Startled Man put to bed!!

I have so many jobs and joblets up in the air that need to be finished or started, so it's important to focus on getting a few finished off before starting anything new. That very much puts the spotlight on The Startled Man. 

Over the last week or so I've been creating the drawings for the remaining parts, rejigging the dimensions to make the components easier to make from the materials available and sawing up suitable steel stock. For some reason, in my first design I seemed to have randomly chosen 20 x 38mm(?!!) section for the foot and 25 x 38mm for the extension. Naturally I don't have anything of either size - I have no idea what I was thinking of there. So I rejigged them to 25 x 48mm, allowing me to use the same piece of 25 x 100mm I bought for the main body. 

First - chop off his head!! He won't do that again.

Then cut off a 105mm length of the 25 x 100mm flat:

And chop it into 3 pieces:

Drill, counterbore and tap the various holes:

I dug out my auto tapping head and finally got it set up for use on the Bridgeport clone. It now has the quick change pullstud system, so can be swapped in quickly. There is a torque arm to allow reversing when you have reached the required depth. I had to shorten the torque arm attachment and refix it to the chuck. So this is the first time I'll have actually used the thing since I bought it in Canada about 3-4 years ago.

The YG-1 spiral flute machine tap worked nicely. As well as making the tapping operation easy, it also ensures that the tap enters the hole at the correct angle. 5mm is the recommended tapping drill size for 100% threading, although normally you'd opt for 50% threading (5.4mm). However, I was feeling brave (foolhardy, wreckless etc) and thought a proper machine tap should be able to cope. In fact it worked very nicely - and no taps were broken!

Machined up a washer for the retaining bolt, 3mm thick with 16.5mm bore:

Parted off with a Korloy KGK indexable turning / parting tool fitted with "proper" aluminium cutting insert - avoids sticking in and gives excellent finish:

This is the retaining bolt and washer assembled. The retainer is held captive by a countersink machine screw:

Turning down the end of the screw (to 3mm dia):

This is the finished assembly:

The toolholder is held in place by the retaining bolt, finger tightened, to avoid the whole shooting match (toolholder) hitting the deck during moments of excitement.

And this is how it's used - for tightening ISO40 collet chuck toolholders:

And there you have it. It seems I managed to measure everything up correctly, design the parts in CAD and make them up in steel without any balls ups. So it all went together without mishap. It does happen from time to time....

This started out mainly as a design-make CAD-CAM-CNC exercise using Fusion 360 and the Shiz. It's been very helpful in making me go through a whole range of learning processes. Hopefully I will still remember some of them when I next need them....