thanks for the sub!

The other differences are that Tony is really good at lighting, cinematography, machining, humour, welding and being cool, whereas I am, er, not. The Infamous Algorithm is to blame for imposing my nonsense on unsuspecting victims. Long may it continue to do so, because I'm having an indecent amount of fun.

Glad you enjoyed it, I'm having an indecent amount of fun messing about trying to learn how to do stuff and make videos. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do all I want to. Talking of which, I need to be at work in The Day Job in 11 minutes time Ugh.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves time and income are big fact , hopefully your channel grow to the point that you become a full time RU-vidr , and you able to do all your project and hobbies, best of luck 🤞

Just came here to say it....absolutely!

Good point. I can usually take a shortcut by changing the dimensions of a part in the model to discover the impact of a small change in dimensions. For an antenna with a pattern that is stable over a 2% frequency range, there are some parameters that have a large impact and others that don't. Waveguide diameter is usually non-critical, but the length of the tapered section of a dual-mode horn is much more critical, and phasing plates need even more precision. Tweaking the parameters of an EM solver model is often the only way I can do it, as the complexity of the geometry means an analytic solution isn't possible. I use MATLAB, Wolfram and MathCAD where I can to get a feeling for the sensitivity of a design to tolerance variations. I do rather dram of having enough computing power so I coudl wear a VR headset and push and bend the model and see the effects in real time rather than waiting 20-40 minutes for each iteration. I'd need at least 10,000 times the computing power to get close to real time though, so perhaps not in my lifetime....

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Figuring out that I'm a old dog. Changing the dimensions on the model seems to be a smart approach. Take care!

If I had messed up somehow, I'd shorten the bolt that goes in that hole. It's just a belt and braces idiot check. I trust my instruments but it would be disastrous if the screw bottomed out in the hole and distorted the brass part just below the hole. I'm somewhat risk averse about messing up, as AIMEE would give me hell and I'd never live it down. Well spotted.

The Bridgeport has a nice new Newall DRO with new style Spherosyn scales. The lathe has an ancient TTL based Newall Sapphire DRO, but with original Spherosyn scales. The powered downfeed on the mill is broken, there's a pin that sheared and the entire head needs to be dismantled to fix it. One day.... It makes boring on the mill a real chore.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I had asked about the mill DRO because that is a really easy way to do a very accurate bolt hole circle. Easier than transfer punches. But you were likely using the punches to show how it could be done W/O the DRO. I had to replace the variable speed belt on my mill & that was a hassle.

I checked the predrilled bolt holes and they were not *quite* at 120 degrees, hence having to use the punches. Normally I use the mill DRO every time for bolt circles. I rather like making circles of seven or eleven bolts just to cause optical confusion

@@MachiningandMicrowaves "they were not quite at 120 degrees" Strange, you'd think all that kind of stuff would be done on CNC. OTOH I just got an ER40 chuck that the grind of the taper is off axis angularly. Chinese rebranded for a large importer. Beautifully finished just runs like a dog wagging its tail.

@@larryschweitzer4904 The quality of the machining definitely reflects the price. Cheap and nasty, but good enough for this application

John from Doubleboost has turned vegetables on his lathe in the past, so has Tom from Oxtoolco. I limit myself to turned carrots, using a knife. I wonder if spinach is magnetic? Wrong sort of iron I guess.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves it would be an absolute blast to turn a Turmip 😀 you could execute something quite arty, in a vegetable stylee. Food for thought mate 👍

Very similar to this one www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ER11-Brushless-Spindle-400W-Clamp-Base-WS55-180-BLDC-Motor-Driver-Controller-/275168747288

There was a side-effect of that when the wrong things get measured of course, "Satisficing" I think it used to be called. You give someone a target and they'll achieve it whether it makes any business sense at all. Help desk managers who are scored on number of calls closed tend to split calls into sub-calls and close often and early, then raise new tickets when the problem is not fixed. My performance is measured on the overall financial success of the business. I have no levers to pull to maximise that metric other than making damn sure the whole business works properly and securely. Also means that there isn't any way to measure what I do, so I tend to do what seems to be best for overall performance. Oh good grief, I have to be at work again in 9 hours and I haven't washed the dishes or done my timesheet for last week or finished the client reports or taken the recycling out to the bins.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Funny you should mention that. I did support for an internet company when call quality was paramount. As the bean counters, the clocks and the high-volume managers took over, it became a horrible grind.

