tools, materials & knowledge for model makers
Setting out an angle on the mill table so that I can machine a set of gears at 9.5°. I know lots who will now be screaming at me to use a sine bar. It might be easiest to start with the simple right angle triangle. Below we see the triangle with the 9.5° angle, … Read more
Machining the miniature Burrell cylinder cavity was quite interesting. Mainly because the cylinder was flat on one side and so the machining was an incomplete circle. This meant I needed to use the rotary table. I use the Warco HV4 rotary table quite a lot. To the extent that it has developed some slight slack. … Read more
I’m looking at making helical gears, as per normal I wanted to start with the fundamentals. What is the optimum angle? Can I index them on the milling machine? Can I machine with a normal cutter? Why do I need to make helical gears? The big benefit is they will be quieter. Gear noise on … Read more
The front wheel hubs are quite small, 18mm in diameter, considering the features that are machined into them. This is my excuse then for having to machine 5 of these hubs before getting a pair that were correct. I don’t want wobbly wheels on my miniature Burrell traction engine. The front wheels rotate independently on … Read more
Very soon after buying a milling machine I can guarantee you will be looking at rotary tables. A rotary table feels like a must have. Use it to machine: arcs flats on bolt heads and nuts rotate a part to be drilled at precise divisions or angles large circular parts that cannot be machined in … Read more
The rear wheel hubs for the miniature traction engine that I’m making need to be indexed with eight spokes each side of a single wheel. The trick is that the spokes are out of “phase” and so the hub needs to have this out of phase feature. This post talks about how I went about aligning … Read more
My first go at machining a rear wheel tread pair for my miniature traction engine was not that successful. That meant I needed another go. The rear wheel tread pair are handed and the tread grooves are 4mm wide and machined at 7 degrees with a depth of 0.75mm, 35 grooves in total. The rear … Read more
Aligning a rotary table or more importantly aligning a part on the rotary table can be tricky and this is just a simple rough and ready approach to aligning a part. What I’m actually trying to achieve here is the alignment of a workpiece on the rotary table and the first task is to align … Read more
4-Jaw Chuck on Rotary Table or perhaps more accurately: “Mounting a 4-jaw Chuck to a Rotary Table in the Simplest Way”. The simplest way is the part for me. I’ve had a small 80mm 4-jaw chuck hanging around my workshop for some time with the intention of either mounting it to the Hobbymat Lathe or … Read more
I saw a set of long T-nuts being used in a jig boring machine and made me wonder if this idea could work for the HV4 rotary table. The long T-nuts with 8mm bolts fitted – I have now machined the upper thread on these down to 6mm so that I can use the Unimat … Read more