hammers-n-nails said:
i would say a dro would be well worth your investment, a purist would probably tell you that its cheating but its faster and you are less likley to make a mistake. mine has an arc function on it, i use it quiet alot and i dont know how you would ever do a large radius arc without it"larger than you could get on a rotatry table"-not being what you would call an expert myself-. i also came up with an old computer with autocad r14 on it, with the two combined machining farly complicated parts without alot of math on paper. but thats a whole other topic. now that im done rambling about that can anyone give me a fairly detailed procedure for doing this oil blacking like whats on the T-nuts?
A Dro is on my list of wants but my list is larger than my wallet so it all takes time.
I've had this mill for 6 months now and only finally managed to have the cash spare to buy the vice and other bits I needed to actually use it.
I'm personally all for cheating and using anything to make my minimal skill stretch further. :big:
Blackening couldn't be easier.
Make sure the metal is clean, I also wipe it down with a rag with meths on it, don't know if you really need to do that though.
Get yourself a metal tin or tray and put some clean motor oil in it, or peanut oil if the item will ever be touching food (pretty sure my T nuts won't be so I used motor oil).
Some people say to use old dirty oil but I wouldn't as a lot of cars now have their engines made out of alloys which contain nasty elements in them and you wouldn't want to vaporise them when dropping a hot item into the oil.
I hang the item on a little bit of fencing wire and then heat with my blow torch until the whole item has 'blued', any parts that haven't reached the blue stage probably won't blacken.
Then quickly drop it in the oil.
Do this outside as the oil will smoke and stink.
Also make sure you have something on hand to put out the oil if you heat the item up too much and set fire to the oil.
Leave it to cool in the oil.
As I attached fencing wire to what I'm blackening I just use that to lift it out and then wipe off the excess oil on a rag.
It looks good and gives some measure of protection against rust and better still is dead simple to do.