gunsmith lathe
- Thread starter D-Rock
- Start date
Joey,
Sometime It seems like you just don't get it. I acknowledged that "Fast Track" made a great contribution. It is the people that make personal comments to opinions that I disdain because it makes no sense at all and it is petty and counterproductive to "Ask the Cue Maker".
Everything I posted was truthful and a matter of my opinion. You quoting me and acting like I don't get it is just spin and to what end I just don't understand. Use the eyes and brain god gave you and try to count to 2.
It is a great thing to have what you call "old metal" like you like to promote. Anyone who is thinking about buying an old lathe and is not a machinist should at least consider buying something new and avoid a lot of the pit falls of "time bandit" work that will preclude them from building cues. Pretty simple concept. If one is buying their first lathe how can they build their own parts that are needed if they need to fix that lathe. It is like what came first, the chicken or the egg gambit. IMO, life is about choices and how you delegate your time. To me a lathe is just a tool to use to an end. I don't want to worship at it's alter. If that floats your boat that's fine.
Cue making and being a machinist are two different ideals to strive for IMO. This is witnessed by your decision to pay to have a pro machinist produce the fine centering fixtures you sell here on the forum. I agree with your decision to job out that simple fixture out because it is better to have a pro do a job like that in metal as you work with wood. Lets face it, your machinist has no idea how to make a Plain Jane like you do and it would take him quite a bit of time to learn and understand the fine details of cue making. Like Dirty Harry said, "A man has to know his limitations".
Re read my post and I think you will see I was appreciative of Fast Track's contribution to the thread.
Rick
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I just moved to Indiana so half my shop is back in Missouri and half is here with me in Indiana. It's been a slow process getting everything moved and setup.
Sadly, I do not have a biax. Believe it or not, I can get quite a bit done using a hip scraping technique. Then I touch up the surface with a hand scraper. It's pretty slow, physical work but I do it because I enjoy it.
SCDiveteam - You are absolutely right that, when it comes to making cues, pretty much any metal lathe will work great. I'm not disdaining folks with the light duty machines or imports. They are cheaper to buy, cheaper to transport, and cheaper to run while still fulfilling all the needs of a cue maker. I just read a lot of posts back and forth about quality of lathes and it seemed like there were some gaps in knowledge that I could fill. I'm not trying to pick on you and I'm sorry if my post seemed like I was targeting you specifically. It is important, however, to understand what it means to machine and measure to the "tenths" (i.e. 0.0001" or "ten-thousandths"). This is completely unrealistic in wood and pretty unrealistic in common machining applications, too. Surface finish, temperature, humidity, etc all come into play at those levels. I saw your post about runout in the 0.0005" and wanted to point out that this is a somewhat unreliable measurement. BUT, what is important, is that you are making very fine cues with the pin so close to center that no player can every notice a difference. I guess I'm just nit-picking.
Thanks everyone for the kind words and appreciation.
Edit: Ha! If I had any spare helium-3 I'd be a rich man. Most modern particle detectors use solid state electronics, solid scintillators and drift tubes with argon or other inert gasses instead of helium three because it's so expensive. I think homeland security bought it all up for neutron detectors in harbors to check incoming cargo.
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Thanks Fast Track,
I never took anything you said as negative. On the contrary you have displayed one of the most informative threads I have read on this forum.
I come from a professional background whereby I had to perform every trade and hundreds of specialty skill sets to a proficient level to verified competency. One of these skill sets was as an underwater welder of stainless steel certified for performing jobs in Nuclear Reactor Vessels, Reactor Drier Separators, Spent Fuel Pools and other safety related underwater areas governed by procedures and guidelines mandated by 10 CFR 50; Appenxix B. I am sure you of all people understand compliance and can relate.
Even though I belong to a very elite and very small group of nuclear welders worldwide who passed nuclear service certification to a PQR in 4 positions through mock up work testing and destructive and non destructive testing of their welds, I knew in my heart of hearts that I could never make a pimple on the ass of a professional pipe fitter, boilermaker, or any shop fab welder who practiced their craft daily. Not even close, as I could count the days per year that I was require to perform these nuclear welding skills on one hand.
This is why I made the comparison statement about using the lathe as a tool vs. expert machinist. As an expert underwater man for over 30 years I could however assimilate and be proficient in site or job specific skills and make the grade. That is what was required and that is what they paid me for. Necessity is alway the mother of invention.