Nowhere near as much fun though! I've used some fancy mounting tape as well as various adhesives, but it's not exactly visually exciting for RU-vid. Soon I'll be making a vacuum chuck to hold PTFE and other horrible plastics that are a nightmare to hold for machining into Fresnel Zone Plate dielectric lenses. They are made from super-unsticky 12 mm sheets that are machined down to 200 mm diameter, with lots of trepanned lens facets

Slack usage of terminology there. The manual ones I have really do have a Vernier scale, but the digitals just use a capacitative pattern and sensor. I've called sliding calipers "verniers" for 50 years, even those with dials or digits

@@MachiningandMicrowaves it might be regional. Now that I think about it another guy from the UK I knew over IRC always said "vernier"

I tried a few things like dropping aluminium and copper blocks on to the chuck to see if eddy currents would do anything interesting when watched in slow motion, like when you drop a rare-earth magnet down a thick-walled Al or Cu pipe, but didn't get any amusing levitation effects. There was some interesting torque on a disk of aluminium glued to a rotating centre, but sadly, not a great deal of comedic potential. Perhaps I can get something to melt from eddy currents?

I find those videos that as right away for like/subscribe/notify clicks really irritating, but a polite call-to-action as a reminder that The Algorithm feeds on likes and interactions and click-through rates seems fair to me. I can't do much to enhance click-through rates other than good titles (which I'm hopeless at) and thumbnails, which always seem to need too many words. Normal microwave cookers operate around 2.5 GHz. There's an urban myth about that being a water resonance. Actually you can use a wide range of frequencies, it's just that generating lots of power at 2.5 GHz is cheap and reliable using magnetrons or solid state devices, and the wavelength and standing nodes in the oven cavity help to distribute heating fairly evenly. The solution to getting more subs is obviously to have excellent recipes and TV Dinner tips. I'm on it!

@@MachiningandMicrowaves haha well im a new sub.. unfortunately subs are just lower with machining videos in general.. do a burnout in your car halfway thru the video, sure to increase youtube subs haha. at least you are not trying to show people splashing water and calling it machining, i got no views for that haha. i got to work for Boeing satellite services for a while in payload and the antenna department at raytheon working on low noise amplifier housings. these days im self-owned and operated trying to build up a cnc shop while teaching myself more about EE. just things i have a passion for to push me along. keep pushing along, you are much more fun to watch than some of the other machining channels. one day ill give it a go again when i have time for my own side projects.

I'm more Imperial than I appear. I have a 25 thou thumbnail that I use for gapping spark-o-laters in my old petrol agricultural machines and a 1 thou feeler gauge I use in lieu of cigarette papers when setting the points in the lightning-whirlers on ancient engines. A feller's been watching WAAAAY too much @ViceGripGarage and I'm in danger of picking up Derek's magnificent idiolect.

I can't remember ever chipping an insert on interrupted cuts. I sometimes wonder if this is another piece of Old Machinists' Lore, like "You need HSS to get a good finish on fine cuts". I'm not doing hard turning on tool steel or inconel though. Perhaps someone can advise?

My shop gets damp overnight with condensation after humid days, so everything ferrous needs to be oiled or stored in a cabinet with VCI vapour-phase inhibitors to keep rust at bay

It wasn't horrible carbony mess, I suspect it was something rather random rather than Meehanite or spheroidal graphite. Still took a lot of cleaning

@@MachiningandMicrowaves black cast iron boogers are a thing, recommend a PPE. 4140 is not the best choice for back plates, but I love machining and turning it.

@@HM-Projects I was wearing an FFP3 respirator to keep the grinding dust out of my lungs ant teeth. Hate that crunchiness...

See also the entire McMaster Carr catalogue contents. I did find a supplier with SureShots at sensible prices, but the order was rejected by the carrier as they thought they were pressurised containers, not pressurisable.

