TOS FA3V mill actually milling something!

My friend Dave and I got my mill running last night and made chips for the first time ever!

As silly add it might seem, just that little end mill cutting that piece of 1/4" thick flat stock is a whole new world opened up. :) 

You want to touch my knob, don't you?

I had a lot of fun making a shift knob! I had some really nice stainless round stock for a long while. With my friend's recently acquired lathe, I wanted to try it out! We were both rather skeptical of the machinability of the stainless, especially on a smaller lathe like the South Bend Heavy 10, but after some tweaking, we were both really happy with the results!

Here's my friend Dave getting things dialed in:

Shiny!

I really like this lathe. It works really well, especially with a VFD running the motor. It's nearly silent with the back gears disengaged. It can turn some really smooth cuts!

We actually had to set up the 4 jaw chuck and indicate the bar in. Neither of us had done that before. It went surprisingly well. Once we turned the bar down far enough, we got the three jaw chuck on and got to work tapering one end down:

This would have been easier had we had the taper attachment working, but it isn't and that's another story.

 Final pass complete:

 Look at how shiny that last pass was! That wasn't even with any polishing. Dave has a darn steady hand.

After the tapering was done, we tried parting the piece off at about 4", but the parting tool is honestly horrendously terrible. All we got was nasty chatter:

 Ew. So, we went medieval on things and lopped it off with a hack saw (while it was spinning, and no it isn't as dangerous as it sounds).

I missed some pictures in the processes, but we flipped the knob around and I chamfered the edge by hand then rounded it over with a file.

Then we got a wild hair up our butts and decided to try to knurl the end of the knob. I figured that if we boogered it up, we could just turn off the failed knurls and no one would be the wiser! heh

Here's Dave setting the knurling tool:

He had heard a tip that you set the knurls slightly off of perpendicular, so the knurls will "bite" better and have a better chance of following each other. If you look at he pic above closely, the rollers have a spiral groove pattern, which basically rubs the surface and pushes the material into the grooves. The bottom roller has the opposite pattern on it, and when the gears roll over the same surface, they create the classic diamond knurl pattern:

 We were shocked when we stopped the lathe and the pattern came out perfect! I'd only tried knurling a couple of times before without a huge amount of success. We didn't go too deep, as that can get pretty abrasive, but the patter really shows and gives a really satisfying texture on the top of the knob! AWESOME!

We flipped the knob around again and polished the thing up with some sandpaper. (I think it was 180 grit.)

 Notice the piece of paper wrapped around the knob. That keeps the teeth of the chuck jaws from digging in to the work, and in some cases, keeping the work from digging into the chuck jaws (though that is rare since they are hardened, usually).

LOOK AT THIS THING! IT IS AWESOME!

 It's fairly large. It's about 1.5" diameter. The small end of the taper is about .750".

 It feels AMAZING. I'll try to weigh it some time, but it is pretty heavy.

The last thing left is to drill and thread it:

 I forgot the thread size, didn't have my tape set and want to be sure of what I am doing before I actually possibly ruin all the hard work and fun that went into this thing!

It's so awesome, kitty approves!

 My friend liked mine so much, he mad his own the next day:

Having access to a lathe is frickin' amazing!

An older, unfinished project, but still fun.

This is from 2008 and I don't have access to a lath or mill anymore, so I can't finish the project until I do. 

What happens when you have plenty of 2024 aluminum, bronze, stainless and machine tools? ITBs (Individual Throttle Bodies), that's what! 

First things first: flanges! You need to have flanges as a strong base for the entire project. Right now, I forget if this is 1/2" or 3/8" thick 2024 aluminum (the good stuff).

The single point flycutter (with a tool I ground myself after some trial and error) going to town on 4 pieces of material:

Notice the clamp on the overhanging material to reduce chatter s much as possible. It worked well enough, since the whole block of material was thick enough when clamped together to be pretty stiff.

After a few passes:

Once I got to that point (I ignored the small nicked spot from an oops with the band saw), I flipped the pieces over and leveled the other side. Gotta love the automatic feed! Set the speed and listen for any nasty noises that means your project is ruined and you have to start over. LOL!

Here's the other side: 

I had a Z6 intake manifold phenolic gasket sent to me and I used poor man's machinist dye (blue wide-point Sharpie!) for my layout. 

I don't have pics of the scribe lines, but . . . I hope you can picture the traced gasket on the chunk of metal. LOL! I determined by, measuring carefully and some math, that the bore spacing for the engine (Honda D16) is 84mm. Armed with that information, I made a bunch of these:

What are those? Pretty close tolerance bushings for the throttle plate butter fly shaft. (THANK YOU JANNE!)

You can see the start of the holes for them here:

I got the holes started then realized I should square up the sides better before installing things that are supposed to be fairly exactly parallel. LOL! 

I didn't take pics of drilling boring holes for them (because, well, the process of boring is . . . boring), but you can see how they fit here:

I used the mill vise to press the bushings in place, two at a time to balance the load:

After I got to that point, I started working on the mounting flanges again. Setting things up in a vise takes time. And though. And time. And measuring. And precision. And mostly time. heh

I didn't bother taking pics of the drilling of pilot holes, but the next few pics will give you a sense of what I was doing:

I left myself some room for final porting and shaping, but I think they turned out pretty well!

(I only had to remake one mounting plate because I oops when setting up the hole spacing . . . LOL)

Some of the other things I was working on while all that squaring up was going on was the actual runners themselves!

I totally forget the exact dimensions of this stuff, but, again, it's 2024 probably schedule 40 pipe.

 Each one needed a small lip turned. Yes, I messed one up. Sue me.

One of the hardest parts of this whole job was turning the butterfly shafts. I managed to keep the tolerances to within +/- .001", which is good enough for me!

I ended up making 12 runners because I could and also because I know I would screw something up in the future.

 Now, an astute observer will notice that I really having filled in the whole story yet! Where are the flanges with the bushings pressed in? Well, I am glad that you asked!

They were getting drilled then bored to size then counterbored!

Drilling the pilot hole:

Using the largest dang bit in the shop (1.25", IIRC):

And then the horrifically painful process of manual boring with a boring head. It would have gone a lot faster if we didn't only have the crappiest Chinese boring bars that fit the boring head. *sighs* It took days to size the holes correctly! (Working after hours during deployment (in Iraq) for sometimes 4-5 hours straight.)

Taking the biggest cuts I could at first to just get to near the correct size:

On size and good finish!

To compare, this is what I start from:

Then, after all that painful stuff, I had to counterbore the top of the plates like so:

 In order to fit the runners in place thusly:

I started making throttle plates, but found out too late that the plates need to have a 10-15" angle on the edge . . . and then we started packing up the equipment. Who knows when I am going to get to finish this stuff . . .