This was basically the first "real" job on my new Gweike M3 Pro fiber laser. The kerf on it is so thin it's ridiculous. The outline of this first 'e' looks rough because the DXF I imported had a bunch of bumpiness in it, which I didn't realize until after the cut; I thought it was the laser, but it was actually faithfully reproducing flaws in the font. The other letters were much better, but even this isn't bad.

The letters stand off the wall on aluminum pins. I needed to make about 25 of these. Here's one, with a grooved and chamfered head at the top and a threaded end at the bottom. Making the other end is three operations (groove, chamfer, deburr) plus chucking and unchucking, and I was pretty happy with how fluid I got it. The threads came from a shop-made tailstock die holder, which lets me knock them out quickly on a bunch of pins.

Here's the full set of letters, with a small box of mounting hardware.

My brother tried them out on his wall.

And here they are up at the curling club, one above each sheet's scoreboard. A closer look at the E, on its standoffs:

I always enjoy casting, and on my birthday in November 2024 I decided to try making some aluminum bronze for an espresso funnel. This is the sand mold, with a 3d-printed ring-shaped pattern pressed into it.

And the pour, at night in the backyard. You can see the glowing crucible, the furnace and the molten metal in the mold's pour opening.

It looks like it was a success: here's the casting freshly shaken out of the sand.

A couple of days later I started cleaning it up on the lathe. The aluminum bronze looks amazing as it cleans up. It's just 90% copper and 10% aluminum, and one application is propellers. It's really pretty.

A few days after that, I'd gotten in a bit of machining over lunch. Plenty left to do. The top is faced and the inside is bored, with some casting pits still remaining.

In January 2025 I finally finished turning the espresso funnel. It's totally ridiculous, but I wanted to make something out of aluminum bronze, and the 3D printed one I'd been using was unsatisfying. This one weighs like three pounds, which is very satisfying.

Here it is next to the purple 3D-printed one it replaces. I really should thin it down some more, but it's amusing me as it is.

A quick 3D print project: an add-on steam handle for the espresso machine, clamped to the steam knob with a small socket screw.

On September 3, 2023, I milled a lathe tool holder, mostly because I just wanted to mill something. Here it is on the mill with a long step cut along it.

A few days later I test-fitted it onto the dovetail of my 250-222 quick-change tool post. I'm pretty happy with this fit.

And here is the finished holder on the lathe, clamping a boring/turning tool with a carbide insert. There's a brass knurled adjuster nut on a threaded stud, and four hex bolts. It came out okay. I think I'll make another one and see if I can do better.

The tailstock die holder was progressing in early October. Unfortunately, I bored the end out too big. Facepalm. It was fixable without starting over, fortunately.

To make up for my mistake, I turned an adapter for the end. I also made it dual size, so it can accommodate larger dies. There was still a bit left to do on it at this point.

Having a multicolor printer is great for stuff like this. I probably should have slowed the print down a bit, and I accidentally used silver rather than white for the sizes, but it's more than good enough for its intended purpose.

Here it is installed next to the lathe's DRO, a dial indicator on a magnetic base, and a bottle of way oil.

Then there's stuff like this. It's a support for holding long, thin things stable in the bore of my lathe. It prints in 20 minutes and cost $0.29 worth of filament. Ordinarily you'd use something called a lathe spider for this, which is a whole project of its own and potentially involves drilling holes in the lathe. This is so easy that I'll just make one whenever I need a different diameter.

I'm also digging just leaving a roll of white in the printer all the time so I can embed text in stuff, like the diameter on this one.

A little lathe upgrade I'd been working on: a linear-scale digital readout for the tailstock, on 3D-printed mounts with a printed clamp collar on the quill. One of those screws is a decoy, hiding the broken tap underneath it.

In December 2024 I printed soft jaws for the lathe chuck out of TPU, a flexible filament that's like a fairly firm rubber. Here's the first version fitted on a chuck jaw.

I added a giant fillet in that corner for the final versions, since that corner was obviously going to fail. Here's the final version.

I wound up not using these because - surprise! - metal chips are hot, and plastic doesn't like that. I'll have to do some in aluminum or copper one of these days.

