Hey everyone. I’m going to explain this further here, since it’s a VERY common comment that I’m distorting the part with the vise. That is not the case, but perhaps that section of the video isn’t sufficiently clear. This is 3/8” wall extrusion and I’m clamping it lightly for these tests. It is NOT distorting the part. Near the end I check for that by putting the DTI on the top, above the wall of the extrusion. It moves 15 thou. That’s a huge amount, and not in the middle where distortion would show. The part is moving, not distorting. It is ROLLING upwards on the round bar, which is why removing that eliminates the problem. I hope that clears it up.

@clintoncraft4161

4 жыл бұрын

Blondihacks - thanks for the clarification. I too had come away with the idea this was distortion of the part. (Also, this comment isn’t pinned so it’s headed down the feed...)

@MF175mp

4 жыл бұрын

It was moving up because the wall against the fixed jaw bends as far as I can tell, when the pin is removed the force is taken by the wall against the vise base so it doesn't bend so much. Otherwise the same would happen with solid block, and that doesn't happen with solid block

@Beltonius

4 жыл бұрын

Actually, it looks like the front edge does lift from the clamping load, the max deflection is not at the center: imgur.com/a/ShOMb9k

@clawtlr

4 жыл бұрын

Great video. How are the ways on the vise? I wonder if the round bar causes a rolling action on the movable jaw, which then lifts that jaw. The effect would roll the part towards the column. An indicator on the top of the movable jaw should give some insight. Just a thought.

@MF175mp

4 жыл бұрын

@@clawtlr the movable jaw doesn't lift on this style vises because there is a wedge system pulling it down. If it appears to be moving, the whole vise is just bending to a banana shape as well or it is not adjusted correctly, or both

My new favorite thriller genre: Investigative Machining

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

Science! 🤓

@woozhi9218

4 жыл бұрын

How bout 18 plus machining?

Isnt machine geometry fun? :D Good investigation!

@jlucasound

4 жыл бұрын

Hi Stefan!! Thank You for recognizing the awesomeness of Quinn! :-)

Watching you debug this problem is such a fantastic way to instruct folks on the process of machining!

This might be one of my favorite episodes, some excellent detective work there for a head scratcher I'm sure most of us will eventually come across. Thanks as always !!

Quinn - what a great video. You have a special knack for concisely explaining nuanced technical information, while moving at a good pace, and keeping it fun!

That was extremely interesting. Didn't see it coming. Well done for the methodical approach to fault finding that issue. That is another of your videos that I will be using as reference material in the future.

This investigative and deterministic approach will save a lot of people a headache.

Love your channel, I hate it when my Cutter gets catty Wompus, but doesn’t everyone, thankful there’s a woman’s presence in the machining world, wish there were more. Grace and Peace!

I so much appreciate when you admit a mistake and talk through it, like having to tram a second time. Many others would be creative in post and wouldn't share details, acting like they did it perfect the first time. A very conclusive video in a couple aspects!

As a novice to all of this, I am grateful for your in-depth yet very clear explanations... :)

I am not a machinist. I do not have a mill or a metal lathe. I do have a small hobby cnc and a wood lathe. I really enjoy your problem solving technique. You have spent alot of time explaining the nomenclature and your reasoning with words and diagrams. Thank you so much.

This is a great video! You lay out all the parameters in an understandable, implementable manner. Thanks.

Best tram video on KZread ! Of course you could also spend untold time scraping everything. The art of scraping Brutal .... Blondyhacks excellence in action.

Well, that's all cleared up. Just need a mill now..

@levitated-pit

4 жыл бұрын

i agree absolutly

@jimphubar

4 жыл бұрын

Good to know you guys are cool with non-practising machinists. Peas be with you.

@railgap

4 жыл бұрын

Save. Buy the right house/garage. Make it a priority. You don't have to be rich, just want it badly enough for long enough that you fold it into your life's planning. I picked up a used Bridgeport for $1400 from a friendly machine shop, and paid only $200 to get it moved across town and into my shop by professional riggers. (but I'm still buying tooling ten years later, LOL - you can spend more than the cost of the machine on tooling)

Crikey Quinn, my head just about exploded with that one. So many variables, talk about an ice cream headache.

