I have many vises....

Back in September 2023 I investigated rust eaters for no particular reason other than to avoid getting ripped off by market leading proprietary brands (aka Evapo-Rust). In order to challenge my solution to this problem (sorry), I used an old vise I found rusting away in my mother in law's garage. 

This was fairly convincing, although it was in a royal mess to start with. It finished up looking a lot better than it started out but still looked pretty sorry.

What it needs is some wire brush action and a lick of paint.

That's better.

The jaws came off easily. Bizarrely, one of the screws sheared off, yet it was easy to remove the remnant. I'm not complaining!

Bizarrely, the jaws are not parallel but slightly tapered. Is this really intentional??

This needs some attention from the belt sander:

There.

I found a supplier of hard jaws for these Paramo vises (this is a No3 model). And I've ordered some blue spray paint. We are now masked up and ready for a bit of painting action:

There we go.....

Just needs that set of jaws and the unnecessary roller thrust bearing I ordered yesterday, and we should be good to go.

Here's the leadscrew and tommy bar. I may need to machine a washer to spread the thrust load and possibly a cup to shield the bearing from dust and grit. I'll deal with that later on, after I've got the bearing in my hands.

Cooker hood and clock face

More domestic chores, Fatty?

Yes, The Stupid Fat Bloke has been busy again. The extractor hood above the cooker hob has been dodgy ever since we moved in and if anything has been getting worse. Partly the switches getting gooed up with condensed cooking vapours - with a failed light driver module preventing the lights working.

Quickly and without any obvious forethought the whole thing came off the wall and got dismantled without consideration of the effort required to complete the job.

This seems to be an AEG HD6470M, probably about a decade old. Found the user / installation manual which gives some idea how to dismantle it:

Here's the dodgy switch assembly:

Not shown here, is the dismantling, cleaning and repair of the switch PCBA shown above. All 4 switches were clagged up with congealed, condensed fat. I managed to clean most of them with IPA and switch cleaner but the light switch refused to latch. I swapped it out for the "2" position fan switch. This means I have only fan speeds 1 and 3 but as I was unable to find a direct replacement for the original switches, this seemed a reasonable compromise. At least I now have functioning lights and a 2 speed fan, rather than no lights and 3 (at best) intermittent fans.

The lamp driver module seems to have popped. Either that or it is only happy driving a high load such as the original halogen bulbs. Whatever. I'll replace it with a modern LED-rated driver. It simply converts mains voltage to a regulated 12Vdc.

Here's the replacement alongside the original (£5 from Amazon next day). It's a bit wider but it should fit.

And indeed it does. Held in with some double sided foam strip, once a couple of superfluous moulded features had been snipped off the housing:

Lid back on and module replaced in the hood assembly:

The switch / lamp assembly slides in from the front. It was a bit of a fiddle to get back in - but not half as much as it was to remove in the first place.

The cowing thing "just" drops back down and the job is done. Yes, I tried it out on the bench before refitting it.

What's this clock business about?

The clock face has been looking a bit sad recently. It seems the facia(?) has come loose and is distorted.

It seems to be rather brittle, so fixing this thing will involve more than just a touch of glue.

All is not yet lost. I have some high pressure laminate ("Print HPL") from a previous project. This is black substrate with a white coating. When you machine into the surface, you get a nice black pocket against a white background. 

This is ideal for recreating a clock face, so let's craft up a design in Fusion, based off the dimensions of the original.

It's a "radio controlled" clock ie receives synch signals (from Rugby in the UK?), hence the funny symbol. It would also be rude not to personalise it. "13BR" is the shortened address of our house:

Created some toolpaths, using a 2.4mm PCB router bit:

Shouldn't take long to machine - about 10 mins:

Off we go. I couldn't be arsed to remove the machine vise and have to refit / retram it again afterwards, as it's much simpler to mount a piece of good quality (= flat) plywood in it and fasten the stock down to it. The machining forces will be minimal, so deflection isn't going to be an issue.

The engraved features have a depth of 1mm and the white outer coat is a fraction of that, so I only need a flatness of better than half a mm or so to be sure of a decent appearance. In practice I'd guess it's 0.1mm or better, without having actually measured it.

And off we go:

That went well.

And soon enough it's back in its place above the (repaired) cooker hood. Yes, it's managed to synchronise itself and I also replaced the hands correctly. If you park the hands at 12:00:00 by removing and replacing the battery, you know the correct position to replace them at.

So that's that sorted out finally.

Well - what happened with the Bantam's LinuxCNC update?

Did you get it running finally?

Last time round, I'd installed the new version of Linux and LinuxCNC but it wasn't working.

