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If you're like me and use carbide tooling a fair bit, you may have read that it likes to run fast. This idea is further supported by the surface speed and feed recommendations you will often find printed on the back of those packets the inserts are sold in; and you might well have seen videos of...

It's been more than a year since my family and I moved down to Bendigo, and none of us have ever really looked back. In this time I have been keeping busy with my engine building and other projects. With this move has come a new workshop that puts the cramped setup in one half of a double garage...

If you haven't heard how this engine came to my workshop, you can read about it here: http://www.homemodelenginemachinist.com/showthread.php?t=27760 Long story short, it actually belongs to a man in Ballarat, and was damaged in a fire. I originally had no idea what model this engine was...

Last month I met a man at a local vintage machinery rally with a collection of various steam engines running on compressed air. I saw that some of them were very worn and sloppy and offered to help him get them to run better, and gave him my details. Around a week later, I got something of an...

Not too long ago I stumbled upon a journal article detailing a liquid-piston steam engine which did away with the need for a boiler in the traditional sense. Following this up led me to some patent documents filed by a group of Japanese engineers working for Denso that details the working...

I recently snapped my 6mm chucking reamer in two, so time to look for a replacement. Now searching eBay yields plenty of results, however a lot of these are from those "we got it all/one stop shop" sellers from China and Hong Kong. I found some of them offering reamers this size for as little as...

Sorry to not let you know earlier, but I am now a resident of Victoria, Bendigo to be more precise. I arrived on the 12th at my sister's place, where I am currently staying until my parents and I move into our new house on the 6th of April. This move has been years in the making, and there...

Pickings have been good at the local scrap yard recently, and I've managed to score some offcuts of steel hollow bar that look like good starting points for steam engine cylinders. Question is, how long will it take before the bores rust up on me? I've asked a couple of other model engine...

Although I have long been wanting to buy a milling machine at some stage, and have been keeping a look out to get an idea of what's on the market, I've recently been pondering an option that I had previously disregarded or overlooked. Could an Indian made machine possibly be a viable option...

I've just seen two threads posted with the exact same words in each: In both cases it was hyperlinked to a Reddit post which displayed an image looking like a video player, but I erred on the side of caution and didn't click it. I'll bet this is spam coming from a bot of some kind, no doubt...

Although Jurgen's designs have been used many times as an exercise in CAD modelling, I haven't actually heard of that many people actually building them, so I decided to have a go. After looking closely at the plans, I decided that my first choice was his beam engine. Here's a rendering...

I came across Jurgen Galba's work while looking around on a website called GrabCAD for CAD models which I could use as plans for new projects. Many members there have used Jurgen's plans as an exercise in CAD modelling. You can download them from this site called Inventor Wizard...

While looking on eBay, I have seen plenty of components like linear slides, ballscrews and trapezoidal (like ACME) threaded rod and nuts being sold for people building their own CNC routers. This made me think; might it be feasible to design and construct a small milling machine using some of...

I've got a drill press vice that was jamming up on me, so I took it apart to see where the problem was, and I quickly discovered just how poorly made it was. There were numerous issues. As you can see, there is a heap of slop between the screw and the movable jaw. I've also had problems...

One day, I made a post on a whim to Sandvik's Facebook page concerning the tooling issues faced by us hobbyists. I wasn't sure what to expect, considering home shop machinists are only a small market compared to industry, but from their replies to this and a follow up message, it seems as though...

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Metex-Opti-BF20L-Geared-Head-Milling-Machine-Drilling-Mill-Variable-Speed/271242888150?_trksid=p2045573.m2042&_trkparms=aid%3D111000%26algo%3DREC.CURRENT%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D27%26meid%3D3029561045766088461%26pid%3D100033%26prg%3D1011%26rk%3D4%26rkt%3D4%26sd%3D200991101743%...

The purchase of a proper mill is looking more likely since I netted $600 today from the sale of a mower. However, one concern is that of noise. I might be using carbide cutters a fair bit, which means running fast. I know from watching videos that the industrial CNC mills can be quite noisy...

My experience with carbide tooling has been up and down since I first got a lathe of my own, but I reckon some stuff made by Tungaloy that I've just got lately is excellently suited to us hobbyists. Tungaloy makes quite a lot of different G and E-tolerance inserts, which are much sharper than...

I've got a copper loco type boiler that I'm working on that's about 90mm (3 1/2") in diameter by around 380mm (15 3/4") long, but I'm having problems getting enough heat into it to perform silver soldering. Repeatedly heating it up to fill in leaks and put bushings in is leaving me short of gas...

As you would expect, its quite exciting to work on something big. This engine is not mine, but I am involved in the restoration, and will be doing quite a bit of work on it. The engine is a Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies portable which we believe dates from around 1903. We don't know much...