Hi Quinn, I've always been a little leery of wall strength in aluminum extrusions when clamped. I square up the ends and clamp along that axis.

@railgap

4 жыл бұрын

When your part design cooperates, sure. What do you do when your part is a foot long? Mayne you live in a better world, but my Kurt and Parlec vises only hold 9 inches tops.

@tobiasripper4124

4 жыл бұрын

@@railgap when you have to clamp on the colapsable wall of an extruction what you do, if posible, is to brace the structure internally with whatever may work. even machinist jack screws could save you some pain killers.

With the 2" cutter... loosen the bolts bring the tool to touch the bed or ground flat stock. Slowly tighten all the bolts. I promise it works. The simplest way. I do it almost every week after tilting the turret on a Bridgeport. Excellent video.

I wish there were more people like you in the industry!

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

Aww, thanks! I wish there were commenters like you on KZread. ☺️

Well, that was fun. Probably not for you but for us. It doesn't take much to crush small cross sections with the mechanical advantage of a vice. When you are working to thousandths, everything makes a difference. Tracking down this sort of problem is like looking for a needle in a haystack and first you must find the correct haystack. Well done.

I've got 99 problems - and this absolutely is one!

I can honestly say you are the very best with explaining things and with what you say. Countless videos ive watched after having a problem with some machining issue and still had the problem. Everyone on youtube seems to make the same videos or at least the same basic information given in their videos. But YOU QUINN always seem to answer my question. So just wanted to say thank you for all the hardwork you do with these videos. I know alot of work goes into them. You do a great job! Except for your intro with ur fingers waving around. Not a fan of that but you sure know how to teach and you’re extremely knowledgeable.

Great video! I come from woodworking. Another thing to do early on is check your square for square.

I love the never give up attitude. I learned the same lesson, the same way. The knowledge always seems to stick better when learned the hard way, huh?

Regarding shimming the column, Stefan Gotteswinter has a great video where he shims it with annealed copper and fills the gap with a metal-filled epoxy material. Interesting video as always!

@robertoswalt319

4 жыл бұрын

I thought about that video as well Nicolas.

@jdstar6352

4 жыл бұрын

How often can that be done? Can it be un-epoxied without significant damage, physical or psychological? Or is it like that tattoo of my ex's name and face in a giant heart, twined with the endearment "4 Evuh" (hey, did I ask about your tats?).

@David-hm9ic

4 жыл бұрын

@@jdstar6352 Most (emphasizing MOST) epoxies break down at around 400° F and can be scraped away with a soft gasket scraper or similar tool. There are some heat resistant epoxies so don't use them here. Caution is required because the finish of the machinery probably has a Bondo type filler under the paint and that and the paint could both be easily damaged. A soldering iron is a good way to apply pinpoint heat that doesn't spread to other areas easily. It will break down the epoxy while barely transferring any heat to the metal substrate. I've been doing this on RC airplanes without damaging the wood since college and I'm now retirement age.

@SWhite-hp5xq

4 жыл бұрын

ToT also has a great video on milling a perfect cube👍🏽

Well, you learned something, your machine is trammed better than ever, and you got material for a video. A win, win, win for all!

I've found my fair share of tram issues with flycutters. Most of the mills at my school hadn't been trammed since they arrived there, so when I had a back cut that looked like .010"-.015", I got a little suspicious. I ended up tramming most of the mills there. Good for practice, I suppose.

@railgap

4 жыл бұрын

Someone else in the YT machine shop mafia wisecracked something like "flycutter, AKA tram indicator" in one of his videos and I never forgot.

Waterslides! Mole Hills! Trams! Your workshop sounds like a delightful place to visit! Isn't it interesting what other engineers call different things? We would rectify this problem by 'clocking' the head true or flat.

