The misadventures of a Wells-Index 860C

[f350ca]

Ron
Spray a little WD40 on the cutter while milling aluminum. Works wonders, absolutely useless as penetrating oil though.
Off topic, the best penetrating oil I've run across is equal parts Automatic transmission fluid and acetone.

[Highpower]

(07-10-2012, 04:55 PM)f350ca Wrote: Off topic, the best penetrating oil I've run across is equal parts Automatic transmission fluid and acetone.

Greg,
You probably haven't tried Kano "Kroil" then.
http://www.kanolabs.com/

That's not a sales pitch by the way. Just a satisfied customer. That stuff has worked for me when nothing else would.

Ron,
Milling aluminum? I buy WD-40 by the gallon for that!

Willie

[ScrapMetal]

I'll give the WD-40 a try next time I'm on it, thanks!

While I've heard great things about an ATF/acetone mix I am also a firm believer in Kroil. I have a gallon of it my shop along with 3 or 4 spray cans of SiliKroil.

-Ron

[ScrapMetal]

Finally amassed enough tooling (well, almost but therein lies a story...), vises, and fixtures to finish up the broken fishing rod project.



I actually glued the old plastic piece back together so that I could take better measurements of it. Gluing wasn't a viable repair option though as this piece acts as a "clamp" to hold the reel on to the rod.




From the pictures, can you see how the one side of the "clamp" has a concave radius to it? Here's where the "story" comes in to play...

I have been dragging my feet on this a bit as I knew I had to have a way to cut the radius on the underside of this piece. I was really hoping to come across a good deal on a rotary table but that hasn't happened yet. I thought about using the horizontal drive on the W-I with an old boring head that I picked up but I still don't have the boring bars I'd need. What to do? What to do?

Then it came to me, "Any tool can be the right tool! - Red Green" (google "Red Green" you'll figure it out. ), my Kurt vise has a swivel base! What I did was to find the "center" of where the vise pivots then position the work piece the proper distance from that point to give me the radius I was looking for. I lined up the piece with an end mill mounted in the quill, loosened up the two nuts holding the vise in position on the swivel base, and slowly fed the piece in to the end mill while moving the "tail" of the vise side-to-side thus cutting an arc. In a nutshell, I used the vise as a rotary table.

It's not a high-precision piece or anything but I think it will do the job.

-Ron

[DaveH]

Ron,
That looks like a nice bit of milling to me.
Of course it is high precision - you made it

DaveH

[Mayhem]

That's thinking outside the box Ron! Well done.

[ScrapMetal]

Thanks guys. I've always had a bit of a knack for, shall we say, "re-purposing" things. It was a bit of a pain to set up and I wouldn't try it on things much bigger or harder but it worked for this.

Don't tell anyone though, I might have to give back my "Junior Machinist" card.

-Ron

[ETC57]

Great idea Ron,

using the swivel on your vice. It's thinking like that that created all the fancy tools we use today!

Jerry.