The New Shop

On examining my camera --w hich has sat, batteries flat. for some time now -- I seem to have lost a whole bunch of photos. Well, such is life in these modern electronic times. So I will have to reconstruct a whole bunch of projected posts.

So while I do, I thought I would give you a tour through my new shop. I have one half of a two-car garage. This seems like a huge luxury. Much more space than I had before, namely one hallway. Let's start at the garage door.

My priceless woodworking bench, which I built in Juneau some years ago now, occupies pride of place. At last I can do woodworking in winter. Previously Mr Workbench lived in the barn -- very cold in winter.  Impossibly so. In the foreground, two out of my three trusty Workmates (TM) . Just wait until you see the vise I got for this workbench. Meantime it's Workmates for clamping. Moving om to the rear of the garage, we have the metalworking machine bench, exactly as it was at Chalupy. Lathe, mill, drill press. No novelty there. I had, of course to add some shelves.

The aassembly/general workbench follows towards the rear. Again, some wood to hold all the tools I need.
 

 Finally there is the grinder bench , -- the shinto temple of a previous post -- with my grinders and a new contraption, the cabinet. Madame Cabinet is a winter project. It is a ten-drawer cabinet which I hope will reduce the clutter in the shop. I built it out of a couple 1x2s, and some particle board. It deserves a post all to itself, maybe I'll do one.

With this environment in mind I will reconstruct the projects currently underway, as soon as I get a new memory card for the camera.

And now it's time for bed.

Chalupy Acres lives again!!

I have been stymied from posting by the internet situation in this new home. My "real" computer was set up for an ethernet connection at Chalupy. The box from the phone line went into the router. From there I ran an ethernet cable to the conputer, and presto! Internet.

Here I was limited to an evil laptop. At least it spoke wi-fi. Getting a USB mouse helped a lot. But I still didn't have all my familiar software. All the stuff to get photos off the camera, all the nice keyboard features that I have become used to. So my daughter had a brilliant idea. The cable company supplied a cable modem. Form thence we went to a router which supplied wi-fi to the whole house. But an ethernet cable from the router (upstairs) would have been about 30 meters long -- posssible but very unsightly. Or I could have drilled a hole in the floor -- verboten. Or I could put a wireless USB "dongle" on my real computer. Which I did, but there is something missing. "Device not found" it says.

The brilliant idea was to note that the downstairs room where I have my stuff set up has a cable outlet. So why not attach the cable modem to the downstairs connection, take the router downstairs, and plug ethernet into that? IT WORKED. The router broadcasts wi-fi everywhere, so why worry about the cable modem/router location?

So now I am online again downstairs. I now have to revive my camera and get the photos off it, and I might be in business again. Note the absence of pictures in this post. When I get the camera up I can show you what I have been doing. Several projects, the new shop, the whole thing. Cameras, unfortunately, require batteries and I am afraid that this may take a few days.  And I may have lost a few photos.

Chalupy acres apologizes for the long absence, but hope is in the air.

I have moved. I am now in Anchorage. My daughter and I have bought a big house and I am now settling in. That is why long time no posts to this blog. Moving is very traumatic and I have had neither time nor inclination to post.

This blog will continue. I thought of cancelling it and starting a new one, but why bother. Chalupy Acres lives forever, but at my age (75) I could not keep up with it. Living in rural Alaska demands lots of physical labor, and John helped for a couple years, yet it was unsustainable. It was time to go. John and Fluffy are now in sunny Tampa, FL.

So I am now in Suburban Hell. But for all that, it is nice. I have a heated shop. The outdoors are not far away. There are 200+ Km of ski trails. So winters are taken care of. My greenwood woodworking stuff will be severely curtailed. But we have room for a garden, and maybe we will go a-Salmon Fishing!

Thanks for your patience.

The Death Star, er, turnip

My life is somewhat unsettled right now. I will go into this later, after it settles. Meanwhile, it is fall in Alaska. Time to harvest the garden. Much to my surprise I grew the Death Star. This is the largest turnip I have ever grown. I did nothing. Like Topsy, she just growed.

Well, the ruler in the picture is the usual 30 cm/1" ruler so you get the idea Furthermore it weighs about 3 Kilos, or 7 lb for the metrically impaired. I have never seen the like. I am given to understand that at the State Fair they exhibit 5 Kilo turnips. Well, not bad for an amateur effort.

The garden this year was mediocre; but then, things are unsettled as I said before. I suspect this turnip is almost inedible, but if I boil it long enough it might do something, like flavor a stew. I am happy I grew megaturnip.

Meanwhile, some animal (I suspect a wascally wabbit) ate my chard. Compared to last year's moose devastation this is nothing. And the greenhouse us quite spectacular. As I said, I got some special plastic. What a difference! Outside temperature 10C, inside 19C, zucchini wonderful, tomatoes great. Ccn't believe the difference. Outside garden over. Greenhouse still going strong. Apparently wascally wabbits don't like zucchini.

Life is a grind

Well, the bandsaw vise is working. I still need some blade adjustments to bet the thing to cut perfectly square. But this is for another day.  Today's post is about a grinder. Specifically I have a 4mm carbide end mill to deal with, for my Proxxon mill. The largest size collet I have for that mill is 3.2 mm which is 1/8" in RGU. So I propose to cut the shank down to 3mm to fit my next collet. I tried very hard to cut it down to 3.2 mm and failed. I cut a taper into it. Slipped in the collet.

