A three-part series from Mikey over at MachinistBlog.com. Mikey has been a machinist for 15 years, and has come ’round to the belief that high-speed steel (HSS) cutters, rather than the pricier, lower-maintenance, carbide-tipped bits, are the way to go on a hobby-sized metalworking lathe. He also makes a compelling argument for using a belt sander, instead of the traditional bench grinder, for making, shaping, and sharpening HSS lathe tools.
At MAKE, we’re crazy for kits. That’s why we just produced a special issue that’s all about kits, our Ultimate Kit Guide 2012, and are also launching a new website dedicated to kit reviews, at kits.stage.makezine.com. Available at newsstands nationwide, the Ultimate Kit Guide includes nearly 200 reviews of top kits ranging from beginner’s crafts to wooden kayaks to advanced robotics to alcoholic beverages and everything in between.
Founded in 1906 in South Bend, Indiana, South Bend Lathe, at one time, controlled almost half of the U.S. domestic metalworking lathe market. South Bend did a lot of things right, to earn their market share and reputation, and one of the smartest was to produce clear, well-illustrated, low-cost instructional materials describing not just how to set up and run their tools, but how to use them to perform all kinds of basic and advanced machining operations.
Weighing in at eighty pounds, the DW734 is the smaller of two bench-top planers that DeWalt offers. You can pick one up from a big box store for around $360-$400. The 15A, 120V electric motor spins the three cutting blades at 10,000 RPM and the automatic feed system uses two rubber drums to grab the workpiece and steadily feed it through the blades at 96 cuts per inch. The blades are reversible and produce a nice finish, however due to the mounting hole configuration they are very difficult to re-sharpen. You can buy a pack of three replacement blades for around $45 online.
Quick, handy video tutorial from Jeremy Bloyd-Peshkin of tiny workshop, demonstrating a fast method of centering a piece of round stock in a 4-jaw chuck using a magnetic-mount dial indicator and a pair of chuck keys. If you’ve never seen this operation before, Jeremy’s video makes it clear and simple to understand. [Thanks, Jeremy!]
Decent mobile tools for creative professionals are slowly starting to appear. Graphics powerhouse Adobe recently released a set of touch focused apps targeting Android tablets that appear to take advantage of the format. This first group of six tools, called Adobe Touch Apps, include a vector drawing app, raster photo app, color palette explorer app, presentation app, moodboard app, and wireframing app.
Three-jaw chucks, of the same general type used to hold bits in most power drills, are also common equipment on metalworking lathes. Though it is not necessarily so, three-jaw chucks are so commonly of the self-centering variety, in which the jaws are not independently adjustable, that “self-centering” is generally assumed from the term “three-jaw chuck.” But…