Good idea. Perhaps it would be a little easier to fit a removeable raised collar at the edge to catch anything that starts sliding. It might be a simpler than trying to grind the surface and leave a lip. It could be an aluminium ring with a couple of capscrews to clamp it in place. In normal use the thing will only be running at perhaps 100 rpm max, so that would limit the potential for the thing turning into some sort of spinning, flying Disc of Death.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Actually, that removable alloy ring idea would be better anyway. It could be adjustable depending on how sketchy you felt the work holding was, could be positioned to support offset work for surface grinding without protruding so far as to get's in the way, or completely removed for when you have anything you need to have overhanging the edges. if you can roll, TIG, and turn a ring of thick alloy flat bar (rather than machining a ruddy great billet of the stuff) It would probably work out reasonably cheap to make too.

@@Reman1975 my big slip roller can manage 5mm aluminium strips easily. I'd probably TIG two blocks either side of the gap and fit a lockscrew, maybe add a balance weight on the opposite side.

It's Millers Millicut J40, an ester-based biodegradable cutting oil, without any additives that might stain copper or brass. I also use isopropyl alcohol neat in a mister, and various Rocol lubes, WD40, some aerosol stuff with PTFE, CT90 mixed with WD40 and some foul Molyslip jollop that works superbly for tapping tool steel. So no, it's not rude!

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Thank you for the detailed response. I will be looking into all of these now

Weirdly, the chuck doesn't pick up much swarf. Smaller chips and dust don't stick well to the pole pairs, and gets flung off. Most of the sparks and abrasive waste get sucked into the shop vac. The vacuum chuck I'm working on is a while different level of weird. Trying to work out a simple plug arrangement to blank off the outer holes and grooves when I'm machining disks less than the full diameter of the vacuum plate.

I can understand there could be certain, how can I put it, er, "technical drawbacks" to waxed ciggie papers, mostly involving rapid loss of eyebrows during their intended uses.

Sounds good. My vac tube is on a cheapo Noga arm so I can position it wherever it gets in the way or in camera shot or tangled up in swarf.

I did have one last Thursday.

Rather than being for X-rays and needing support, these are for wavelengths around 100,000 times longer at 2.44 mm rather than

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Thats really cool! Ive only worked with (and thought about) zoneplates in the context of EUV (13.5nm) light but what youre describing sounds very exciting! Im staying tuned!

Heh heh, I have plenty of M+W and Starrett and my second-favourite Tesa, plus a bit of Brown and Sharp, but the feel of the current Mitutoyos beats all of them. I still use my father's Scottish-made Starrett though, for old time's sake.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Ha, I too have a couple of drawers full of M&W and Shardlow gear, all passed down from the Old Man. I have less and less reason to get out to the lathe and miller these days but, many moons ago, they kept me and the wife warm and fed. Your videos might yet ignite an old passion though. G0JJW

True though, isn't it, they look like they're living their best life

Did I say "precision ground stones"? Oh dear, they are just a set of three stones that I use with the manual 3-plate method as you suggest. Should have made that clear sorry. I don't have solid 123 blocks, but I think they would be useful, good point. I have some proper wheels that I'll be using once I get the toolpost spindle made, those stones I used are just cheap rubbish. I'm treating the chuck as a consumable, but it won't get a lot of wear so I'll need to check it periodically for flatness. I nearly bought a Jones and Shipman last week, but my lawn tractor died and I had to replace that, so the surface grinder is back on the wish-list.

hand tapping a spiral flute is sound mate

oh man are they PTS cap screws? great fixing

I love Myfords!

Perfect name!

I'd have needed to remove the rotary table or the vice, as there was a fixture out of shot to the right of the vice that I didn't want to move. This was a quick job between some others, so I didn't want to lose registration and have to re-tram the vice just for the same of three holes. If I was using the DRO to position the holes, and centering the chuck with a DTI on the spindle, then it would have made sense to put it on the table, but in this case I'm using the mill as a fancy drill press really. 123 block was the first thing I picked up.

I did wonder about trying a few things like spinning a brass or aluminium disk held in a bearing on the tailstock a few mm away from the spinning chuck, but hadn't though of trying the heating effect of eddy currents!

