On October 22 I started fabbing up a little catch basin. Sheet metal is fun. Here's the folded tray on the bench. I just cut the shape with some metal shears by hand, and spot welded the corners.

The drain needs a conical recess, so I 3D printed a one-off punch and die to make one. This is the design, in cross-section.

I already have a Harbor Freight 20-ton hydraulic press, like everyone has in their garage, but this is only 26 gauge steel, so a clamp or a bolt and nut is plenty.

It worked even better than I expected. Here's the clamp squeezing the printed die into the tray.

And the formed drain: a nice smooth conical recess.

The drain parts are 3D printed too. This is the drain fitting seated in the recess.

From underneath, the drain passes through the table via a printed hex nut fitting, with a clear braided hose attached below.

Here's the finished product (the photo at the top of the page), just waiting for the silicone to cure. I tilted it up ever so slightly so everything runs to the drain. I might need to add some bumpers at the edges to make sure the mill doesn't vibrate the whole thing loose. For obvious reasons I didn't want to fasten the pan down, although I could; a neoprene washer under the screw would probably work fine.

Here's the mill running with the pan in place. Working like a champ.

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.

Step one was to figure out how to fixture it so I can mill some precision into it. Here's the base upside-down on the mill vise, with a dial indicator reading its surface. I think this will work.

Here it is on the router. It works pretty well - we align it with the side rail using 123 blocks, clamp down the vises, and we have something we can repeatably secure extrusion in.

Better than PLA, but I wound up liking these better for removing things from the build plate.

To address the issue with the above unit wearing out, in October 2023 I made a couple of 3D-printed versions. First up was a prototype. It shows one of the drill bushings that I made to guide the drill, since if the mild steel I was using on the original version didn't stand up, the plastic definitely wouldn't.

My 3D printer has more than enough accuracy to place the holes. I measured the prototype and found it had placed that bushing to within 0.001" of the correct location, and since the bushing is reamed, the whole thing is probably within about 0.005" as far as putting the hole in the right place.

Of course, jigs get abused. The kids broke one and I broke another. In early November, I think this was at least version 5. Visible in the fifth hole from the left is the locating pin I made, so the jig can be used to make series of holes that are longer than the jig.

Here's the design in CAD: two split-clamp blocks, each with a bore and clamp screws, joined by a bar.

And here's the aluminum bracket complete and installed on the Z-axis slide of the plasma table, holding the new machine torch. It was super, super nice using the Bridgeport for this.

Boring the bracket on the mill.

Here are the panel pieces coming off the printer: the front panel with the speed dial, the forward/stop/back rocker switch, and the four-digit LED display, plus a few blank panels.

I was down to my last roll of PETG when I printed this, which was a relief, because I will never use it again. It gave me stringing, voids, and blobbing. (2026 update: PETG is now my preferred material. The problems were likely due to not drying it. Having a better printer now helps, too.)

Holding the finished control box next to the mill and its DRO.

Once it was assembled in the basement, I thought it would work to move the Bridgeport I'd bought, and that it should fit in my car in pieces, too. So I took it apart and checked.

It fit easily, and it was pretty easy to carry, too. Three trips on foot to carry the pieces.

Then the real test, the same day: lifting the heavy ram of a milling machine with the chain hoist. It worked perfectly.

A couple of weeks later, back in my basement shop, lifting the ram into place.

Years later, I finally found a photo of it in action, straddling a machine in a garage shop.

One piece of advice about the hardware: use a forged eye bolt rated for the load you want to lift, not an eye screw or a drawn eye bolt. One of our robots unwound a 1/4" wire eye bolt lifting itself not long ago, which is not how you want to find out.

You want the ones that look like this:

Not this: