The Workshop

The hobby, it often seems, is the shop (it’s suppose to be model engineering).  I guess so long as its fun its all good.  Most shop time the last few years has been spent working on, making things for and reconditioning various machine tools…all in desire to have a specific and broad set of capabilities.

Like the cliche, you want it high quality, fast and low cost, pick two, I’ve been fortunate to assemble my shop with quality machines and little money.  A bit of a trading, and lot patience as well as learning reconditioning has been the key.

There’s always more shop projects but  I’m close to getting it mostly in good working order and with the view of focusing on model engineering and horology.

beautiful schaublin 70 lathe in black and white

Garage

Basement

Horology

Microscopes

Electronics

  • 465b Oscilloscope
  • Pace Soldering

Casting

 

Other

Garage

The garage is machining and welding.  This is where it started.

By fitting so much in, I’ve knowingly sacrificed convenience for capability.  Too bad I have about zero gymnastics ability, it would make it easier to traverse it

Here’s a tour of 25 years building, collecting and reconditioning

Elliot Horizontal Mill

Thank goodness these great machines have fallen out of commercial favour, it makes the machines and cutters cheap and plentiful.

I use the vertical mill 90% of the time, but the horizontal removes 90% of the metal.   At five hp geared down it can easily plough most things in a single pass.

XLO Vertical Mill

The first machine I bought (along with a nice Standard Modern Lathe).  These are a great machine.  In the last couple of years I’ve done a few upgrades, central oiler, Newall DRO, New P4 spindle bearings and rubber way protectors.  I still need to a good light

To save space I hang heavy accessories on the side of the mill and use Skyhook (stupidly overprices, where are the low cost China products when you need them) to lift items onto the table.  I can still manual do it, but we don’t stronger as the years go by so quit while you are ahead

Dean Smith & Grace

The Rolls Royce of lathes.

Bridgeport Rigid Ram CNC

Monarch 10ee

A work in progress.  Big projects completed is the rebuilding of the feed and speed gearbox (al new bearings and some gears replaced)

Another major project was the adaptation of a 5hp AC motor to the original backgear. 

Buffalo 18" drill pess

Norton Surface Grinder

Benchtop Tool Grinder

This was the first tool and cutter grinder I acquired.  It came with an air bearing that is, in my opinion, essential for grinding endmills.   People try to grind endmills by grinding at the bottom which is a waste, if you not grinder the peripheral edges, you sharpening the cutter. 

Another myth is that endmills cut on the bottom.  They do if you are plunging, moving down on the Z, however the vast majority of their use is cutting on the side, traversing the work.

When I sharpen them I usually don’t bother with the bottom as its rarely used.  Incidentally, the bottom of a properly sharpened end mill is relieved toward the centre a few degrees so they don’t rub – it really doesn’t cut on the end unless plunging!

Tool and Cutter Grinder

Everybody needs one of these!  I like following the skilled woodworkers creed – you need to be able to sharpen your tools.

I did a ground up scraping reconditioning of this machine which was detailed in an article in Home Shop Machinist

This one came with a motorized work head making it also a light duty clyndrical grinder

Jones Shipman 520 Cylindrical Grinder

Jooes shipman was one of the better machine tool makers and this baby 520 cylindrical grinder has to be the smallest thing they made. 

Quite rare, this one has the regular and power head heads as well as the internal and external grinding attachments.  The working holding head takes the diminutive 8mm watchmakers collets

Sheet Metal Equipment

Brown Boggs shear, Finger Brake and Roller…the later two by yours truly

The shear is infrequently enough used that its somewhat hidden this days; tool boxes on top and DSG tooling underneath.

Sunnen Hone

Probably more accurately described as a contraption than a machine, these neat units really work.  Its hard to think ok a way that is to get a get bore straight and smoother.  My only beef is the tooling is stupidly expensive, so I’ve sometimes made my own

The shop is so crowded, the only room I had left was straddling my DIY rotary phase converter, so I made a stand to suit

Welding

Mig, Tig, Gas, Stick and a bit of propane for silver soldering.  Missing is a plasma cutter, which I don’t really want at the momenent – too many sparks in my crowded shop

Demagnitizer

Wells Bandsaw

A great little saw that as done everything I’ve ever asked of it.  Older model, solid, came out of a high school machine shop during the travesty years (when Ontario flushed high school trade education)

Deckel D bit Grinder

Carbide Grinder

Christian Drill Grinder

Arbor Press

Electro Mechanical Drill Pess

Die Filer

Die filer with the prized and hard to find (at a reasonable price) die files

Comparators - Mitutoyo and a .00001 Sigma

Die filer with the prized and hard to find (at a reasonable price) die files

Bench Centres

Die filer with the prized and hard to find (at a reasonable price) die files

Habegger 102

I took delivery of Schuablin 102 today, well, actually a Habegger.  I bought it from a buddy I do some trading with. The cool thing its a 5C headstock and a MT2 tailstock taper (not the hens teeth 2 degree taper most Schuablin stuff is). I bought it because it came with a full set (by 64th) of 5c collets, 95% hardinge.

