2015 POTD Thread Archive

[magu]

Today I brought home my new to me bridgeport. It is a 1948 series one round ram with the m head. It is small by bridgeport standards, but will be perfect for my small garage.

I loaded it in my s15 (s10) pickup and drove it 3.5 hours home to pittsburgh. From there, it took me an hour to unload the mill with nothing but a harbor freight engine hoist, some not appropriate for the job tools, and a loose understanding of physics.

I got it pretty cheap from a vendor my company deal with because someone had supposedly friction welded a collet into the spindle.... after about another 45 minutes I had the collet and drill chuck out. It Turns out that someone didn't understand how the self extracting drawbar works and in their attempt to remove the tool, they messed up the drawbar, but the collet wasn't particularly stuck.


View attachment 118023

edited to remove duplicate photos. View attachment 118024

 

[Bellwether]

I got my mill with the mechanical tach broken so an electronics whiz friend of mine made me a digital one with some parts he had laying around and some open source code that he found online. I made the housing and put in place of the orginal tach. Works great, looks great. I'm happy.

 

[CarlosA]

Made some gears out of delrin ... some mistakes but they all mesh together perfectly when put on their spindles, good enough for me.

View attachment 118039

 

[Franko]

Those look great, Carlos. What kind of tool did you cut them with? (I've never made a gear)

 

[extropic]

I got my mill with the mechanical tach broken so an electronics whiz friend of mine made me a digital one with some parts he had laying around and some open source code that he found online. I made the housing and put in place of the orginal tach. Works great, looks great. I'm happy.

Any chance of you posting a "How to" thread on your tachometer build/install. Not being an electronics whiz, I would love to see it.

 

[brino]

after about another 45 minutes I had the collet and drill chuck out.

Good work magu!
It's great when you rescue a machine and even better when it turns out better than predicted.
Congrats on the "new" equipment.
What's your first project?

-brino

 

[Charles Spencer]

Magu, that looks like the size I'd want. Congratulations.

+1!!! It's always surprising how much we all have invested in our avocation.

Yeah, it ran to thirteen pages and a higher dollar value than I thought. I emailed a copy to myself. I figure that way I can check it if I'm out some place and see something. I think I'll make a slimmed down version for ease of reading on my phone by deleting a few columns.

 

[Bellwether]

Any chance of you posting a "How to" thread on your tachometer build/install. Not being an electronics whiz, I would love to see it.

I had nothing to do with the electronics portion of it, but here are some pictures of the housing I made.

 

[Round in circles]

My latest project took several days and doesn't look very impressive at all.

I saw a set of angles on ebay and the price was pretty good, but I didn't know if I already had a similar set so I refrained from bidding. There was no time to check before the auction ended.

To avoid this in the future, I made a "property book" similar to the ones the military uses. I did a pretty good inventory then entered everything into an Excel spreadsheet. I assigned each item a group code and an item code. I also entered size, cost, brand, model, etc.

It turned out that I had quite a bit more than I thought, but did not have the set of angles that I didn't bid on.

Where is the spread sheet stored ..on the computer , on a stick / flash card or in a third party cloud ?
My bro & I live 250 miles apart I hold a 16 GIG memory stick that has the details of all their possessions including photos from several angles & he holds similar for mine just in case of flood ,theft or fire at our homes. When he dies if it's before me I will place all my stuff on a cloud server instead .

 

[ebgb68]

I had to think about this for awhile because at the time I just printed-out the plans and kept them in the shop until needed, but I remembered they were from a Ebay auction. Search on Ebay for "sovereignmachinetool" and in the auction pictures for the arbor they are nice enough to include the drawings. Not that there is anything new here as all these arbors seem to follow the same basic design.

I just used 12L14 for the arbor. It's not like I'm going to wear it out using it a few times a year.

Since many people seemed to dig this project, here's an action shot on the lathe.

View attachment 118018

The arbor is ~1.0" at it's largest diameter but you can only get ~3/4" through the old SB's spindle hole so I had to use the steady rest. It worked-out pretty well. Here's you can see the one piece about to be parted-off. Next I was able to do the drilling, tapping and boring in the main part without moving the rest. After that was done, the rest was removed and a bull-nose live center was used to support the work for the turning down to 3/4" at the one end.

It was a fun project. Hopefully I'll be able to see how it works in a few days.

Thanks for the link to the drawing I snagged a copy . Thirtyone bucks is not too bad for that but buying stuff we can make isn't whats its about.