I picked up a Vevor 6-inch six-jaw self-centering chuck with a D1-4 cam-lock backing plate for just north of $200. It arrived covered in grinding dust and with the burrs left on, so it's getting a few hours of deburring with files and blue shop towels to take it from "done" to "operates smoothly". It's nearly finished; next up is mounting it on the lathe and seeing how accurate it actually is. Updates to follow.

Here it is torn down on the bench: the body, the six jaws, the scroll ring, and the backing plate, with a set of needle files standing by.

I tried to DIY the container that holds the pressurized coolant and wasn't having much luck, so I went with a purchased container and some custom fittings. I had a fun morning on November 18 knocking these out. Machinist glitter included.

The system was complete by November 20. A flexible hose with a brass nozzle drips coolant toward the chuck.

The coolant lives in a wall-mounted water filter housing, plumbed with brass fittings and an air regulator with a gauge.

The term for this is MQL, Minimum Quantity Lubrication. The advantage over just a mister (which is what I started with) is that forcing the lubricant into the mix with air pressure keeps the droplet size smaller, so less of it winds up in the air. Plus I can run a straight drip system.

Even running with mist alone, it takes me from "part is too hot to touch when I'm done" to "part is completely cool when I'm done". That increases accuracy, too, since a part gets bigger when it gets hot.

To be fair, I'm abusing the commercial system. It's meant as a mist system, and I'm overloading it by using air pressure to push fluid through it rather than relying on the Venturi effect, which is the design intent. It's a bit of a hack job, really, but I think it's still an upgrade.

First I had to peel off the insulation. The lathe made a convenient way to hold the spool.

Then I realized I could wind the bare wire on a mandrel on the lathe and get a tighter winding for less effort.

The coils went into a graphite crucible, and were poured into a sand mold that was not, unfortunately, packed tightly enough.

A little turning cleaned it up a lot. I have been using one of the two as a drift, for tapping things down into the vise. The other one will probably get melted down again to make something at some point.

Assuming I didn't screw anything up, the enclosure end of things was done. The odds of a screwup are high, of course; I have yet to do this and not have a loose connection or a wrong wire somewhere. This is the variable frequency drive, a Hitachi WJ200, with its terminal blocks, breaker and wiring.

A quick lunch-break pair of upgrades: I replaced the belt with a poly link belt, and the socket head cap screw with a quick-release handled screw. The new belt is slightly longer, which makes belt changes easier and puts the motor closer to the center of travel in the adjustment bracket.

And the DRO is done, with scales on both axes. I am soooo glad that's a one-time activity.

Here I'm placing the sprue in the middle of the 3D printed pattern. I wish I'd remembered to make some marks to help me center it, so that I could use it to grip the casting on the lathe.

With the sand packed, I separated the two halves of the flask so I could remove the pattern. The bottom half still has the pattern half-embedded in it, and the top half has the matching impression, with the hole for the sprue.

After the pour, I dug the casting out of the sand. It was looking good so far: you can see the disc, the pillar, and the spoon-shaped sprue coming out of the sand.

Success! It's super rough, though. I think I should have sieved my sand. But every surface is going to get machined, so it should be fine.

The next morning I started cleaning it up on the lathe. One face took a cut nicely and came up bright, with the rough sand-cast rim still around it. There were going to be some voids and inclusions in the finished part. Tim said that was fine, as long as it held the thing and conducted heat.

Flipping it around to do the other side meant gripping the faced rim with the chuck's outside jaws, with the sprue stub sticking out toward the tailstock.

It was loads easier to cut most of the sprue off on the bandsaw than to machine it away.

And done. The front face, up top, has a raised center step. This is the back: a shallow recess, with a bit of rough casting skin left on the rim. That's as far as I could take it down without running out of material. I should have allowed more room in the casting, so I'm calling the rough edge artistic. A few of the pits made it through, too.

It shipped off to Tim shortly afterward.

The rubber seal in the picture is from a replacement I bought that doesn't fit, again because of that non-standard size.

And one on the trailer in May 2022. I had to fudge it a bit, but it works.