By Mike Solomon I have a tip that might make life easier for your readers. When I need to turn small diameter rod on a larger lathe, the fitted chuck often will not close small enough to hold the workpiece. My six-jaw chuck on the South Bend 10K only goes down to about 1/8” diameter [...]
By Doug Ripka We recently bought a small Jet drill press at work. The drill has T-slots in it instead of the open slots our old drill press had, so we couldn't use our Vise-Grip style table clamps that we had grown fond of. (One example of what we are using is the Grizzly H1127 [...]
By by Gerry Betteridge This tip came about after I purchased a mill-drill machine awhile back. It came to me, as it may have come to you, that the location of your workpiece was lost whenever you attempted to alter the height of the head. Having a round column, there was no way I could [...]
By Don Wiederhold You know what a pain it is to check pitch diameter using wires. It seems like you always drop at least one of them and the small diameter wires can be near impossible to find on the floor or in a pile of swarf. The idea came to me to just drill [...]
By Kenneth Hemmelgarn Here is a tip for a workholding option that I often use with odd-shaped parts. While not as solid as clamping with straps or other more conventional methods, this can be used for a number of situations. As seen in the Photo, I have clamped the part in a machinist’s clamp, and [...]
By Peter Evennett When milling a piece supported on parallels, it is often difficult to stop the parallels from falling out of their position against the machine vise jaws. John Mallak has described an elegant solution in the February/March 2010 Machinist’s Workshop, and this prompted me to offer my extremely low-tech idea – a piece [...]