Last in a series of Lathe operations

Presented by Gene

Members in attendance; Scott Brown, Dean Quackenbush, Neil Peters, Tom Bulman, Tom Haltmeyer, Merlin Carlton, Glen Lynch, Bob Harbour, Ron Yevin, Owen Jeffers, Robert Stewart, Neil Butterfield, Alan Mcdonald, Bob Sanders, Eugene Niegoff

Meeting started at 9:00 with a video of a remotely operated puppet named "Sandman" that a friend and I are building for a Survival Research Labs show in Vegas 2004. Of course most puppets don't weigh in at 400 plus but who's counting. I was pleased to share our progress with all of you and get some feedback on it. Next in line was a paintball marker project I am working on. It is a rehab of an older CCI Phantom that I purchased on Ebay recently. We passed around an example of a current production Phantom for comparison and so I could show off my other new marker. An interesting point here is that Mike Cassidy the owner of CCI has been making pretty much the same marker since 1987. He is a one man show and his product and customer service is next to none. His markers are the preferred tool for stock and pump class players the world over.

At 9:20 Bob Sanders our host, offered a quick tour of Toolcraft for our 3 newest member's, Bob Harbor, Robert Stevens and Neil Peters. This was great as I was pretty nervous because Gene our instructor for Lathe 101 had yet to appear. As a personal note, if you are ever left to help coordinate a group on a Saturday morning be sure to call and wake up the teacher!

At 9:30 A very apologetic Gene appeared with some very nice pieces for the CNC project share with the group. This and the control unit that Merlin has built for the project sparked an hour long discussion on CNC. This was good and covered more information on CNC and converting manual mills than I was able to keep up with. Should any of you who attended wish to add your notes to our web page on this meeting when it is complete please contact me.

At 10:30 or so we began to cover boring theory, rigidity of setup, speeds and feeds .basically this is application dependant. Knowing your machine, it's HP and the rigidity of your setup is all key here. A good rule of thumb is to cut everything back by 1/3 and take very small passes. We also covered "witness marks" to avoid this back your tool away from the surface being cut and then remove it from inside the work. Using a micrometer or DRO is the best way to remember you numbers to setup for the next pass. Counting revolutions is not the best way to this as you can be distracted and forget your number.

Sometime latter we went into the shop with safety glasses in hand to get some hands on with Gene and Bob showing us how to use one lathes in a cutoff operation. Again this pretty much situation specific, but in this case I believe the setup was very solid. The cutoff was clean, feed was slow, coolant was used, and most of all the setup was very solid. A 5c collect was used to hold a 1" or so piece of Al and the tool was as close to the centerline of the carriage or tool post as possible.

With this the hands on portion of the meeting came to an end around 12:00. As we proceeded in picking up and departing Neil Butterfield provided me with a quick treasury report. We currently have 29 dues paying members with $369.65 in the fund.

In closing I would like to thank Bob Sanders and Sons for having us again and all of you for attending.