The Habegger is identical and interchangeable with the Schaublin 102. Apparently Habegger worked for Schaublin, left and founded a machine tool company making an identical line of lathes.  Bed and Tailstock are pretty good, headstock bearings, undecided, and the slide rest is apart and waiting scraping. I’ll get all that and whatever other issues fixed. These such a treat to work on, everything is just so well made.

The lathe in the foreground is a Schaulbin 70. I’ve just about completed reconditioning it. I did everything on this lathe, including hard chroming. grinding and lapping the tailstock quill and bore (.0002″ clearance), re-made some slide rest parts from hunks of cast iron, reground the spindle shaft and I made and scraped and lapped new plain bearings in the HS. Currently I’m scraping the HS & TS into alignment on the bed….this one is going (but I’ve a few more tucked away :D).  Its being done as part of a trade with a friend, sweat equity.  However I should have flipped burgers instead. Reconditioning is like having a job that pays $0.20/hour…but its nice bringing these back to perfection and its also grist for the mill – it will be part of series I’ve been working on “Reconditioning a Lathe”

The Agony of Defeat - Habegger excessive end play

The Thrill of Victory - fixed!

Basement

My Eldest at one point moved his bedroom to the basement.  Years later firmly entrenched in his own place in a different city, two things were top of mind for the basement bedroom:

  1. Nature abhors a vacuum
  2. It’s far easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission

I pounced on the space, and this is the result

Holbrook B8

Holbrook were a British firm known for making very high end sold, precision lathes.  Their line would rank among the best lathes ever made.  They also made this small bench top lathe, the baby, of which I particularly fond of. 

It is a current reconditioning project (scraping).  The bed is scraped, next up is the tailstock which I first need to correct the bore on.  To maintain the pattern of endless sequential projects, I’m currently making a Sunnen mandrel to redo the bore.

B&W holbrook B8 lathe

Pultra 1750 10mm Lathe

Pultra is another British lathe, the small watchmakers and instrument lathes made by the venerable lathe maker Smart & Browne.
 
This one has a very nice set accessories.  I replace the factory motor with a DC motor and variable power supply.
 
Its a treat to use, if you ever see one, snap it up!

Rivett 8mm Watchmakers Lathe

Pultra is another British lathe, the small watchmakers and instrument lathes of the venerable lathe maker Smart & Browne.

This one has a very nice set accessories.  I replace the factory motor with a DC motor and variable power supply. 

Its a treat to use, if you ever see one, snap it up!

Boley 8mm Geneva Style Watchmakers Lathe

Boley 8mm WW Style Watchmakers Lathe​

….

Boley 8mm WW83 Watchmakers Lathe

This was a great find, a WW83 with about every accessory.  I replaced the headstock bearings with P4 AC’s which is a small conversion; the original just had deep groove bearings

Present are a complement of collets, 3 jaw, 4 jaw, bezel chuck, faceplate, complete threading attachment with all the change gears, vertical slide, milling, dividing, and an extra slide rest.

Levin Radius Lathe

Levin 10mm Lathe

Another nice find, a Levin 10mm lathe with a complete set of accessories.

The collets shown are 8mm….I’m in the market for a complete Levin set of 10mm collets if you know of anything

BCA mill/jig borer

BCA

 

Undergoing extensive renovations….more to follow

Schaublin 70

Nothing is as much fun to turn on as the small Schaublin 70.  A favorite of watchmakers and instrument makers, there’s just something about how the Swiss make a machine.  I’ve got two operating and third in rough shape that will be reconditioned
 
On this one, currently set for production ‘chatons’, I make a two under bench drive with a toggle style belt tensioner

Schaublin 70 w/ overhead drive

Aciera F1 Mill

Everyone loves the little Aciera mills, and they are very nice, however like several Deckel models, they suffer from the worlds worst spindle design.

Who am I to judge and trash Deckel and Aciera?  You decide.  This mill and some Deckel models make use of rolling element bearings at the business end of the spindle.  Ok so far….however this bearing arrangements use the shaft as the inner race and the housing as the out race!  You heard correctly.   Any wear, and the spindle essentially becomes scrap.

This is just idiotic. 

