PM1236 gears

[Larry$]

What kind of work were you doing that you laser burn your eye lenses. I have worked with lasers a lot. You must have been using a CO2 or other IR laser? The visible wavelength lasers go right through the lens and destroy the retina, not the lens... unless your cataracts were really absorbing the light a lot.

I didn't make it clear. The laser was in the vision doctor's office and used to burn away the unwanted material behind the lens. My guess is that the procedure involved the use of multiple laser beams from different directions such that they all pinpoint focused on the garbage on the back side of the plastic lens. It was akin to playing packman. Even with the noise. I could see target cross hairs of thin red lines as they proceeded.

I have never worked around lasers.

In prep of the procedure, I sat in front of multiple machines that, again! guessing were locating and measuring the garbage locations in 3D. The garbage was from dead cells left over from the original lens implant procedure. No one told me then, that this would be the case.

Their offices are so full of nifty looking machines that it could easily be wondered if the entire thing was some sort of elaborate scam. But the results are real. There are two kinds of implants available. The standard ones are fixed focus. So you would need glasses for either distance or closeup after the procedure. Your choice. I had researched the available options and found that the state of the art at the time were implants that were made in such a way that they allowed the muscles that control your normal focusing to also change the shape of the plastic lenses. So they would auto focus just like or similar to you natural lenses. You are awake and looking out though the eye as it is worked on.

Between Medicare and some supplemental insurance plans most or maybe all of the cost for the fixed focus lenses can be covered. The, maybe outlandish, add on price for the state of the art lenses was over $8K which I paid. Old theory "buy once, cry once!" They warned that initially bright lights at night would have star burst patterns around them. Turns out true, but over time, goes mostly away. I no long notice it or have become totally accustomed to it. Over the next two years after getting both eyes done I started needing brighter & brighter light to see details. Some Google work turned up the clouding issue and that there was a fix.

The fix was covered by my insurance and appears to be a good one. The eye place said it was a one time happening and it would not reappear.

At this point I have excellent vision. The auto focus works great. Recommended. I'm 80 years old & long term diabetic. I've controlled my blood glucose levels well enough not to have neuropathy. My body does suffer form damage done when I was younger and felt bullet proof.

Sorry about the long post, but it may help some of you.

 

[Aukai]

Thank you for posting your experience.

 

[B2]

Wow! Good to have this info.

Dave

 

[verbotenwhisky]

I can make most any gear. I've got a BS-1 and a rotary horizontal/ vertical table with even more choices because of the # of index plates. So if I'm in need some strange gear I might be able to pull it off. Duplicate gears are easy.
I'm off to the eye fixer right now so will be out of commission for a bit. I'm having the accumulated dead cells lasered off the back side of the plastic lenses. The lenses were inserted after laser burning away my natural ones a few years ago. I had cataracts so bad I couldn't read a micrometer.
Survived it! Have pretty good vision now. Procedure was quick & painless.

I hope all goes well....

 

[verbotenwhisky]

I was new to using a mill when I purchased the PM940M machine in 2017, so I did not even know how good a machine was suppose to be nor did I really understand what to look for. Took me the better part of a year just to get it installed. By the time I became serious about it I was pretty far along in the warranty if it was not completely exhausted. Anyway, I mentioned some of this to Matt, especially about the head falling and how I thought the gib was bad. He offered to make me a new gib, but needed dimensions, which I did not have. (I certainly did not want to make the same one over as it was poorly made, too thin, and was too short. Anyway, Matt, reads most of the PM form when he has time. So he knows almost everything we work on!

I live in Pittsburgh and PM is not very far from my home. So I have been there many times. They have always been good to me and helpful, I like Matt and the guys and I want to help keep them in business. This was no small part of my decision when I first started buying the equipment to go down the machining road. Anyway, replacing it or even the major parts might be an issue since the CNC version is somewhat different. I do not actually know if the basic mill parts are the same and a 940M. The do look the same but.... I am pretty sure the lead screws etc. are different. Then there is the issue that I had to actually take the mill apart to some degree to get it into my basement shop room an it just fits. So taking it back apart is not something that I really want to do. I am a physicist and electrical engineer (both in theory and experiment) and worked in industrial R&D for 16 years before I moved on to be a university professor ... and have been around a long time (read that old) getting experience in lots of things ... and so will figure it all out or just get tired of trying and quit or buy something else. I would really prefer to have a CNC knee mill, but I have yet to see an add for one, let alone one, that would fit in my walkout basement. The reason I originally purchased a mill was that I was developing a very special very high resolution magneto-optical microscope for measuring some thin film magnetic materials... and needed to get rid of (remake out of non-magnetic materials) all of the ferromagnetic parts of a standard microscope. I made a lot of it by hand or with my old SouthBend lathe, but I needed more than just hand tools and finger nails for making some of the parts. Because I was using magnetic fields the ferromagnetic parts in the microscope would tend to move or bend and screw up the optical paths.