I noted the differences in your vantage point and my own experience because we all come from different places and have different thing to share and express. In the end it is about doing the best job you can and measuring it to a standard and raising the bar to exceed the standard. This is world class culture expectations. I know that concept exists in your world and if fusion is to be successful in our future it will be this culture that gets us there.
I have studied the art of cue making and set the bar for work in my shop. The Enco lathe does the job with flying colors for wood applications in cue making. I do every machining function with a laminated blueprint clipped in front of me and verify all dimensions with a 3 time check process and have developed a QA QC Standard that I feel is second to none in cue making because of my training and understanding how to go after a world class ideal. For me to compare cue making in this way is overkill but I like overkill.
If your specs. require a tool room lathe with super high tolerances to produce a gizmos that need off the wall tolerances, RMS finishes or pneumatic air gagging to measure concentricity, then you got to have that stuff.
People who wish to make innuendo and negative fodder are distractions to one's desire to be professional IMO. I choose professionalism and I can see by your passion, desire and logic that you do too.
Again, thanks for sharing,
Rick G
PS. I have a sign in my shop the states, " Thou Shall Strive to be as Dennis Shearing Like as possible on every task and operation". That is one standard I have yet to master but I am working on it. LOL
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I'm envious of you. Are you familar with the LaSalle nuke plant in Illinois? My old man is an engineer there and he always brought me updates and info whenever they had weld teams out. I recall just a couple of years ago they had to call out a team of underwater welders to weld a stainless steel baffle back in place during an outage. Said they had guys under the water round the clock to get it done. That is an elite team, for sure, and I've often thought it would be an amazing experience to be part of that.
Not sure I understand your statement about comparison between using the lathe as an expert machinist vs as a tool, though. Back when I was working for a living (now I mostly sit on my butt and do research!) I ran my machines daily. One day I might be turning parts for a lab that required working to the tenths in a temp controlled environment and the next day I was making a bushing for Farmer Joe's hay wagon hitch. I guess I'm far from an expert machinist, but I know several masters and they use their lathes as tools, but they also respect and maintain them. They recognize that their lathes (or mills or etc) are major investments and that without them, they can't make a living. Because of this, many of us can't help but develop a certain "relationship" with our tools. I think having them provides a sense of being able to provide for ones self - not only in the financial sense, but in the sense that my tools give me the confidence to know that, no matter what breaks in my daily life, I can repair it or build a new one. I don't feel at the mercy of chance or technology. I dunno. Just my thoughts.
FT,
I worked on the LaSalle Nuclear site from the construction phase until 2001 when I sold Scott Diving Service, Inc. If your dad was there before those dates we would be familiar because I held the Blanket PO with ComEd to perform underwater service to all of their Nuclear, Fossil and Hydro Generating Stations for over 21 years. I worked there as the "on call" service contractor and supplied outage team support since day one.
BTW, underwater stick welding is a fairly easy technique because you don't hold an arc and are pressing the rod in with high amps and volts tuning. It is like using Jet Rod because you don't hold and arc as the rod is consumed by pressing it into the parent metal fit up. You orientate the rod at about a 60 degree angle at 7 to 8 ipm feed. Because of the bubbles coming up you watch the travel direction behind the rod as you can't pull a puddle with an arc as you can topside. Stainless is rather easy due to it's molten or melting point vs. carbon steel. In the nuke plants the water was like gin and it was easy. In the rivers, most welds had to be done by feel because you could not see anything but a glow. Also, welding carbon steel is much harder than SS and gets even harder when you are deeper than 40 feet because of hydrogen embrittlement factor due to the super quenching of the parent metal combined with the hyperbaric effect from the water PSI loading. That's what I needed the helium 3 for.:groucho:
Please PM me your dads name.
Rick
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Steve,
I never did offshore rig work but that is some serious stuff.
The guys who pushed the underwater wet welding were from La. and started getting people certified to surface welding standards was Dale and Richard Anderson who worked for CBI. To us underwater welders they are like Gus and George as trailblazers.
Did you see any large creatures?
Willie formally of Willie Cue also works in the industry as a calibration tech in his local.
Rick
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I saw lots of wild looking creatures.I saw catfish that could swallow a man with no problem.It was a different world down there.I didn't mind so much,climbing a 150 ft ladder after that, lol.Alot better than being 150 ft. in the water.
I would like to do it again,like I said what an experience.Just didn't like sitting in a decompression chamber after.
I would like to do it again,like I said what an experience.Just didn't like sitting in a decompression chamber after.
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