Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
It’s easier to remove the leadscrew while dismantling the carriage and apron, which requires removing the cover from the control box containing all the switches & knobs. Come to find out the “cover” actually holds all the gadgetry onto the headstock:
LMS mini-lathe – control box interior
I want to replace the Power indicator with something visible in normal shop light; judging from the connectors and overall brightness, it’s a neon bulb inside a green housing.
Anyhow, the four screws holding cover to the headstock weren’t identical:
LMS Mini-lathe – cover screws
I thought the oddball screw was deliberate, perhaps fastening that corner to a plastic frame of some sort, but it turned out to be a quick fix for a boogered tap job:
LMS Mini-lathe – mistapped cover hole
A bag of 4 mm knurled brass inserts will arrive in a while, after which I’ll drill out all four holes and epoxy inserts in their place. Might have to use stainless hardware, just for nice…
The original owner of our house positioned two blue plastic barrels along the driveway, filled with salt for ice melting. We’ve neither used the salt (a snowblower suffices for most storms) nor removed the barrels; they’ve been in those spots for at least three decades.
The Little Machine Shop 5200 lathe package includes DROs on the cross slide and compound cranks. The readouts report the position of the crank, not the slide position, which isn’t a major problem on a lathe.
Unfortunately, the compound collides with the DRO on the cross slide:
LMS Mini-lathe – compound vs DRO
That is a major problem on a lathe.
When you can’t turn the cross slide more than 45° from parallel with the bed, you cannot set the compound to the (typical) 29° degrees required for (traditional) thread cutting. That’s measured perpendicular to the bed, so it would be 61° on the compound rest scale, if the scale went that high:
LMS Mini-lathe – compound way
This mess doesn’t have a trivial fix, because the DRO body under the (non-removable) display doesn’t quite clear the compound screw:
LMS Mini-lathe – compound vs DRO – bottom
As nearly as I can tell, removing the entire DRO is the only way to slew the compound beyond 45°, but the DRO replaced the usual manual scale around the cross slide knob, so there’s no analog backup.
The DRO mounts to the cross slide with three screws, so you can’t rotate it 90° to the side to get better clearance:
LMS mini-lathe – DRO mounting screws
The other four screws presumably mount the DRO encoder housing to the outer shell.
The setscrew sticking up from the sleeve anchors it to the cross slide shaft. The slit milled into the shaft captures the end of the setscrew:
LMS mini-lathe – cross slide leadscrew shaft
The knob slides over the shaft, with a screw in the end holding it in place by friction against a split lockwasher; you can apply enough torque to turn the knob under the lockwasher in either direction.
Removing the DRO doesn’t produce more cross slide travel, because the DRO body sits flush with the back side of that large disk.
I think the cross slide knob collides with the compound DRO, but I put it all back together without any further exploration.
Actual 6 inch DROs based on linear encoders seem to run $40-ish and other folks have fitted them to their mini-lathes. Verily, I don’t do much threadcutting, so I’ll just put this mess on the far back burner.
That DRO ticks me off every time I look at it, though…
Some time ago, Vassar deployed Big Belly solar-powered, network-connected, compacting trash cans. We recently walked across the campus to a play …
Once is happenstance:
Vassar Old Main – Broken Trash Can 1
Twice is coincidence:
Vassar Old Main – Broken Trash Can 2
Those neatly printed signs suggested a common-mode failure, so we took the long way back to visit my all-time favorite trash can installation. Yup, three times is enemy action:
Vassar Library – Broken Trash Can 3
You can still put trash in the containers through the obvious opening. Perhaps the networking failed?
This year’s mouse survived the winter under the tool rack, perhaps due to living inside a well-insulated ball made from leaf fragments, dryer fuzz, and random stuff:
Insulated mouse nest – first look
The white fabric around the entrance is a nice touch and the blue threads certainly add a decorative flair. I eased the top surface back to show the interior, although the flash flattens the texture:
Insulated mouse nest – interior
With hawks hunting during the day and owls a-wing at night, the local rodent population has been taking a real beating; even the squirrels look worried.
One of the motel’s TV channels offered this diversion:
Fedora console on motel TV
Alas, no combination of keys on the overly complex remote fed themselves to tty1. That didn’t surprise me, but ya gotta try, y’know.
Contrary to what you might think, that’s a well-focused image. Apparently, someone, somewhere, aimed a crappy camera at a monitor and devoted one video input to the result.
Returning from Rochester & Points North, I spotted something in the rearview mirror that could have been either a Yellow Submarine or a storage tank. As whatever it was got closer, the view got weirder:
Bears on I-87 – approaching
Huh. Who’d’a thunk it?
Bears on I-87 – passing
A stiff crosswind pushed them all over the lane:
Bears on I-87
I hope they arrived at their destination with the shiny side up and the rubber side down.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 