I did once grip some bar in a collet and fixed a 3-jaw chuck to the bar backwards so I could machine the step on the rear of the chuck. In my defence, I did feel a degree of shame and embarrassment, but (a) it worked and (b) I wasn't filming, so I marked that as a win. The chuck fitted perfectly after that rather sketchy setup.

A bit of malarkey is a good thing. Now and then.

I guess that's what a Vacuum Pump does then, pumps the envelope full of vacuum. More Nominative Determinism in action. I bet the language equivalent of home machinists do RU-vid videos about the usage of "Full of" when it's describing a lack of something. Oooo, that could be a deeeep rabbit hole.

Yes, I used a 400W AC motor and controller that came with a mounting block and milled an Aloris-style dovetail toolpost mount for it. Sadly, I didn't make a video of the process. I use it with tiny 0.5 mm end mills and 40 mm grinding wheels for face grooving and grinding D bits. I will be making a new version using the same motor but with stepped pulleys and high-precision bearings rated to 48,000 rpm twitter.com/g4dbn/status/1185713830967627778 twitter.com/g4dbn/status/1186006756679401473 twitter.com/g4dbn/status/1211371980127133698

@@MachiningandMicrowaves thx,,, it’s something I’ve been considering making but,,, there’s always a but.

@@mike_jay I'll try to get round to making the proper high speed spindle soon, it has an ER16 collet and the overall diameter is low enough that I can reach all of the chuck surface with a small wheel. It should be way stiffer and will be able to do much higher speeds

@@MachiningandMicrowaves will you make your own er Chuck, cut the taper in the end of the motor spindle. I’ve looked around for off the shelf spindles a motor can be attached to via a belt to little success, but to have the er collet as part of the armature would be fantastic. These are all over eBay.

@@mike_jay I bought a long-shanked ER16 collet chuck like this: www.cutwel.co.uk/16mm-straight-shank-plain-er16-collet-chuck-100mm-long-cutwel-pro-c16-er16-100m with a 16mm shaft and I'm mounting it in a pair of high-precision bearings, in a block that mounts to the toolpost, with a plate to hold the motor. I can't find the exact chuck I bought, it was more like 160 mm long. There do seem to be plenty around.

Tony is a professional, talented, skilled and has original ideas. I just make things up as I go along and have literally No Idea What I Am Doing. Which is fine. If you've never seen Derek from Vice Grip Garage, he is a total joy to watch. Very gentle humour, a rich and complex private language, and serious skills with old American cars. Lightning Cubes, Sparkolaters, Power Barns and many other delights await the unwary. He is a total gem. My next video should be out in the next hour or two.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves I think I have watched a couple of videos of Derek, and I'm gonna check his channel right now. Tony and Adam Booth, I consider them my teachers, because I learnt a lot from them during college on machining subjects. Last but not least, either you know what you're doing or not, your content is great, I subscribed on the first video I watched 🙂 and looking forward to your upcoming videos.

@@syedusamamanzoor1838 Joe Pieczynski, Robin Renzetti, Cutting Edge Engineering, Stefan Gotteswinter, Edge Precision, Brian Block, Tom Lipton and many others are such a good resource. I'm 100% making videos that are "How I did it" rather than "This is how to do it". I leave that to the professionals and educators. I am a hacker and experimenter messing about having fun.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves Indeed they're all great people. God bless them all. Regarding how you do it vs how to do it.... Whatever gets the job done is a good "how to do it". Machining is problem solving.

A feller's way, waaaaaay too much of a fan of VGG.

I need a second channel for that sort of content! Plenty of oiled-up action from 23:43, but I kept one foot on the ground as required by the Hays Code. Of course , I *might* have been Foot-Popping during that scene. Nobody will ever know....

Main reason is the grinding dust that would get into the chuck and have to be cleaned out thoroughly after each use, also I'd have to reverse the jaws every time. Seeing as I'd have to dismantle the thing to clean it anyway, that's not an additional burden I guess, but yeah. Grit.

Yeah it's much nicer just to be able to pop the chuck on and off an switch out.. nice job on it 👍🏻

Crikey, that's fighting talk! I'm 100 percent Yellowbelly, born and bred in rural Lincolnshire. I have been to Nottingham twice in my life though.