There is a firm in Germany I believe that will rebuild them.  Not sure the approach.  The only thing that would is careful regrinding and them fitting of a needle bearing that was custom made/selected to account for the increased clearance between inner and out race.  I contact precision bearing manufactures about high accuracy customize sized needle bearings, as per their catalogues, and they laughed at the suggestion of a run less than 1000’s.   Other might think hard chrome….nope.  It’ll work on say a tailstock quill, but will flake off with the point loads a rolling element bearing generates.

Nevertheless, the mills are nice, so want to recover from the these fatal design flaws?

My idea is to do it properly – design a spindle with cartridge (i.e. replaceable) rolling element bearings.   Design is a bit of a challenge given things are tight – about the only advantage of the crappy OEM arrangement was it kept things compact.  Mine will be a plug and play replacement for the OEM spindle

This is a current project, with some photos shown.  If it works and performs to the OEM standards, I may get some spindles made for sale.  Let me know if you are interested.

Hauser M1 Jig Borer

This beautiful little Swiss made Hauser M1 jig borer is about the most perfect thing I’ve worked on. 

Graduated in 10,000’s of a inch, it has a neat feed screw lead error correction method.  The ‘zero’ marker is spring load and moves as it slides a long a sheet edge that has been profiled to correct lead error.

Hauser Pivot Polisher

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Polishing Equipment

Vibratory Polisher

Jewellers Polisher

Tumbler

Magnetic Polisher

 

Prusa Filament 3D Printer

The excitement new possibilities 3D printing opens up was tempered somewhat by the Prusa i3 printer starting off as nothing but trouble.  There were some serious design flaws and their support was rather useless.  I eventually solved them, and main culprit was Prusa’s deviation from the open source heat break they based their offering on.

Replacing this solved print jamming issues and its been working well since

Prusa Design Fail Details

Resin Printer

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Bead Blaster

Cheapo Princess Auto (think Harbour Freight quality) bead blaster, but works.  I ran an airline from the garage and have it set up in the basement.

The media is glass beads.  Really small glass beads.  If you spill any vacuum them up….they are like walking an microscopic ball bearings

I should vent it outside and add lighting….on the todo list

Storage

Small parts and lots and lots of electronics bits and pieces

I pick up small parts bins full of stuff for small dollars when the opportunity presents itself.

I also really like the wire shelves on casters – makes for increased flexibility in tight quarters

 

Servo Drill Press

High speed, sensitive, super precision.

 

Duplex high speed drill press

Unimat 3

With all the good fortune the lathe gods have bestowed, the humble Unimat still has place with me.

My first lathe was a Unimat DB200, I think when I was around 12 (Dad cosigned a bank loan and I did chores on neighboring farms to pay for it).  The U3 is a substantial improvement with V ways instead of round bars.

They are a neat little machines capable of lots of work.   I think I’ve got most accessories for it

The only really annoying aspect is the tedious cranking of the Z feed screw (they are only leadscrews if they are for cutting theads).

They were also really under powered.  The Consew servo motor is an ideal upgrade, in the photos its under bench.  I hacked the motor controller so I could have both foot and knob controlled speed

What makes these motors so nice is that because they are servos, they increase current to maintain speed.  Whether DC, or VFD, most electronic motor speed controls become useless at lower speeds whereas this thing is unstoppable

EDM

This was an attachment made for my BCA mill -much more information appears in the projects section, here

Lots of colour and action with the EDM running

Hermes Engraver - Diamond

These are quite useful.  The engraving is done with a diamond stylus vs a rotating cutter so any material can be engraved

Hermes Engraver - Spindle

Horology

Bench

The bench has to be the right height for putting one’s eyeball into a watch without excessive hunching over.  A pull out cloth tray (cloth so it doesn’t bounce) to catch parts that go ping is almost a necessity.  Mine has a glass top and three sides which reduces dust and contains said pinging parts.

L&R Cleaner

Here’s the ubiquitous L&R Mastermatic.  Using the L&R wash and rinse, it gets watch parts cleaner than ultrasonic cleaners.

If you are unfamiliar with them, the parts go into a stainless fine mesh basket.   The rotating basket oscillates between CW amd CCW and goes through wash/rinse 1/rinse 2/dry.  At end of each cycle the basket is raised out of the fluid but still in the jar and spun, using centrifugal force to get remove most of the liquid

I sound a bit like an L&R commercial, but the machine and fluids do an amazing job.  I do thing the fluids are priced too high so would love know about a thriftier alternative

Photo of an L&R watch parts cleaner

Seitz Tool

Staking Tools

Crystal Press

Press

Ultrasonic Cleaner

In my opinion the wash and rinse style watch cleaners do a superior job, however I do use the ultrasonic cleaner a lot.

