Hey y'all,
I bought this 9" straight edge casting a while back. The plan is to use it to straighten out the compound of my Chinesium lathe, which came to me bad as-new for my convenience .
I guess I was being lazy with this setup and it felt a little precarious at times. The casting did tend to ring a little at the ends until I got under the scale.
It would possibly have been more rigid to flip the table and to clamp the casting straight down to it. I'm not entirely sure, though, as it really needs to be held by the "handle" for this first operation, so that'd limit the rigidity of any setup.
It came out just fine, though, seems to be flat as a pancake from how it hinges on my surface plate. I'll need to scrape it in due course, so I guess I'll see just how flat it is when I start that process.
So here's a real n00b setup question:
I need to cut the 45 degree bevel on the front edge, but I realized that I don't own any V-blocks large enough. I also don't own a table that'll angle or such. It would have been handy to cut this with the head tilted to 45 degrees, but I don't have the Y travel for it.
I can of course rig up some fixturing by making something that'll hold the casting at 45 degrees, which is probably my best bet. Neither the angle of the face nor "parallelism" to the back face are critical here, this just needs to end up as an angled flat face.
I guess I could also buy some V-blocks, they're sure to come in handy over time.
What I do have, though, is the Deckel dividing head and the face plate. The face plate is plenty large to hold the casting. The dividing head will tilt and swivel, but it'll only tilt a few degrees toward and away from the table it's mounted to. It will however swivel 90 degrees in either direction.
I've not used the dividing head yet, so I don't have a feel for how rigid that kind of setup would be, though my guess would be "not very"? I'd have to space the work off the faceplate, and my sense is that it'd be a long way out from the neck of the dividing head by that time.
Also, if I mount it on the vertical table, I'd have to cut the bevel on the Y axis which doesn't have the travel - so that's out.
If I mount it on the horizontal table, I'd have to traverse some 13" or thereabouts in Z to cut the thing in one pass with that face mill. That doesn't feel like a good idea, though I couldn't rightly articulate why I feel that way. WDYT?
Am I overlooking "this one weird setup trick" that'd make this a total breeze?
Siggi
I bought this 9" straight edge casting a while back. The plan is to use it to straighten out the compound of my Chinesium lathe, which came to me bad as-new for my convenience .
I guess I was being lazy with this setup and it felt a little precarious at times. The casting did tend to ring a little at the ends until I got under the scale.
It would possibly have been more rigid to flip the table and to clamp the casting straight down to it. I'm not entirely sure, though, as it really needs to be held by the "handle" for this first operation, so that'd limit the rigidity of any setup.
It came out just fine, though, seems to be flat as a pancake from how it hinges on my surface plate. I'll need to scrape it in due course, so I guess I'll see just how flat it is when I start that process.
So here's a real n00b setup question:
I need to cut the 45 degree bevel on the front edge, but I realized that I don't own any V-blocks large enough. I also don't own a table that'll angle or such. It would have been handy to cut this with the head tilted to 45 degrees, but I don't have the Y travel for it.
I can of course rig up some fixturing by making something that'll hold the casting at 45 degrees, which is probably my best bet. Neither the angle of the face nor "parallelism" to the back face are critical here, this just needs to end up as an angled flat face.
I guess I could also buy some V-blocks, they're sure to come in handy over time.
What I do have, though, is the Deckel dividing head and the face plate. The face plate is plenty large to hold the casting. The dividing head will tilt and swivel, but it'll only tilt a few degrees toward and away from the table it's mounted to. It will however swivel 90 degrees in either direction.
I've not used the dividing head yet, so I don't have a feel for how rigid that kind of setup would be, though my guess would be "not very"? I'd have to space the work off the faceplate, and my sense is that it'd be a long way out from the neck of the dividing head by that time.
Also, if I mount it on the vertical table, I'd have to cut the bevel on the Y axis which doesn't have the travel - so that's out.
If I mount it on the horizontal table, I'd have to traverse some 13" or thereabouts in Z to cut the thing in one pass with that face mill. That doesn't feel like a good idea, though I couldn't rightly articulate why I feel that way. WDYT?
Am I overlooking "this one weird setup trick" that'd make this a total breeze?
Siggi