Recent content by Russel

You might give Handbrake a try. It's open source, so its easy on the wallet. There are both Windows and Linux versions.

Wow, some great very small stuff in this thread. Here is the smallest part that I've made so far.

That's a good question Mosey. I always wear nitrile glove while working on machinery or operating my mill and lathe. Keep in mind that these gloves are very thin (4 Mil or 0.004"), in fact it took me a while to learn to wear them without ripping them in the first five minutes of use. I've had...

If you are going to use indicators with large dials there is no reason that the 45 degree angle idea wouldn't work. I also have the Sherline 2000 mill, and have to agree that tramming the Y axis can be a real pain due to the location of the pivot. I use to spend a lot of time tramming the Y axis...

The Sherline lathe and mill spindle does have a shoulder on it. Both the spindle shoulder and the threads insure that chuck threaded on is straight. In this photo I'm using a .25" collet, but you can see the threads, and in the upper left corner of the photograph you can see just a little bit...

I don't think that you're overthinking it. It just depends on how much work you want to put into it. Sometimes I won't bother with too much because I just want something to run. But, other times I've gone to much more trouble if I plan to run something more than occationally. For small engines...

Back in when I worked in a small engine shop (chain saws, lawnmowers, etc.) The rule of thumb that we used was to make the seat contact about half of the valve face. The valve face being the part of the valve that's at a 45 degree angle and contacts the valve seat. To do this we used valve seat...

Great work! I'm following your restoration with great interest. Thank you for sharing. I would say you can count just fine. I've been working on 6 simple little Millie steam engines to be given away as Christmas gifts, so that means that I automatically machine 7 of each part. Sometimes I want...

Yes! Very nice! I love your lathe dog smfr, I would have never thought of something so simple!

Please forgive me. Sometimes I can be a little too literal. ;)

The imperial system is based off of us. I know that my thumb at the base of my fingernail is almost exactly one inch, my foot is about 12 inches, and my arms spread horizontally are slightly over 2 yards. At work we once had a competition to see who could guess the distance between the wall and...

As I understand it, a thousandth of an inch (0.001”) is a tolerance that can be machined and a ten thousandth (0.0001”) is a tolerance that can be precision ground. So, imperial measurements kind of falls into place for machining. I know this isn't carved in stone, but it is a fair rule of...

Keep at it. I'm looking forward to seeing your completed millie.

Wow, millie was the first engine that I made with my Sherline mill and lathe. It took quite a while at that time to make all the parts, including starting over on a couple goofed up parts. I've been thinking of making a few more for Christmas stocking suffers. Anyway, I would suggest using a...

Almost all of my lathe tooling uses carbide inserts. I haven't learned much about HSS single point cutting bit geometry as a result of that. Consequently, I've misinterpreted the importance of "end" relief as opposed to side relief. Thank you for pointing this out to me Greg. Your illustration...