Did you have any questions about, or even get a chance yet to look at, the PM1236 Excel TPI workbook I set up for you? You don't want to take too long ... I WILL forget what I did in making it for you. I won't have access to the HM form next week so you have some time. You can just check through the AllTPI table I generated for you and see if you find any errors in the TPI, feed or xfeed arrangement values, at least the ones that you know. Also, the metric values maybe off as I did not spend much time worrying about those. Generating the TPI using the lead screw is pretty straight forward. Also, the feed. But where I may mess up is when I generate the TPI values using the feel movement. The spread sheet has a bunch of IF conditions and it is easy to get some of them wrong. Like I said before the Feed and XFeed values listed on the lathe plates are commonly inaccurate or just wrong. It is kind of hard to even measure the feed or xfeed per turn and get it it accurate to better than on or two digits. On my lathe I have a 1/10 turn digital counter on my spindle and a DRO and I can run many inches of travel to get thousands of 1/10th turn counts to generate the measurement. I do not know if you saw my posting about the counter and the VFD conversion. Here are a couple of posting links.







Good night,


Dave L.

Thanks for the links, I will go look at them. I started looking at the sheet you prepared and got side tracked, I will try go through it further this week. I travel a couple days a week for work so I do not always have the time I would like to invest in the things I really enjoy.

I am a senior Mechanical designer and have owned several mills over the years, this is my first New mill and my first Chinese mill at the same time and thus far, as I said before, I like it. If there is anything I can help you with please feel free to let me know, I love solving issues/problems. This is my first lathe and thus far I like it as well but new issues which I haven't dealt with before such as the one you have been helping me with are a bit alien to me.

I suspect, after reading some of your post as well as Larry's that I may be the young pup here, I'll turn 60 this year. I purchased these machines to stay busy once I retire but I have a few years to go.

Any way I hope I have not overshared.

 

[B2]

Hi guys, @verbotenwhisky @Larry$

Greatly appreciated, Let me digest this and see if I can get further information, any information I get I will share to

Did either of you get a chance to look at the TPI spread sheet draft I created for your lathes? @verbotenwhisky , Do you think it was correct? If so I will posted it as a final version for other folks. If the table for the PM1236 fills in correctly.... like the one below then the PM1236 spreed sheet should be good. In the last Workbook version I posted I think I had figure out a values for Knob#1 via looking at the feed rates so this should be complete. However, feed rate tables commonly are limited in accuracy so I guessed a bit. You can quickly check this by scratching a thread using M-I, A-1 and compare this to B-2 and E-12. It is surprising that they did not put this info on the lathe panel as the 120/120, M-I, C-1 should yield the 16TPI with the standard upper 48T and lower 24T gears.

For @Larry$ 's 1440HD the manual is even less complete so it table is missing a row until some measurements are made.

Anyway, let me know.

By the way, I did not insert all of the possible external gears into the spread sheet for the 1236 above the Zzz as it just makes the thread table generator run longer. However, you can do so at line 31 etc., in the two columns, "O" and "V" used for the external gear values.
Just type the "Zzz" at the bottem of lists and remove the blank by moving one of the values to where the Zzz was located.....so the automated generator knows when to stop.

Also, according to the manual you should have the following external gears:
48
24
44
52
38
22
26
127/120

Dave L.

 

[Larry$]

I have tried to let a tap pull the spindle down on my drill press, but it always failed.

I re -read my previous post about power tapping. I made an error when I said I use the power down feed for tapping. Just use it for drilling before I tap. An M6 tap will pull itself down fine after it gets a few turns in. When I back it out I always keep some pressure on the quill handle so it doesn't screw up the first few threads.

B2, I've been working on figuring out the Excel threading file. I checked it against a poster I use that has all the imperial, Metric, & British threads. Every one of them can be run using some combination of the levers & gears on my lathe. A few don't have an exact match but close enough. I'm not good with manipulating a spread sheet but want to eliminate rows & columns that don't show me anything useful. Duplicate rows so I can print it. Problem is it will be bigger than a decent size book. I've got to work with it more . I want to learn how to use different gears than what came with it.
Thank you!