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

Maybe I should cut back on the recreational chemicals a bit. 😬

If you wanted to get really crazy with it you could use machine epoxy to influence the column or scrape the bottom of the column and top of the base where the column sits. Stefan has a great video on this epoxy method. I am all too familiar with the very issues you speak of in this video. It can be time consuming to correct but it’s well worth it. That’s the only way to get great results on these mills i think. It’s all gotta be working together in unison. And the issue with it not holding an adjustment, I ran into that too!! Drove me crazy

Very interesting video. I always learn something here. I love the "old school" video effect at the end, really cool.

Wow, great troubleshooting on finding the problem. Very educational for me as a novice. Thanks for a great video as usual.🙂

Thanks for an excellent video. I read that the definition of a machine tool is one that has the accuracy built into the machine. You can make a cylinder with a file and a vise if you can measure the shape and correct the errors. free form like scraping. Or spin it in a lathe and get roundness, straightness, perpendicularity, cylindricity, size from the machine. We build machine tools and have to check for the errors you pointed out. When one refers to a vertical direction which machine element is it? Axis of the spindle, quill motion, column Z, 90 degrees to bed Y, 90 degrees to the table top, vise jaw, etc. The problem could be complicated if the wrong thing was adjusted. If a head nod was "corrected" by column lean the tram and fly cut would look good but bores would be out of square. Good job bringing these concepts up in an interesting and informative way.

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

Traditionally, the spindle axis is considered Z on machine tools, and they are left-hand coordinate systems in X/Y

@paulgarrigues5069

4 жыл бұрын

True, a lathe's Z is usually confused and called its X axis... Quinn, you have a much higher than average mechanical aptitude!

OMG..You are the best. These are precious nuggets of info. Thanks

Great investigation and analysis. Thanks for sharing this!

Thanks Quinn for taking the time to show us this, very interesting.

Oh no, it’s Devo. I went through all of this with my first mill which was a mill-drill, otherwise known as a glorified drill press. I was trying to shim the column in two planes at the same time. It was a long, frustrating process that resulted in some improvement. The best part of it was an opportunity to practice logical thinking and patience.

This maybe the best video on indexing that I have seen: congratulations Quinn!

We make "crush plugs" for that kind of stuff, to distribute clamp force/support the part between the jaws. Or sometimes if we have to hold a .001" or less flatness we put an indicator on the part while clamping to see how much clamping we need.

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

Great tips! Thanks for sharing!

This episode was both illuminating and insightful. Thank you.

A very high value lesson in sleuthing machining errors was just given. Worth three x the time invested at the least. Looking at the part in the vise the wire may have been deforming the wall of the stock inwards therefore shortening that leg of the tube lowering that side of the top that was being milled. Machining the end first and clamping across the length may have helped the issue, But Hindsight is always 20/20. Mahalo

Sounds like it's time for FEA! Looking at the side view of your setup, all the clamping force is through the rod some distance above the floor of the part. This will deflect the floor and the ceiling up on the rod side and tilt the top of the walls aft. The back jaw will resist this somewhat the back wall will deflect above the vise. If you move the rod to close to the middle of the floor I suspect the deflection will be greatly reduced. Fusion 360 has FEA capabilities and it might be fun to see if you can approximate the results in sims. Wait, this is a machining channel!

Ah, the joys of dealing with tram issues in knee Mills😵. This is why they sell kits to put indicators on Bridgeport heads to monitor squareness. I'm so glad I don't have to deal with that anymore. Quinn, you're rod method is good, it's just the placement of it was too high, causing the inner wall to buckle distorting the rest of the extrusion. Next time, try to place it where it won't cause collapse👍

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

It wasn’t distorting the extrusion, I checked for that.

That was were informative I would never have guessed at the round bar causing that problem Thank you for that

One of the First Things i did when I got my mill year's ago was I made a DIY tramming device which comes in the spindle and has two indicators 25 cm away from each other so I just have to have the same reading on each side and I'm 💯 okay ...fast and easy ....you can buy the same thing but if you build it properly there's no need it is precise as can be ....I don't say again that Quinn's videos are so good and informative it's getting boring to repeat myself every time 🤪

Thank's Quinn. Great lesson on Murphy's law ! Thank's for teaching us newbies how to trouble shoot problems ! Another great video, Happy Trails.