The error messages gave a bit of a hint. Each one lists the lines in the HAL files that are causing the app to crash. Commenting out the problematic lines one by one finally got me a working system, with all the axis scaling, homing, closed loop operation etc. 

Still some issues to be sorted out, when the ongoing domestic tasks allow:

• The wireless MPG sort of works. It allows jogging but many of the keys don't work.
• Andy Pugh's macros don't show up. A tab appears in the GUI but clicking on it does nothing. This was actually one of the main features I was hoping to gain by upgrading, so there is work still to do.

Hopefully I will get some inputs from the LinuxCNC forum to help resolve these issues. But for now, it's over the main hump in the road.....

LinuxCNC time again

Yes, call me a sadomasochist but the time has come for me to get involved in this again. The CNC Bantam sort of works but there are a few issues.

Why the Bantam? 

You might wonder why I'm bothered about the Bantam, given that I have a "proper" CNC lathe in the Tree UP-1000 but they are quite different machines. 

• The Tree can only sensibly handle work up to perhaps 6" diameter or so and it lacks a conventional tailstock. 
• The Tree's tailstock provided is only intended for supporting the work, not drills, taps etc.
• The Tree would struggle to do any heavy duty tapping or threading, as it has a fixed pulley ratio between the motor and spindle. While it's rated at 4kW, operation at low speed and high torque isn't really its strong point.
• The Bantam has a tailstock, a decent length (approaching 20") and a half decent swing (6.5"). It can also handle a faceplate and weird workpieces.

In short, there are some jobs that I need to Bantam for. However, last time I messed with the setup, there were some "unresolved issues":

• Andy Pugh's macros required Python 3, yet the current version of LinuxCNC (back in early 2023) only included Python 2. I got the macros installed in the GUI but they wouldn't actually do anything.
• I had grief with the RT default kernel and had to f*ck about a lot to get things running, eventually having to install a different kernel.
• I'd almost lost the will to live when getting the closed loop axes set up (X and Z axes have glass scale encoders).
• And the WMPG took some setting up, to say the least.

So, rather than leave this for another year, I hope to do a fresh installation of both Linux and LinuxCNC.

Fixing the intermittent errors:
Before getting caught up in updates, there's a problem with the cabinet. Sometimes the system works and sometimes it complains that the breakout boards aren't connected. That's classical "dodgy connector" stuff, requiring some investigation.

The lid will have to come off the PC. But that's got to happen anyway, as I need to swap the SSD so I can create a new installation while not losing the last known good (= working) installation.

Some photos for the record. 7i76 (top) and 7i85 (below). The 5i25 sits inside the PC on an ISA slot. It has an FPGA and talks to the external boards by means of ribbon cables via a couple of DB25 connectors:

7i76 closer up:

7i85 closer up:

The encoders for the X and Y axes and the spindle come in through the DB9 connectors at the bottom:

Here's the machine itself. Ground ballscrews, glass encoder scales, AC servos etc:

Installing LinuxCNC:

Currently, LinuxCNC is at v2.9.4 and it comes as an ISO image along with Debian 11 "Bookworm". Note that although Mint is built on Debian, this build uses XCFE, which is more "functional". Mint looks almost pleasant and almost Windows-like in appearance. In contrast, XCFE look like a clunky GUI from over a decade ago. Ho hum - I'm not going to make any further work for myself, so will have to swallow that.

I struggled with the install. I think this is because I used a 256GB UFD for the ISO file. Finally, having tried both Ventoy, Rufus and Etcher, I changed to a 16GB UFD and all was well. That was a couple more hours of my life I won't get back.

"New" (ie previously used) SSD:

Linux XCFE up and running finally:

Configuration challenges:

Having installed Linux (and LinuxCNC), the next challenge was to copy the various original config files over from the NAS (network drive), where I'd copied them. Naturally, the file manager that comes with XCFE is incomprehensively shite. Mapping a network drive in Mint was a piece of piss but XCFE's "Thunar" file manager boasts that it isn't really intended to be a network file manager. WTF? So you have to install the Gigolo app ("it just mounts what it is told to") and connect to the Samba (SMB) server in the NAS.

One suggestion on the LinuxCNC forum on how to do the update was to copy the Gmoccapy folder across into the new installation. Well that didn't work.

My approach is to try to create a functioning installation of Gmoccapy using the Pncconfig utility, then edit the resulting files by swapping out the relevant contents of the originals.

Naturally, the Pncconfig utility doesn't list my combination of Mesa boards (5125, 7i76 and 7i85). So although the 5i25 FPGA is flashed with the right bitfile, I can't select it from the Pncconfig utility. Consequently, I can't set up the HAL entries - or more precisely, I can't use the utility to configure them and generate the appropriate HAL file. Hopefully somebody on the forum will point me in the right direction.

Doubtless more to come....