Hello again after a long absence from posting, only lurking,
I havent even had much shop time in the last 2 months due to sonnydoes (for my old Mom) daddydoes and honeydoes, also life has kinda been getting in the way of my hobby. Well I have been machining (my description) for 2 years now and I dont yet have an engine to show for it, nor even plans for one (but I will get there). I have been having fun making tooling.
Ive been thinking of toolpost spindles and one of my kids bought me Harprit Sandhus book, Spindles which has good info on their construction but little on their use. To my way of thinking ( I am a completely self taught machinist I have only watched experienced machinists about 3 times in my life for a total of about 10 minutes so know where my ideas are coming from) there seem to be many advantages for a variety of operations like slitting colletts, gear cutting, drilling radially etc etc for milling spindles in the lathe. Advantages like easy setting of centre height, getting subsequent operations square and concentric and the prospect of easy indexing using the lathes change gears.
However, I have not seen much use of toolpost spindles in the HMEM build logs. Perhaps disadvantages and impracticalities outweigh what I think are the good reasons to use spindles. I see that industrial CNC operations can have workpieces and tools on all sorts of axes.
The first spindle I want to make is a cutting frame and its first job is to split a collett thingy Im thinking of.
Just curious,
Cheers,
Ant
I havent even had much shop time in the last 2 months due to sonnydoes (for my old Mom) daddydoes and honeydoes, also life has kinda been getting in the way of my hobby. Well I have been machining (my description) for 2 years now and I dont yet have an engine to show for it, nor even plans for one (but I will get there). I have been having fun making tooling.
Ive been thinking of toolpost spindles and one of my kids bought me Harprit Sandhus book, Spindles which has good info on their construction but little on their use. To my way of thinking ( I am a completely self taught machinist I have only watched experienced machinists about 3 times in my life for a total of about 10 minutes so know where my ideas are coming from) there seem to be many advantages for a variety of operations like slitting colletts, gear cutting, drilling radially etc etc for milling spindles in the lathe. Advantages like easy setting of centre height, getting subsequent operations square and concentric and the prospect of easy indexing using the lathes change gears.
However, I have not seen much use of toolpost spindles in the HMEM build logs. Perhaps disadvantages and impracticalities outweigh what I think are the good reasons to use spindles. I see that industrial CNC operations can have workpieces and tools on all sorts of axes.
The first spindle I want to make is a cutting frame and its first job is to split a collett thingy Im thinking of.
Just curious,
Cheers,
Ant