Awesome investigation Quinn! I had never thought of using paper on the clamp jaw, brilliant!

Wow, I was worried you were about to start going crazy with the shims. That plot twist at the end really got me. Excellent video, very educational.

I had it figured out the first time I looked at your setup. BUT made showed a great video of all the possible ways to adjust your mill. Thank you.

Very interesting. In the 1970’s I worked as a machinist in a shop that milled a lot of sand cast aluminum. Fly cutters with cemented carbide tools were the norm. Tolerances were in the .005” range. Things worked well. In the 1980’s I worked as a detailed parts inspector at a place that made parts for Boeing. If you had a whole .001” tolerance you were in high clover. If you know geometric tolerances you will understand that the .001” was in parallel and square as well. This shop NEVER used fly cutters. The flat milling was multiple passes with .500 diameter cutter. This was done specifically to negate any tram ( any direction) effects. Thought you may find this interesting.

You can check for head nod after you've trammed the column by mounting an indicator on the table and looking for any deviation of the spindle as you raise and lower the head. I recall watching one video where the poor fellow was sure he could tram his machine simply by milling the table. I cringed all the way through it. He was adamant that he was right even after I explain how an out of tram column would leave scalloped grooves in his parts.

G'day Quinn, Wow! I enjoyed the failure analysis even though I needed time to stop and process what you said. Good job!

Thank you for a most interesting, informative and thought-provoking explanation of how to identify the root causes of issues of machine geometry. My round pillar mill drill is keeping me well challenged in this regard but I now feel a little more confident in revisiting the analysis of its waywardness and might even be able to reduce the more severe of them.

Thank you for sharing and explaining your trouble shooting technique.

This was a really good subject! Nice work!

Woo hoo!!! Another mill vid. Always look forward to your vids. Extremely well delivered. These might just get my wife into machining too. If only!

Always interesting and timely.

So, don’t take for granted. Great teaching. Good to invest into during the Covid-19 quarantine.

Turn it 90 degrees on the vertical and repeat and see if the results are different. Limited to the jaw distance of the work piece, but for checking alignment may help.

Wow, that was some kind of detective work. It's like you know stuff, and stuff! I had to watch a couple of times to get it, but finally... Good job! Thanks, and Meow to Sprocket.

hey thanks! this was all very usefull. i suspected the vice clamp force being the cause since the very begining.. which makes me feel more confident for whenever i get to mount my shop. and all these geometries, while vivid in my head, are some much more easier to undesrtand by observing the effects they have on the cuts. amazing content

I'm home from work, watching another of your great videos, home because I sprained a foot. Now I have to worry about tramming, nod, lean, and in my case, saggy knee! -I have an old Rockwell. You ARE a gifted teacher! Thank you for all your efforts, and Merry Christmas!

This was amazing! I actually enjoyed the ride of you debugging this! Albeit a novice, I imagined myself an EXPERT at some tradeshow watching the video and trying to second-guess and predict what is going on. You should almost put fixed pauses in the video like this, with a prompt -- "#3, WHAT DO YOU THINK is GOING ON, NOW? (write it down, no cheating!)" I'm certain that kind of interaction would go over big at a TRADESHOW! Perhaps even making it interactive for those commenting to your thread! IDK.

Thanks for sharing. Good learning experience!

Hi Quin.. this video wan very very helpful about troubleshooting squareness of the mill... Thanks you very much you share all this inforamtion with us.