There are way more thread pitches available than I would have expected.

 

[B2]

Hi @Larry$

I am really glad to hear that you are finding the workbook of value!

Yes, most folks are surprised by how many hidden TPI values there are. Clearly do not need all of them, but once in a while it is nice to know that a strange thread can be made (or approximated) or that a particular one might be accessible (or approximated) via the feed rod rather than the lead screw.

If I can help you eliminate stuff in the output version you wish to print just let me know what you would like to eliminate. If I recall you said you were running an Excel clone or an old copy. I cannot recall.

Anyway, did you get the Macro's to run so that you can regenerate the TPI list if you add a gear or something?

In the "AllTPI list of TIPs values you can delete columns easily. After you have sorted the list by TPI or what ever you want, then just click the column Address heading and delete. The entire column will disappear. (I can no longer recall if my macros will work after to delete things so you want to make sure that you save a copy of the original in case you are going to need it again.) For example, there is no reason for you to keep the extra gear knobs or external gear columns where they all say "1" or "NA" in the entire sheet. Likewise there are extra feed rates that you may not wish to keep. Again just delete the column. Duplicate rows (to be removed) can be identified by first sorting the spread sheet on the TPI values, but I did not write a Macro to automatically do this for you. The duplicates should be somewhat grouped. So it will be some work to go through the list on by one and delete them. Macro: "Sort_Multiple_Columns" will sort up or down on any of the columns. There is also a Macro: "UnSortAllTPI" which will put the sheet back to its generated form ... i.e. removes the previous sorts. However, if you are willing to use the Macro: "SearchTPI_At_TPI_Col" you can search for a specific TPI value and it will then be shown at the top of the list. You can do multiple searches and accumulate them or delete the previous search... and the results again appear at the top of the sheet.

Dave L.

 

[verbotenwhisky]

Hi @Larry$

I am really glad to hear that you are finding the workbook of value!

Yes, most folks are surprised by how many hidden TPI values there are. Clearly do not need all of them, but once in a while it is nice to know that a strange thread can be made (or approximated) or that a particular one might be accessible (or approximated) via the feed rod rather than the lead screw.

If I can help you eliminate stuff in the output version you wish to print just let me know what you would like to eliminate. If I recall you said you were running an Excel clone or an old copy. I cannot recall.

Anyway, did you get the Macro's to run so that you can regenerate the TPI list if you add a gear or something?

In the "AllTPI list of TIPs values you can delete columns easily. After you have sorted the list by TPI or what ever you want, then just click the column Address heading and delete. The entire column will disappear. (I can no longer recall if my macros will work after to delete things so you want to make sure that you save a copy of the original in case you are going to need it again.) For example, there is no reason for you to keep the extra gear knobs or external gear columns where they all say "1" or "NA" in the entire sheet. Likewise there are extra feed rates that you may not wish to keep. Again just delete the column. Duplicate rows (to be removed) can be identified by first sorting the spread sheet on the TPI values, but I did not write a Macro to automatically do this for you. The duplicates should be somewhat grouped. So it will be some work to go through the list on by one and delete them. Macro: "Sort_Multiple_Columns" will sort up or down on any of the columns. There is also a Macro: "UnSortAllTPI" which will put the sheet back to its generated form ... i.e. removes the previous sorts. However, if you are willing to use the Macro: "SearchTPI_At_TPI_Col" you can search for a specific TPI value and it will then be shown at the top of the list. You can do multiple searches and accumulate them or delete the previous search... and the results again appear at the top of the sheet.

Dave L.

I finally had a chance to look at the spread sheet, you were correct, it is a bit off due to the settings on my lathe, I am trying to calculate some of the gearing but unfortunately I am in the middle of a big project so my shop work is slow. as soon as I have the time to get into it deeper I will share my information. Once the information is out here maybe it will help others, again, thanks for your help.

 

[B2]

Hi @verbotenwhisky

I finally had a chance to look at the spread sheet, you were correct, it is a bit off due to the settings on my lathe, I am trying to calculate some of the gearing but unfortunately

I understand busy! I have moved our conversation to the thread dealing with the TPI generating Excel Workbook:

I am moving our interaction to this thread. Since it deals with the TPI generating Excel Workbook, it is more appropriate here.

I will watch for your response there. No rush on my part, but when we finish I will post a final version of the workbook for others.

Dave L.