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 [...]
By Scott Strampe My eyesight not being what it once was, I am always struggling to line up a mark with my horizontal band saw blade. One day at a local home store, an idea came to me. I bought a cheap (less than $15) 24” level with a built-in laser. The laser had the [...]
By James Donnelly Many of my projects include drilling and tapping blind 2-56 threads. Once the tapping operation is complete, it’s sometimes a challenge to get all the oil and shavings out of the hole so the screw will turn to the bottom without obstruction. What’s needed is a small dose of low pressure air. [...]