Lots of stuff gets clean in this as it seems I’m always rebuilding some old machine or another.

imo its a bad idea to put rolling element bearings through an ultrasonic cleaner.    The action does cause parts to move against each other and some microscopic banging around occurs that can damage precision parts adjacent to each other….like balls and races

Hand Removal Tools

Tweezers

For a watchmaker, tweezers are a fundamental tool.   Along with a good loupe and screw drivers, they are the most used, and most indispensable of watchmakers tools.

Parts are simply too small to handle any other way (small screws in the photo are 0.5mm, shown beside a 1/4″ socket head screw as a size reference), and after cleaning, the parts should not be touched by bare hands (finger cots are worn to handle larger parts when necessary).

Various weights of tweezers are helpful with various sizes of parts.  Learning to manipulate tweezers is a key skill to craft and takes some time (for me anyway).  It requires the development of a touch….too light and you drop parts, too heavy and you spend hours search for the part that just went pingggg across the room.  Maintaining just the right pressure while rotating and manipulating the part is a skill the experienced watch maker takes for granted…and the rest of us must work on

I’ve been fortunate to buy a few estates over the years so have a good selection.  You certainly don’t need this many and there are some duplicates of the fine C3 tweezers.  However I’d rather have duplicates of a tool that is $50 or $60 dollars new and is ruined with a drop.

Almost all of my tweezers are Dumont.  There may be a comparable manufacture, but I don’t think there are better.  They certainly are the most popular among watchmakers

Microscopes

Photo of an EPROM integrated circuit

Nikon Apophot

Nikon EPI

For the stuff I do, this is the fun one.  The EPI referrers to the illumination coming from the top.  They are also called incident illuminated or metallurgical microscopes.  Unlike biological scopes which predominately illuminate from the bottom (the Apophot does both), An EPI scope lets you easily view opaque objects

Meiji Trinocular Stereo Zoom

Mitutoyo Toolmakers Microscope​

Microtome

A project in waiting.

What is a microtome

A microtome is used for preparing microscope slides.  A specimen is frozen in  piece of wax then sliced into very thin sections on this machine.  The wax blob is held in a sort of collet and as you crank the hand wheel, the collect advanced toward you while an extremely sharp blade makes slicing motions shaves of .001″ (or so sections)

It popped up in the local classifies for $25 including the Bausch and Lomb stereo zoom microscope….so I pounced on it!

Optical Comparator

Electronics

When I get interested in something, I must think about it a lot as serendipity quickly fills available space with the accoutrements.  My ratio of equipment to ability is a bit embarrassing when it comes to electronics…..but having the toys makes it that much more fun and easy to learn.

I’ve also duplicated lots of capabilities.  I convince my self its not hording, but when the opportunity presents itself to pick it for next to nothing, its worth it as a back up

465b Oscillopcope

Casting

Oven

An Oven is a super handy shop tool – heat treating, annealing, normalizing and burnouts for lost wax casting.

Mine had a Fuji PID controller that was the most frustrating I think I’ve ever encountered.  It either did not work properly or I just wasn’t smart enough.  I think the manual was written by a very low EQ person seeking revenge on the world

I replaced with one of the low cost off shore pids that you can program with a computer.  It wasn’t much better but I was able to get it working.

I guess PIDs are a very small market, but its it wide open for anyone who wants to make easy to use bit of software and controller

Shown in the oven are some weldments being normalized

 

Vulcanizer

You ca make many lost wax casting of the  same item by “casting” mutliple was patterns.  Molten wax is injected in a rubber mold.  The rubber mold is made by placing a pattern between two piece of raw rubber.  They are then vulcanized in the press

Vulcanizing press used to make lost wax casting molds

Wax Injector

Vacuum Caster

Used with lost wax casting.  This is best way to get great results – the porous investment mold  literally lets the metal sucked into every part of the cavity.

Melter

Cheapo melter.  The ones you see advertsied as from Italy are I believe the lousy made in China modesl so not worth paying a premium.  This is the 3kg model

 

Woodworking

Table Saw

Jointer Planer

Band Saw

Woodworking Bench

Hegner Scroll Saw

These things are the cats meow of scroll saws, they’ve got the whole German quality thing going.

 

 

Other

Christian Becker Balance

Not really a need….just an appreciation for beautifully made items.  measures to 0.1 mg, a work of art.

Triple Beam Balance

The basic mass measurement tool.  Measures to .1 gram.  In the photo I’m measuring a bit of plastercine used in the balance process with my soft bearing dynamic balacer

Balance (Torsion Balance Co.)

Picked up somewhere along the way, better quality than the Ohaus