The Windy Hill Foundry Square: Milling and Grinding a Casting Parallel and Square
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- Machining a machinist square casting made by Windy Hill Foundry including milling on both the vertical and horizontal milling machine as well as surface grinding the part to be both parallel and square.
For information on acquiring a casting to make one of these squares, contact, Clarke Easterling at Windy Hill Foundry: clarke@windyhillfoundry.com.
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Nice job Keith! Looks like you are getting very good results on that old grinder. I am happy to see you are using our tools. Thanks for the shout out.
Steve
Keith, some of these nay Sayers do realize you are a hobbyist? A person of knowledge readily willing to share openly because you actually have a different job? Just because you don't utilize some fancy C & C setup and choose to show old school does not mean you are wrong. Besides I prefer old school techniques to get a result. You just keep doing what you do because many enjoy your content. I will readily keep watching as I have done for over a year or two
I would expect, given different circumstances, Mr Rucker would be showing us how to build good accurate tooling with a hacksaw and a chunk of flint. Thanks for the show, Keith.
I have to agree with you Donald, i'm by no means an engineer or a mathematician i just have an avid interest in the lathe and the old school descriptions about setups and the like suit me down to the ground.
there are shit talkers who you just ignore and then there are also people giving valid criticisms when they notice mistakes being made. i saw someone call robin renzetti a nay-sayer in the comments once when he was giving valid feedback.
shit talkers on one side, sycophantic laymen on the other side.
@@SuperAWaC
There are always people who don't really know anything offering advice. Opinions are like a well known body orifice. Everybody's got one. The smart ones just keep them to themselves
Wow you guy's would never make it in the mining or logging industry's. Your judged on every single thing you do by your peers and most are extremely experienced. Any serious mistake makes you an instant target for sometimes weeks of derision and laughter if it was bad enough. I've spent over 40 years listening to criticism. You tune out those who don't know what there talking about and for the ones that do you treat that as a positive learning experience no matter how strongly it's worded. I consider myself very lucky to have gotten all the criticism I did so I could learn from my mistakes.
I do no machining but I do enjoy watching. I enjoy the videos.
Excellent quality casting . Windy Hill Foundry most certainly know some secrets and techniques about casting to be this good , very little to machine off and not an impurity to be seen.
Their secret: Only the finest quality casting materials are used. "Virgin" worn-out brake disks from the local auto shop.
@@MrShobar .Yes correct .Watched the 2 videos Adam uploaded , they do put a little bit of a few other ingredients in the mix to get every thing just right .
@@MrShobar ....Those "worn-out" brake disks are, in fact, some of the finest quality materials. If you have ever been to a large foundry, you will be surprised/shocked at the variety of cast iron trash they process. Brake disks are gray cast iron with a higher % of carbon than everyday cast pieces. Brake disks are an excellent choice for his tool castings
I got my set of square castings from Clarke this weekend and started machining the first one. What I like most about machining is that almost no two people will approach the same job from the same way. Thanks for sharing!
You are absolutely correct. When we machine something, we do the best we can with the equipment and tools we have available. Keith has some pretty old machines, but I have seen some of his restoration work, and the rest he accomplishes by thinking carefully about each stage of producing the thing he needs. He might be a hobbyist, but I am a lifer who has worked too many times with guys who just won't think of how to get the job done with what we have in the shop.
Thank you for taking time and energy to post these lessons for us.
Hi, Keith...Here is a copy of a note I just sent to McMaster-Carr. Thank you
"Thank you very much. My items arrived just as promised.
"This is my first experience with McMaster-Carr and I found it extremely satisfying. I watch Keith Rucker's TH-cam presentations and had the impression that it would be, and it was.
"Your website is the best I've seen for my needs. I'm a hunter more than a shopper so I get a little annoyed when I'm bombarded with "suggestions." Especially when what I'm really looking for is hard to find. Your site is well laid out, easy to filter for sizes and choices, and once the "hunting" is done, all the product information is fully available for review before adding item to cart.