Now you might say "you have a lathe, dummy! Just turn the shank down! Piece of cake!" Alas, the end mill is carbide. If I tried to cut it with even a carbide tool, I would ruin the shank, certainly the tool, and maybe even the lathe. Not an option!

The only way to do this with my equipment is with a toolpost grinder. But nobody makes one for the Taig. So I improvised one. I started with some 1/4" - 6.3 mm steel square bar from Lowe's. Nice nickel finish on it, too. The Taig toolpost takes this size. Ten second's worth of time with Handy Bandy cut it off. Then I milled the ends square.

 The basis for this gadget is the Dremel chainsaw sharpener. This gadget is lousy for chainsaw sharpening. But the Dremel screws into it. It is amazingly a metric thread, M19x2, which I cannot cut. It's very large and I have no such tap. So I bolted the sharpener bracket on my piece of bar. I put a dial indicator on the Dremel and on the chuck. Chuck ran out (was off center) .06 mm and the Dremel only .03. I was impressed by the Dremel. It took a lot of fiddling to get the holes in the bracket right in line.

In the end, it took a long time. The grinder does not like big cuts. Furthermore if the grinder axis is off-center you will grind a taper on the shaft. So you have to measure the shaft at root, middle, and end and adjust the toolpost accordingly. There is no way I can get a dial indictor into this setup, I sure tried enough, but no room. I practiced on a broken drill bit until I got the angles right. I wore out 3 grinding wheels in the process. Carbide is very hard. Also things tend to move. So it's grind, measure, reset, go again. Took, essentially, a full day.

But it worked. The new shaft fits, just, the 3mm collet, so I have a 4mm endmill at my disposal on Cecil B. de Mille.

Handy Bandy's vise, a long trip.

The saga of Handy Bandy's conversion into a cutoff saw continues. In this episode we relate that we were unable to find a suitable commercial vise for him; we were obliged to make out own. One of the hardest metalworking projects I have ever undertaken. At first I tried just clamping down the work and hoping for the best.

 Alas, this does not work. The bandsaw blade pulls left to right as you view the picture. It exerts enormous torque on the clamps. The work is pulled crosswise and the blade jams. This needs a proper vise. I looked all over the place and could not find a proper one. So I decided to make my own.

Long ago I found a couple of bedsteads thrown out by the wayside. With my trusty angle grinder I deconstructed the bedsteads and provided myself with a lifetime supply of angle iron, I am here to tell you, bedstead steel is super-excellent. I could make tools out of it, and will in the future. So the idea is this: we have a fixed jaw on a vise (angle iron). We have a movable jaw. Angle iron too. Finally we have an end block. For this I used 13 mm (1/2") square bar. I bought 10 foot of ths stuff for $7 from Fastnall in Wasilla. Now the whole megilla has to be lined up, clamped, and drilled in the proper place. It was quite difficult to keep the whole aligned as I drilled it:

 Now over to the lathe. We need some steel rod. I used hardware store stuff 12+ mm, not the best. I turned down the ends in the lathe to accept hardware store 10-32 screws and threaded then with a die:

 Now we put the whole thing together. We will have to tap the end block for a 1/4-20 (about M6x1) holdit-down screw, which I did, a real pain because I really don't have the proper size drills. I had the holdit screw nade up from a previous abandoned project.

And there is my vise. Now we have to countersink screw holes to take wood screws so I can hold down to the wooden block. Then use wood screws to hold it down. Then realize you need a shim under the movable jaw. Adapt a pice of aluminum. Then you have a vise.

And here is the end result. We have a little piece cut off on the bandsaw. Stiiting on the Al shim. It works. We need a bit of tuning but I have a working cutoff saw.

More to come.

Camera Repair

As I mentioned before my Nikon Coolpix had a latch failure. The tiny little latch that holds the battery lid in place was broken off when I dropped it on the floor. I have improvised with scotch tape -- not duct tape; it stretches too much. Time for a more secure fix. Obviously I cannot photograph any of this because the camera was kaput. But I can show you the result.

What I did is spend half the morning measuring the camera. I then put a screw through both lid and the plastic beneath. Little black thing lower right on Camera. It obviously has to be placed so that there is some "meat" underneath the hole, i.e. some plastic. We are running the risk of drilling into some very significant wire; but the camera did not work anyway, so what the hey! Now -- how to drill the hole? It must be drilled, or at least started,  on the Proxxon mill. I have .001 = .025 mm control on where I place the bit. I also have some tiny aircraft drill bits, Morse number 80 or so  (bigger the Morse number the smaller the bit; most confusing, about 0.6 mm) . The next problem is to drill the hole. My mill will not go high enough to go through lid and bottom. The lid, by the way, goes out and only then will it hinge.  So I put the hole on the bottom where I wanted it. After that I zeroed my dials so I could get back to the right spot. Then I closed the lid. Oh dear the bit broke when I cranked back. On a chance I said "maybe it will cut anyway." It did! Once you have a pilot hole it is not so hard.

What size screw? Well, I had #4-40 caphead screws, these are about 3mm and they worked. So after that I moved over to the drill press; drill and tap for #4-40, put in a screw.  A Coolpix costs about a hundred bucks. My repair is much cheaper. Even if I need an Allen wrench to change batteries. Thanks to John for photographing the repair.