Making Mini Rotary Table T Nutz: Ammco 7" Shaper

[Ulma Doctor]

i want to make some T nuts for my shaper's rotary table

I thought for a first project to plane a piece of aluminum on 5 sides.
(i planed 5 sides because one side was milled flat on a vertical mill)
i was successful at making a rectangle.
it is the uncut diamond!

(the milled side is show facing up)


after some initial layout, i mounted the billet in the vise.
i started the shaper, taking light cuts and simply enjoying the click, click, and the watching sweet little curls pile upon the concrete.
here is the t roughed out.
the area marked in black will be a second set of t nuts



thanks for looking!

 

[Randall Marx]

Looking good so far!

 

[Ulma Doctor]

thank you very much Randall!

 

[Ulma Doctor]

i managed to do some more work today on the T Nutz.

using a lathe parting tool to start hogging out the t nut from it's billet




then i rotated the billet 90* and started the parting process again.
live action shot of the parting op




the t nut is free, but needs some tuning!




here is the billet and the t nut before further refining



the finished blank:




next up:
drilling and tapping to #8-32.
i'll be able to render 4 t nuts from this piece.
each t nut will be 5/8" long

 

[Ulma Doctor]

and some more work done!
the blank is fitted, drilled to #29 and tapped to #8-32.


here is a shot of the t nut blank in the rotary table



in the next act,
i'll be parting the nuts from each other!

 

[Ulma Doctor]

here are 4 finished t nuts with some mounting screws

 

[Randall Marx]

Sweet! Nicely done Mike. Did you separate them using the shaper?

 

[Ulma Doctor]

Sweet! Nicely done Mike. Did you separate them using the shaper?

Thank you very much Randall,

i had delusions of grandeur in parting the t nuts with the shaper,
then i was stricken by the reality that i miscalculated the distances between the tapped holes and had to go thin blade to reduce the error
if you look closely at the nuts you'll see center of the 8/32 is off by .020"in length- oh well!

i could have ground down a tool to do it on the shaper, but i chose to use a hacksaw and files to finish this go around
here is the kicker, i saw a hacksaw attachment that was homebrewed. after i already did it.
it looked like it would work very well
i may just add the project for upcoming things!

 

[Randall Marx]

Sounds like fun to me. Looking forward to it!

 

[Ulma Doctor]

for anyone interested in the hacksaw attachment:
http://www.neme-s.org/shapers/columns/shaper_column_48.html

the pictured hacksaw attachment is for a larger shaper, but scaled down, the idea would work perfectly