"The only teeny concern that I felt was not knowing upfront the cost of shipping. But with the trust I've come to place upon Keith Rucker's judgement, I pressed the button and was relieved to learn that your shipping charges are quite reasonable. As you know, there are firms out there who charge many multiples of the actual shipping rate.
"Just want to let you know what a pleasure it was to deal with you. "
It might be one of machinist's daily routines, but for example 5:45 is in my opinion an awesome example of thinking outside the box - because i'm not a machinist. Good stuff!
Thanks Keith, great video. Wish my dad was still here to teach me these techniques. Your teaching reminds me of him often.
I just watched Abom milling the same squares. Seeing the two back to back makes it clear why gauge makers charge different prices for different levels of precision. Milling gets you so far, grinding kicks it up a notch. Then lapping or scraping. And each operation boosts man hours which drives the price.
I'm not innately familiar with machining, was aware of surface grinding and have seen a few brief examples, but this vid stepped it ou for me. TYVM Keith & co :)
That stickiness on the surface plate is a testament to how good your grinding job was! You were probably wringing the surfaces together by sliding them.
Keith, Great to see the precession finish on the square, takes a lot of time to get it right.
Love your videos and your work sir. As a hobbyist machinist(formality a professional in training) I find a great deal of information and even more enjoyment in all of your videos. You keep filming and I’ll keep watching. Thank you good sir.
I definitely can see some good uses for a thick square like that.
Another good job Kieth.....Great casting by Clark!!!!!
Hey Keith great video and job
THANK YOU...for sharing. Very nice.
Amazed at the amount of work to have a square and true tool... great video, thanks!
Thanks Keith
Greetings from the UK
chris overman, hope things are going well over there, greetings friend, from the US!
Found this as I'm watching ABOM machine the 12. great little square!
Not bad for repurposed brake rotors!!! Very nice!
"repurposed brake rotors" are a premium material for casting. They are clean gray iron with a high carbon content. They are perfect for his type of casting.
I love the precision !
Hi Keith. Loved the machining of the square casting. I didn't realise that there would be that much difference in accuracy between a mill and a surface grinder. I had assumed the mill would be within a few thou but I think you said there was about 20 thou difference across the surface of the square. Anyway I thoroughly enjoy watching and learning something new alimost every time I watch your recordings. Malcolm
sehr gut gezeigt, weiter so!!👍
Very nice result! Learned a few tricks watching this. Thank you for sharing.
I finished Abom79's series on these machinists squares. I like the different approach to how y'all work.
Keith I love the videos i gone back to videos more than once as there are always tips and tricks i pick up after watching a second time.
Keith yes l know Clark.....l am a Gold Smith by trade, l am 77 years old now....Thanks Keith love watching you work....!
Great video, and good explanation of milling and grinding.
Great video. Thank you for taking the time to record, edit and share.
Cheers
Very nicely done Keith.
Great video! Came out amazing! Thanks for doing the video!
Thanks for sharing
Why did you use your wrench as a hammer?
Keith: Because I had my wrench in my hand.
Guilty.
Keith, Really liked how your square turned out and enjoyed watching your video thanks and for sharing your video.!.!.!.
Good job. enjoyed the video
Nicely done. I might suggest on the Horz mill to pull the table away from the cutter before moving it to the other end. Might have a snarl cutter that puts in marks on a clean cut. Cast might have hidden hard spots that cause chips on cutters.
Great video. Super nice work. Excellent turn out. Thank you for sharing.
Neat project. Neatness is its own reward. Thanks for the video. :-)
Very nice looking square. Will definitely have to contact the foundry about one of those. Keith, I am an old school manual machining hobbyist. I occasionally watch CNC videos because they have very interesting crashes. LOL
just a thought before you dive in with the grinder,, have a measure with a hight gauge & mark the high spots with a sharpie. that way you won't crash into it as you did. Great job. A nice project I like the setup.
