The Oakes Family

Rotary Table: Christmas came a little early this year as Santa’s stocking just couldn’t hold a new 6″ rotary table. The Grizzly H7527 seems to fit the right balance of quality / price and hopefully will give me an easier way to index the gears for cutting when that time comes.

Pillars: I started work again on the pillars, starting with the shorter set of four. I started with five, just to have a spare. One mysteriously ended up 3-4 thou shorted than the others, which were all within 1 thou of the correct length of 1.515″. I’ve kept that short one apart and will use it for set-up. I also discovered that permanent marker will make a reasonable stand-in for dykem, but its certainly not perfect as a marking-up system. Next I’ll do the longer ones - I have a spare of those too. (1 hour)

Now all cut to length, the pillars are re-chucked for drilling. Again, to ensure an accurate center, I started with a center drill and worked up from there. Despite a broken drill bit, this is going relatively smoothly. (1 hour) After another hour, all the pillars are finally drilled and ready for tapping (1 hour).

Before tapping, there needs to be two holes drilled through each perpendicular to the axis to aid tightening the plates and pillars together. My drill bit broke on the test piece so that operation was put on hold until I got a replacement.

Workshop: This led to a whole avalanche of activity. I searched for a replacement and couldn’t find it anywhere. There were so many tools, scrap and stuff all over the small work surface. So I decided to make a new worktop and shelves for everything so I can spend more time making and less time searching and sorting.

It is hard to put up shelves in the corner of the basement where the lathe and mill live, so I resurrected a project to turn the area into a room of its own.

The lathe and mill now have room around them. Next to the main bench is a new work surface that is home to the bench grinder, the vise and the all important radio.

The rest of the room contains shelves for tooling, a scrap metal pile, layout desk and reloading bench. All in all it took about 5 days of on-off work to frame, drywall, hang the door, install new electrics, lights, rip out the carpet and get it all tidy and organized.

Happy New Year!

Total for December: 3 hours + $0
Total so far: 22 hours + $17