Build - 9 second drag truck #racegreen
- Thread starter bgreen776
- Start date
bgreen776
White Collar Fabricator
Thank you. It sure is nice to be able to get some work done in the shop!
I studied machining technology at Idaho State University in the late 90's, yet most of my education has been from the old timers I have had the privilege to work with over the years. What little CNC/CAD/CAM knowledge I have I learned from books and lots of hours banging my head against my monitor. Now days you can really learn a lot from forums and youtube.
97rada
New member
jlibert
New member
Nice piece man!
Bodacious
Comp Diesel Sponsor
I love it!!! I love your excitement more!!
Are you ready to start making me some parts????
bgreen776
White Collar Fabricator
A new knee mill, similar to this one, with full three axis capability, would probably be 15-30k and no tooling. This one is a 2 axis so I can't really machine 3D surfaces and I can't walk away from it as the operator must raise and lower the tool, but that saves a bunch of money, and most parts I will make on it don't absolutely require the third axis. I paid $5500 which is probably more than what someone in the lower 48 states would have to spend. I'll eventually upgrade my machine to a 3 axis and add a rotary axis, but that's a long way out and another 5-8k.
If this is something you're interested in I suggest looking at the Tormach lineup. They aren't as versatile as a knee mill but you can get a 3-4 axis machine for a very reasonable price.
I've acumulated a lot of small tooling, drills, end mills, taps, measuring tools, over the last 20 years but the mill only came with one working drill chuck and two collet holders so I've been hitting ebay every day looking for good deals on used and import tooling. I did get some old drill chucks with it but they were rusted solid. Fortunately I was able to make some tooling with the mill to disassemble the chucks and get them working again. They aren't accurate but they work and I couldn't be happier. I should have taken some before pictures!
In this picture you can see one rusty drill chuck and a couple nice ones. When I got them they all looked worse than the rusty one!
Here is how they look now after I took the apart, cleaned them up with phosphoric acid, bead blasted (In my home made bead blasting cabinet
), and re-machined them. They were in such bad shape I had thrown them in a box, thinking I'd likely end up just throwing them away, but I got a wild hair up my arse one day after work and decided to at least try to tune them up. One of them ended up being a 3-400 dollar German Albrecht chuck and two were 2-300 dollar Spanish Llambrich chucks. Score!
Thank you!
Thank you. I've really enjoyed getting back to my roots, machining parts for a living was awesome, but I found it to be very stressful. A large part of the work I did after I graduated was repair work for a small refinery, but it was on assemblies or machines that cost the company upwards of a million dollars a day in lost revenue while we were repairing it. Just chucking up on a half million dollar turbine rotor was an incredible amount of stress, and then you had to turn the machine on! lol. Over the years a gravitated away from machine work toward turning wrenches and found myself really enjoying that aspect of the business, so I started doing less and less in the machine shop. 15 years later I have found myself missing the satisfaction that comes from creating something useful out of a chunk of material that most would consider not much more than a paper weight.
Now that I can do it on my own timeline and with materials that don't cost an arm and a leg I can enjoy it again. There is no pressure to get the work done as fast as possible so I can take the extra time to learn new processes, understand the science behind the work, and create things I would have never been able to do otherwise. And now that I've passed my tool box down to the new guy at work and sit behind a desk 40-100 hours a week I really look forward to coming home and tinkering in the shop far more than I used to back when I was in the thick of things all day.
I'd love to have a part on a rig like yours, it would be a real honor, maybe one day we can collaborate on something small like a catch can or a shifter handle. :Cheer:
Next experiment... Electroplating!
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zfaylor
Comp Diesel Sponsor
If you want to get into 3 axis cnc machining put aside 20k+. We just went through the endeavor and what we learned was anything worth owning that will make parts is expensive. Clapped out machines or old tool room style/knee mill can be bought under 10k. The only issue I have with knee mill machines is very limited z travel, no tool changer, slow spindle speeds, and oftentimes they truly aren't heavy enough to take any substantial cuts. $.02
Tooling and the small pieces of the puzzle is what will get you. CAD/CAM software, tool holders, carbide tooling, coolant, vises/fixturing, etc.. all add up FAST.
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