The various goings on in my workshop
For a while now I have been looking into various options for storing my lathe and milling tooling, having them loose in my roller cabinet drawers is not really working for me and not ideal for the tooling either. I had been considering using rectangular box section aluminium like Chris Heapy but at around £17.00…
My Lathe has a 4 teeth per inch (tpi) lead screw, and the chuck thread is 1 1/4″ 9tpi BSF. According to the screw threading data, I can cut this thread using a 40 tooth drive gear on the spindle, an idler and a 90 tooth gear on the lead screw. There are other combinations…
Having successfully installed the OS, my next step was to try and reduce the number of writes that were likely to hit the CF card, this involved moving many of the logging and temporary areas to use tmpfs and also turn off writing time updates every time a file is accessed. This is all documented…
I have been umming and ahhing over which stepper motors and drivers to buy for my mini mill for over a year now and not really making any progress on making a decision. The other day I was comparing prices of nema 23 stepper motors once again when I came across some for sale by…
I was doing some work on my Mini Mill the other day and noticed that despite the fact that I had set a 0 position on the Z axis, the readout that came with my Chinese scales would randomly reset and as a result the 0 value was suddenly elsewhere. This was not a huge…
I have recently returned from our family holiday in Orlando Florida, where as usual I used the US trip as an excuse to stock up on a few items that are cheaper, or simply not available on this side of the pond. Electrostaticmagic want £239.00 ($370.00) for what looks like a Frost kit that you can buy direct…
Well, the parts all arrived, and that is when the trouble started. The first issue was that the pico power adapter unfortunately has 24 pins and the Mini ITX motherboard has 20 pins. If it was the other way around, then all would still have been fine, but because there is a capacitor in the…
I have recently been collecting parts to build a bare bones PC, with no moving parts, to run LinuxCNC. My intention is to mount the PC inside the controller box along with all of the stepper drivers and power supplies. I first bought a second hand VXL GA-C7V7VX-RH motherboard for £20.00 ($31.00) with free P&P…
I have stated from the beginning, that I was not overly happy with the tilting column design of the Sieg X2 Mini Mill and would have preferred the solid column as sold with one of the models from LittleMachineShop. As such, ever since it became available at ArcEuroTrade, I have been interested in the Fixed…
It saddens me to say that on the night of Tuesday 16th June my garage/workshop was broken into. It looks like the burglar initially attempted to attack one of the garage door locks with a screwdriver. Then when that failed tried pushing on the top corner of the door in an attempt to bend it…