NEWS

Due to several ongoing interests I've had to postpone the Wood Lathe project indefinitely.  Sorry to those that have been asking about it.  I never thought it would take so long to free up the time to finish it off.  Combine the lack of time with computer melt downs and here I am.

Cheers, 

NEWS

Well it's 2009 and things are picking up a bit.  The Grinder plans have been more popular than ever.  I've recently had some time off to take a breather and did a bunch of work on the wood lathe project.  It really does take time to work out all the little issues that make a great machine.  Here I'm not just interested in performance but ease of construction with minimal equipment and durability.  I try to strike a good balance.

NEWS

Hello everyone.  I nice fellow emailed me the other day with a great idea that some of you might find useful.  The image he sent below shows what could be done.

With some careful thought, a guy could make it so this grinder rotates and locks 90 degrees.  This would permit you to do some spindle sanding and or edge sanding.  The rest would have to be changed and if I were to do this I would make darn sure that the pivot was very rigid.  Otherwise, all the wonderful stiffness in this body would be lost and you'd find vibration creeping in.

This idea and the sketch below is courtesy of Mr. Bob Coffey.

NEWS

As some of you may have noticed, there hasn't been much activity here for a while.  Unfortunately, we've been too busy completing other projects to dedicate much time to this web site.

To all you happy customers that have enjoyed the grinder plans, please send us comments about how your build went.  Any problems?  Do you have photographs you could send to us.  We would be grateful in either case.

To all those who asked about the lathe project, I say please be patient.  Life has a way of pushing you off course at times.  We're aiming for some time in January/February 2006.  Keep up the emails as it is encouraging.  I read every one of them and try to reply quickly.

We're working on some interesting freebies for you.

In the interest of showing you the quality built into all our products, we have selected a number of great little projects we will be giving away to anyone interested. The first one will be a rotary latch.  According to Guy Lautard, (www.lautard.com), it originally appeared in Model Engineer in Nov,1928.  Lautard's version can be seen in his book titled The Machinists Bedside Reader. 

I made several changes to address a few issues I had with it.  One, was there was no real way to secure the latch.  If you let the box bounce around in the back of your pickup, the latch tended to wiggle itself loose.  I've added an extra locking knob that prevents the cam from turning when tightened.

Another small problem was the narrow slot for the lid pin.  Before you could close the lid, you had to spin the cam to find this small entry slot, otherwise, the lid pin would slam against the outer rim of the cam.  I found this aggravating.

My solution?  Remove the half of the cam that never gets used anyway.  This provided a large opening for the pin to pass through.  As an additional bonus, the cam is now heavier on one side.  This tends to drop it out of harms way naturally.

"I love it when a plan comes together".

I have two more freebies on the go.  One is a tough tailstock supported die holder and the other is a simple tailstock center finder.

So......what else are we working on?  Other than completing the projects we've already got up on the site, I'm looking into finishing up a design I started years ago.  It's a Brinell hardness tester.  I don't know how many times I've heard guys say they'd love to be able to test their hardened parts after heat treat.  I built a tester many years ago that was accurate enough for my purposes at the time, but I would like to refine it a bit to make it more reliable and accurate.

We would like some feedback from you.  If this is something you would be interested in purchasing, send us an email.  The more interest we see, the sooner it will get designed.