It would be cool if he put two through holes in the web to add two strips of delrin or phenolic for handling insulation.
Great video, thanks Keith
By that do you mean insulating it from the heat of your hands?
@@BravoCharleses yes
Why? These aren’t high precision measuring tools. They are tool room precision. Enough for normal use. The mass of the tool is also enough to absorb the small amount of heat your fingers will leave.
Mel Gross I think it would look cool, like I said. And they are as precise as you make them.
Great job, nice bit of machining. I do also like the detail in the casting. Should have no issue selling those.
Looks great 👍 hi from Missouri
I really enjoyed your content today and have a lot of respect for your knowledge.
Thanks for the video. Keep safe and stay well.
Wow enjoyed.
A threaded hole at the ends would have been a nice feature in the event you wanted to attach a handle, indicator, and other accessory to the square. It would be the ideal time to do it considering that it is only ground and not lapped or scrapped yet, and since the parallelism is not ground into the part you would be able to ensure parallel clamping with the face.
Great work Keith nice seeing good tool making good tools ! I like watching your videos ! Thanks
Having thrown work off a magnet, I disagree with put hand on discharge side of wheel and not blocking around the work, especially given the spacing on that magnet.
Yes I've had magnets fail in the middle of grinding.
13:30 it looks like the next machine that needs to follow you home is a small *Blanchard Grinder* to take care of that unevenness
Awesome project. Thank you for sharing. Stay safe & God Bless!
You never mentioned de burring after milling, maybe that goes without saying but if you didn't that may account for .010" inaccuracy coming off the mill. Also I was taught that your diamond dresser should be leaning away from wheel rotation and be in front of the wheel.
Agreed on the dresser, that's how I was taught too. Plus I'd put it "downwind" of the part you have set up so you don't blow grit all over the part you're going to grind.
very good video--thanks for your time
I ordered one.
Time for a little woodworking project. Set's see a custom storage box. :-)
Enjoyed
I'm not surprised that the milled surfaces weren't even. Distortion from the mill set up. It happens. There are things you can do to reduce it. Such as slipping shim stock under the areas with gaps.
On the grinding operation myself I would have set up on magnetic parallels that were ground in place so that I had a surface as flat as the grinder could produce. The secret here is to not turn the magnet off too release the parts or the parallels. I used to grind thin walled bearing spacers to .00005 or better in parallelism on a continual basis.
Enjoyed every bit. Thank You.
That material looks like some very nice stuff to work on. Very machinable, good to grind and it takes such a nice finish. Please let us know if somebody adds lapping to the process. I think those squares would look like mirrors.
Great teacher. Thank you.
👍👍👍Thanks for useful tips and detailed information.
The best thing I learned in machining was the touch off. I would guess and be too deep or not even touching. Then the backlash and conventional milling and climbing milling.
Wow! Looks good.
Hiya Keith
Nice!!
Yikes - at the end when you were handling the new square on the surface plate, I kept thinking you were going to cut yourself.
I mean, you can call it surface grinding if you like, but it was a perfectly good sharpening operation too.
Had you (off camera) softened the arrises to be less ... lethal?
Nice job
Mr Keith you all ways make me think twice when I have my set up ready to machine it because I watch your videos just for the heck of to find some sources but rapidly realized that my set up is not wrong but it could be better thank you for all this years of prof me wrong ahahahahahahahahahhaahah
For those questioning the positioning of the dressing diamond - look at the angle of the grit being thrown. It will always be tangent to the wheel at the point of contact. Looking at about 24:15 it looks like the grit is rising slightly, which would indicate the diamond point is on the egress side of the wheel and slightly past dead center. I seem to remember Keith saying something about that once before in a video, but it may have been someone else. Either way, it looks to me like we are being fooled by the camera angle.
Keith, when you get to 50 millionths of an inch aren't you supposed to use temperature to calculate true measurement?? Well done time well spent, thank you I enjoyed this video as usual.
