Someone GAVE me this old Moog Hydrapoint but they kept the J-Head that goes with it. I tried my Burke Millrite head on it and it fits! So, now the CNC table the head went on is for sale.(The Monster: see below for pictures.) 
01/29/05
Picked up a Ramco second operations lathe from a place here in Arizona, should take the load off my poor old lathe for spindle parts. Should make things faster, too. Too bad there's only one of me......My wife would say that "luckily, there's only one of you!"
I have to say that I couldn't have gotten this lathe without the help rendered by my good friend, Pat A., one of the most competent men I have ever had the pleasure to work with.
Here's the lathe:
01/21/05
The Trison milling machine is here, it arrived this afternoon from Grapevine, Texas. I thought it was going to be like one of those flimsy undersized chinese mills. Wow, was I wrong. This thing is massive! The forklift I borrowed from Hitching Post Iron Works actually grunted a bit taking it off the flatbed truck. The springs on my trailer were maxed out on the way home, and I kept having visions of blowing out a tire and watching the thing pinwheel across the highway.Ouch!
You may want to check out the website where I found this machine, it is at: Astra Tools , and the chap's name is Dave Austin. He seems to be a very easy fellow to work with. They have a lot of Bridgeports and such.
It definitely is a heavy duty machine, kind of like a BPort but not really....here are some pic's:
04/22/05
Finished the power feed for the Trison Mill this week. Was torn between a DC gearmotor or a stepper, but went with the stepper so I can use canned cycles in DanPlot (Gasp!)
Besides, it's what I have on the Rockwell mill, the MSC lathe, the flamecutting gantry and the cutter grinder. I do, however, have a clutch setup so I don't have to fight with the stepper. The clutch is VERY accurate, everything repeats to .0002" in both directions. 3 balls under spring pressure in the idling timing pulley, 3 ball sockets in the sliding keyed clutch plate. Locks in 1/3 of a turn, self locating. Pictures below, and yes, guards removed for clarity.
A 750 oz/in stepper thru a 1-6 reduction into a 4 TPI leadscrew bends a 1/2" threaded rod by accident like it was warm turkish taffy.
Here is a Superior hone I purchased 9/03 and rebuilt. If you do a lot of close holes, I recommend a honing machine highly. Plus, the accessories are a lot cheaper on the Superior than they are on a Sunnen.
I had a couple of inquiries about a 4th axis setup that I had built about 7 years ago for making machine dials and rotary stamping dies. Here is a self explanatory picture that I will leave up here for a few weeks. It is a $49.00 spindex with a 5C collet.On the back is a 60 tooth wheel with a single pitch worm driven by a stepper at a 4-1 ratio through timing belts and pulleys, XL series. In half-step mode it can divide to 96,000 steps per revolution. For backlash compensation, I have used weight on a cable wound round the spindle or a wound flat spring.I may put better pic's up if there is any interest. I DO NOT SELL THIS ITEM!
This is an old picture of the machine that started me down that slippery slope; a Powermatic/Burke Vertical mill. I had a contract to produce 120 pcs for a replacement weed whacker head and each piece had 16 holes in it around the edge! That's a lot of drilling, so I automated the quill feed and a dividing head with Danplot ver. 1.1, run thru a Computer Continuum Lab-40 card. I think it was around '89 or '90.
Here is a K.O. Lee universal grinder I picked up in California from an auction on Ebay. Everything on it was full of dried glass polishing slurry. I also bought a curve grinder for lenses but it was too heavy to bring home.Any ideas?
This is a Gorton Pantograph Mill that dropped 3 floors during a fire. All the pantograph arms were torn off during the fall, so I rebuilt it as a small CNC mill.
When I first started milling circuit boards, I would have to sharpen D-bits one at a time in the tool grinder. That soon got monotonous so I built the automatic grinder below. It also does endmills and slabbing saws.
Here is my 11" x 36" Logan Lathe that I rebuilt from salvage.
I recently had to saw out a LOT of parts on the bandsaw and I didn't want to lay out all those lines by hand, so I found a slide and an old height gage in my junk box and built a layout machine. Since I don't need it anymore, it may become an airbrush plotter next.
Last year I bought a Lincoln Weldanpower portable AC welder. I built a converter with a big rectifier bridge and a huge choke coil so I could do MIG welding with it. It even does aluminum.
While we are on the subject of welders, here is my Airco MIG welder I obtained by swapping for an old Tri-Onics DRO.
I rescued this Rockwell mill from a life of rust and obscurity. It sat outside of MIT for 5 years in the rain.
This is the third 3 Phase converter I have built, and by far the ugliest. DON'T build anything that looks like this, please.
I had sold my previous PC board mill before we moved back east 5 years ago, so I built this one out of junk I had in my pile.(old robot slides,hardware store aluminum, etc.) It worked so well I left it alone. I have done close to 1,000 boards of various types on this machine.
When I found this Pexto brake, it was only good for a boat anchor. Now I do all my cases on it.
Here are 2 circuit boards, one is a 5804 into 7414 stepper driver. The other is a unipolar L6506 Chopper board that will go onto almost any driver with discrete transistors.
This Delta bandsaw was too nice to pass up, so I mounted another motor under the original and used the original for a jackshaft. A pin in the drive pulley can be engaged for low speed or pulled back for high speed.
I built 2 of these speakers in '93 when I was playing duets in bars with the legendary "Crazy Ray" Burlingame. I still have them, I use them for practicing my "guitareoke", playing loud lead guitar over MIDI backing tracks. I recently ran across a picture of Crazy Ray playing under the stage name of RJ Walker, see below:
This welder had an acetylene tank next to it that blew up.The blast melted all the wires in the control circuitry. (122 wires,)I rewired every one but I sweat blood at a few places. It's a LOT of power and not to be taken lightly.
Here are some anti-backlash leadnuts made out of Delrin acetal resin, the 1/2"-10 nuts are for Steve Manzer (see links page) and the 1"-5 nuts are for Russ Revels. It was a learning experience, but I have since simplified the design. Pictures coming soon.