@@MachiningandMicrowaves ahh from the wild flat lands. Only ever passed through there on the way to see my mum on the Norfolk coast. Is there any chance you could do a video on your lathe setup. It sounds very quiet and responsive. I'm just getting an old Hardinge and I'm in the mood for fettling.

I have another 56 videos in the pipeline already, so there might be a bit of a wait sorry!

I dressed the outside with the diamond dresser fixed to a block on the plate, so the outside is smooth and open, but the wheel is poorly balanced, it's definitely vibrating at some speeds. Those cheap wheels are cemented to the shafts and the quality is terrible. I might throw this one away and try dressing and trueing it. Probably better to wait until I finish the high-speed precision spindle as it has an ER16 rather than this ER11 and I should be able to use much better wheels

I should do a bio introduction video. I'm an International Man of Mystery. Oh, wait, that was Austin Powers. According to my channel description, it says I do: "Machining and Ham Radio microwave and mm-wave radio experimentation. I make things, machine stuff on my Colchester lathe and Bridgeport mill, model things in Fusion360, run E-M simulations on OpenEMS, circuit sims on QUCS Studio. I operate on ham bands from 136 kHz to 122 GHz, although rarely between 2 MHz and 1 GHz. I like moonbounce, tropo, meteor scatter, aircraft scatter and rain scatter propagation. Happy to use digital or analogue modes, love Morse too. Also do longwave IR and visible light cloud-bounce and VLF listening, so might post about ANYTHING machining or radio related. Neil Smith G4DBN IO93NR Yorkshire, UK" That sounds moderately accurate. I was born in the 1950s (just) and have spent my working life messing about with computers. I'm currently a Security Architect, whatever that means. Basically a network engineer and coder who designs stuff to repel international crime gangs and home-grown crooks, does forensics and writes low level designs for things as a day job. I've been messing about with electronics and radio since 1969, but apart from a 4 week course in 1976, I didn't have any proper machine tools until 2017, so I'm a rank beginner at this game. I learn fast, listen to those who have Wisdom and have no fear of failure. Dangerous mixture. I have seven grandchildren, one great-grandchild but no children. A very good arrangement indeed. All the fun, no responsibility. I'm still in a delicate state of mourning after my wife died last summer after being together for 37 years. I get snarky when rude and opinionated folks tell me off for wearing gloves or not cleaning my machines to their satisfaction, but I'm generally cheerful, affable, congenial and obliging. There! I bet you wished you'd never asked!

@@MachiningandMicrowaves In short, you did a fabulous job about explaining about yourself 😁. I was born in March 1957, and will be of course 64yrs old. I you said, never say no, I don't have anything except high school. I'm a good listener, not afraid to ask if I haven't done, without creating any damage. Started wiring in Ladder prints, lots of relays, my friend. Eventually the height of my career, worked at a company who built very precise equipment. I actually got adapted to metric. The system had up to 37 working stations, each one had their own PLC language. It's cylinder honing, using Microns and put out 400 engine blocks, within a 8hr periods. Yes, I'm aware of those machine names that you mentioned. Thank you very much 😊 to spend such detailed history of you 😊. Please take no risks when you run machines. Here's a hint, measure twice 😉 b4 cutting. Take care now....

Marvellous!

I'll try not to make anything desirable in the next one! Actually, the one after that is a vacuum chuck with rotary union and a Laval vacuum Venturi for holding thin plastic parts on the lathe that can't be gripped or glued and aren't magnetic. Just editing this week's vid, it is going to be a two-parter I think. No financial impact on your wallet, guaranteed. Unless you need a 1.3 GHz high power stepped coaxial low pass filter, obviously...

I rather suspect that "BearMoo" is a victim of an over-literal translation engine. Looking at you G**gl*

One dot might just be a mistake, two might be a coincidence. Three is definitely a pattern, and I added another one just for luck

Yes, it's a Student 1800 made in 1982. Similar to the Clausing Colchester that Joe Pieczynski uses. I use it with an inverter to get 415 V three phase from my 240 V single phase mains, and get soft-start, variable speed and regenerative braking, it has a Newall Sapphire DRO from the 1980s which is made using TTL devices and Spherosyn scales. It was relatively cheap, I wish it had more swing, more power, a longer bed and a larger diameter headstock tube, but it works fine within its limitations