Squareness checking is just that, for something where it's exact physical size is important then yes it's temperature could have a large effect. For checking squareness then as long as the tool was thermally stabilized to roughly the same temperature throughout it's cross section and approximately at normal room temperature then the measurements and tool can be trusted. Since there's no such thing as absolute perfection then sometimes good enough will do. That square is still pretty damn accurate for a home shop and you'd have to spend some large money to buy anything better.
@@turningpoint6643 -Oh thanks for telling me what I know... My attempt at complimenting his work indirectly by implying his work is so GOOD he should use temperature controls has been overlooked. Sigh...
@@paulsilva3346 And thanks for letting me know I need to learn to be a mind reader. When you add question marks that does turn it into a question now doesn't it.
Now you have to scrape it!
After the planer I think Keith has had enough scraping for a while. :)
I am also happy for the fast moving machine. I bet you wish you did it long time ago. time is always shorter after the job is done. thanks
Very nice square. Any more machine rebuilds in the pipeline?
Cheers all
Good stuff Keith. Do you chamfer the edges of that square or leave the sharp corners?
Interesting, thank you. I've come over here because Adam has said in a recent video that he is going to square up his example using a different approach. It's that shaper again. Looking forward to seeing the different methods.
Nice as usual
Keith, when you stated that you were using a wheel specifically designed for cast iron, what are the specifications please? Yet another great video!
Hi Keith Great Video . I would like to try and machine one too. You used a face mill on the vertical milling machine around minute 2:00 do you know the insert size I may have some I can send you.
Nice
Could have added 2 steps - grind the thickness to a fixed amount- say 1" and the lengths of the sides to 6" or whatever size the casting allows- would give you a couple more precision reference points.
indeed...I was thinking the same thing...perhaps also some drilled and tapped holes so it could be used as a right angle support on a milling machine table
@jacktheripped The casting is over sized. There was extra material in the design and the draft was added after that.
@jacktheripped From a business point of view, I don't see much chance of success. The foundry guy could probably sell those castings for 20.00 each and maybe make some profit, but the amount of time necessary to mill and grind them to dimension would add another 100.00 to the price if done in batches, so who is gonna pay 120.00 for a square- A limited number of hobbyists who own their own grinder could buy the casting and grind it themselves.
OLD SCHOOL g by
Hog hog cv V V V v v. V
it appears that you and Abom79 had the same issue with the rapid transverse... although it had a different root cause.
What is Donald Walker responding to? I do not have the time to find the nay-sayers. Clearly you are a master of the Human-Operated-Machine machinist trade. This is a real thing. I watch you, Abom79, and Precision Machining. PM is a CNC machinist. But it is still hand work really. That is because he has to use his fingers to feel the gauge to measure where his CNC machine really is. So the bottom line is that the accuracy of his machining resides in his human senses, and not i some mystic computer perfection.
Nice job, though I gotta say I prefer a square with flanges on at least one side of the web for mounting clamps. Clamping anything to this will be tricky at best.
Buy one from Windy Hill and mill/grind it to your spec. That is the beauty of finding good, rough castings that can be made into precision tools.
@@paulcopeland9035 The issue is that there isn't enough material in that rough casting to leave a flange. The casting needs to be made with that in mind.
@@siggyincr7447... I'll bet Clark could fix you up with a thicker flange casting. He seems to be flexible with his designs. A small operation like that is great to work with.
How square do you need, 1 micron is REALLY close.
Even if it's .0001" out of square it is good enough for any job that calls for the precision of a square. That .0001" over a test distance of 5.5" means it's out by .001" over a distance of 55". If more precision is needed than that then a 6" square probably isn't the best tool for the job.
Since I have never ever surfaced grind ed anything, I have a question of wonder. As you surface grind anything, doesn't the grind stone itself also wear off throughout the process? And if so, the beginning of a grind would be lower (more taken off) then the end of the grind. IDK?
