I did a bit more work on the chuck backplate last night – still no drilling, but I made it so that the plate fits perfectly over the spindle on the lathe. Looks like we’ll be able to do the drilling tonight, so it’s almost done…
What's been on my mind lately? Read on...
Big news: my knitting machine came! Ok, so it’s not big news, but it’s fun nonetheless. The vintage 1975 Mattel knitting machine I bought on EBay arrived in the mail yesterday in perfect condition. It’s actually pretty amazing – they managed to make it entirely out of molded plastic parts and make the instructions easy enough so that any monkey could follow them. Having read some web pages since placing the bid, I feared that it wasn’t actually a knitting machine, but something close (that it did some bastardized form of knitting) – thankfully, this couldn’t be further from the truth! It knits!
This week is super-busy for me, so it looks like I’ll have to wait ’til at least next week to finish the adapter plate for the new chuck. Lots of dance rehearsals & other miscellaneous goings-on taking up the evenings and for the weekend, skiing at Killington.
In two weeks, I’m headed to Toronto for a swing dance workshop – know any good restaurants up there?
Last night, Mike and I got about halfway through making the adapter plate for the 4 jaw chuck. We used the big lathe at work (a South Bend 9×40?), so cutting the aluminum plate was like cutting butter. I got a little over-enthusiastic (exactly 3 thousandths of an inch too enthusiastic, to be exact) with one of the cuts, so when you mounted the 4 jaw chuck on that shoulder, it wiggled just the littlest bit. Mike showed me an awesome trick to fix it – we went around that shoulder with a prick punch and put tiny little holes in the metal, which pushed enough of it up that the chuck fit perfectly. We’ll have to attach it semi-permanently with Locktite so the holes don’t collapse, but it saved a hour and half’s worth of work & $10 in aluminum.
So what’s left to do is set it up on the mill and drill the holes for the various screws – really it shouldn’t be too hard since the machine has digital readouts (DRO’s) that make finding the precise location of holes very easy. I did a drawing in SolidWorks so I could print out the exact coordinates of the holes. Almost there…
Well, the 4 jaw chuck arrived yesterday – it’s huge! It’s a bit thicker than expected – it’s a cylinder 4″ in diameter and almost 3″ thick. It’s mostly steel, so it weighs almost 10 pounds. It came packed in styrofoam and machine oil (unlike the lathe that was covered in sticky packing grease). I ordered a 4 1/2″ diameter round aluminum plate (an inch thick, give or take) from Online Metals to make the backplate. It’s slated to arrive on Monday, and Mike’s gonna help me with the machining.
Our choreography for the North Atlantic Dance Championships is coming along well. If you’ve got a good name for our dance group, send me email (nothing too cheesy, please – we’re all too good at coming up with those kinds of names ourselves).