Sunday, June 18, 2023

Machining New Legs For the Losmandy Mount

I mentioned a couple days ago my need to make ScopeRollers to fit over the outer legs of the Losmandy Lightweight tripod.  I am still waiting for the 2x3x.25 aluminum tubing.  The acetal inserts that hold the casters are way to start making because I have a lot of scrap acetal big enough to cut down to size.  If I had a cutting tool that could be used without endangering my fingers, I would cut the .75" excess off this one block and mill the remaining .0277" off.  But the only cutting tool that I have left is a chop saw not easy to use for cutting small fractions off a workpiece.

So I have the mill slicing off .01" at a pass at 5 inches per minute.  This is slow but trying to cut too fast can push the mill vise out of position.

One slight problem with a surprisingly pleasant consequence: I had thought that I had at least 0.77" of workpiece above the jaws of the vise.  No.  The end mill hit the vise and moved it out of position on the table.  

To my surprise and pleasure, this wonderful mill vise about which I have previously rhapsodized, escaped without even serious cosmetic damage.  I just needed to reposition it parallel to the back of the mill table, insert some parallels under the workpiece, rezero Z, adjust the Makefile for the amount already removed, run make, load the new gcode file and restart.

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