Yep, that's why you have to keep the stone dressed regularly and let it "spark out".
@@mechanicalTurk0 I got it, turk
It's ground, not grinded
Great content. Thanks!
I was hoping that you grind the sides to equal length also...
Maybe I'm missing something, but (after the facing cuts) I would have clamped it flat on the table of the vertical mill (on a spacer to keep it up off the table), and run around the two long sides and two ends in one setup. Pretty hard for it to finish anything other than dead nuts square after that isn't it (since you normally expect your x and y axes to be square)?
But then you'd be cutting through scale with an end mill while Keith used a really beefy insert face mill. Personally I'd have considered using a HHS fly cutter and resharpening freehand after it got beat to hell. Though If I was making a soft iron square I'd be tempted to make three and hand scrape them to final squareness (but not at $130 a pop for raw casting) Partly just for the heck of it and partly because I don't have a precision "cube" so grinding setup (and final checking) wouldn't be so easy, not sure I trust my Chinese 2,4,6 blocks all that much..
@@jaytalbot1146 fair enough. Good point.
I hadn't really given that aspect any consideration...
I would be using a solid carbide end mill not hss. Does that do the job in your view for cutting the scaled up surface? Happy to learn from others.
I still want to find a way to machine it in one setup using the squareness of the x and y axes to guarantee the squareness of the product though...
Most importantly, thak You !
Keith, You probably have thought that as well. What went wrong in the milling machine ?
For me at least "little over 20 thou" is too much variation, it is 0.5 millimeters anyway.
Typically the old milling machines when taken good care of can easily do 0.02 millimeter (about 8 tenths) accuracy just by taking good care of the setup.
I did not notice nothing wrong with Your setup so might it be tramming or nodding the head ?
I was curious about this too. I'm not criticizing here at all as Keith does great work that I could never approach. I am curious, though, how coming off the milling machine it'd be off by 20 thou? Just wanting to learn here.
Most likely the part wasn't shimmed on eiher occassion of milling it clean, or as usual with a casting, it warped from removing the skins.
I don't know how much it matters because I'm not as experienced as you are. I would have thought that the webbing should have been supporting when clamping and magnetic fixing were done to prevent the pull on the webbing from deflecting the rest of the part. Looks great!
Saw you at windy on Abom’s you tube, what were you casting if I may ask
When grinding flar does your magnet have a residual feature?
Flat
Keith
What are your views on casting ageing when I was in work the old timers (hark at me I am 73 )used to say leave them out side in the sunlight for a year to stress relieve I know the modern way is to heat treat in a Lear , they always put the spun cast iron pipes though a huge Lear at the iron works where I served my time , I believe it was a old practice to bury the steel used in jo blocks for a year
It has been shown numerous times that 'aging' outside doesn't do much at all to the stresses in the parts, mostly 10-15 % might fade away. The only way of properly getting it stress relieved is with heat treatment.
Some of our customers required a 'cold treat' before grinding hardened tool steel.
I didn’t know dead nuts was a measurement term
One of the many things one can learn from Keith....
It is. (albeit a VERY old term!)
CHRIS COLOME Dead nuts is a smaller measurement then "a bees dick" 😊😉
My old boss would say dead nuts, gnat's ass and hill of beans...
"Dead nuts", same as "Bang on".
What if, you measure the hypotenuse and the sides/legs and check it with pythagoras.
I realize that you had good references in those blocks, so just for fun i guess.
How far/close are you from square/perpendicular in angle?
Hey Keith not critiscising but please do something to contain that grinding dust when dressing a wheel , especially as with the warm weather coming on and doors being open for a breeze. Grinding dust can get everywhere and just loves oiled machine surfaces.
Could add a dust collection system to the grinder.
And your lungs.
Indeed, but some folks care more about their machines than thrmselved.😢
Ron Brown here. You haven't seen my diamond dresser, have you...?
I don’t recall if you stated it, but what grade of grinding wheel are you using?