Shim stock is useful in so many applications. Thank you, Quinn, for reminding me how useful it is. Been many years since I have needed it. When I needed it, throughout the years, it wasn't there. Really. I'm a "grunt". PHD in GED. No respect, no matter what I fix. :-)

Everything in this video was usefull. I had a similar journey on my import mill vise. I discovered a .007 in high ridge on my vise's fixed jaw casting (must have been some cutter they used) which caused the vice jaw to tip at an angle when I installed it. Then I discovered the base of the vise was warped. I was seeing movement on my vise jaw when I tightened the vise to my mill table. I had a fly cutter that let me flatten the base which uncovered a tram issue when it ended up cutting on the back side just like yours. It seemed like you enjoyed troubleshooting your problems. I did mine too. Thanks for the video.

Wonderful video. You are an excellent communicator.

Nice presentation and diagrams. Trammed my bench-top mill the other day for a similar problem while using a fly cutter. Noticed there was still some cutting on the back side. Never thought about locking the head down during adjustment. You gave some good pointers. Thanks.

Excellent video thx. Even the most seasoned professionals need to be diligent and NOT rush to conclusions. My compliments on your systematic approach and keeping an open mind. Your avoiding the tendency to start shimming the post or head is the payoff for clear thinking with an investigative approach. Well done.

First off, thanks a lot for the great videos. I've not done any machining for nearly 40 years, but I took a lot of classes in high school and college, and was also a "helper" in those classes since I seemed to have a knack for it. I did a similar thing on 10 pieces of 6-in square tube steel for the shop teacher. What he had me do first was to make a precision angle plate that I could clamp the vertical side of the tube to, and then the bottom of the tube was clamped to the table. It worked out quite well and the surfaces ended up being within a few ten thousands when I was done as long as I didn't try to hog off too much on a pass. It was a fun experience. Have no idea what those were ultimately used for, and the shop teacher didn't know either. Just given a rough hand-draw on a sheet of oily paper. :) Of course, Aluminum is a whole different game. I did little machining of it in my time.

Another wonderful presentation. I like how you work the problems that are typically seen in the hobby shop. This is a new hobby for me and I began with your lathe videos and I recently purchased a mill much like yours, a pm-25mv. My son warned me about some of the peculiarities of vises and suggested that I go with a kurt vise to minimize that. Of course I didn’t listen and selected a less expensive one offered by precision matthews. The knowledge that you shared with us today might keep those Benjamin’s in my billfold instead of Kurt’s. Thanks for everything and keep up the good work.

Thank you for this excellent investigative video. For a newby amateur machinist this kind of instruction is invaluable.

Thanks! Best video I have seen yet on problems of squareness on the mill. Especially good since I have the same mill. In the past I had always worked with Bridgeport type mills which have the capability to adjust for nod and when we trammed ahead we indicated from front to back as well as left to right. As a side note, for whatever reason, during my 20 plus years in several different shops I had never heard of "tramming the head". We always "swept the table" or "squared the head" but I was working for the last half of my career in IT so upon returning as a hobbyist I now hear "tramming" as the most common term.

Sometimes it seems like when I have problems like that I wind up chasing my tail , when all I had to do was sit down and not think about it for a few minutes, anyway thanks for the insight, hope you and yours stay safe. Thanks

Very thorough, another good video.

Having the head out of tram and a fly cutter can sometimes be used to advantage. Years ago doing work for Sandia National Laboratories we often had to fit Aluminum flanges to the sides of pipes and tanks. Often the radius to be cut on the flanges were three or four feet. The trick is to calculate the head tilt to give the desired radius using a fly cutter of known diameter. Using this method does not give you a surface which is a segment of a circle but instead a segment of a parabola. The good news is that the surface generated is in the portion of a parabola that is very nearly a circular segment. You do have to use a fly cutter that can cover the work piece in one pass and if your mill has a turret like a Bridgeport it must be set so the ram is square to the table. When I go out to the work shop this afternoon I'll dig through some paperwork and see if I can find the formula and post it. Cheers from NC/USA

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

That’s a great idea! I may use that some day.

Awesome stuff Quinn, I have the same mill and similar problem just have to determine if I need to shim the nod or the column.

Awesome...thank you....you just saved me a lot of time and a headache or thousands!

Excellent instructional video! And the Devo reference was not lost :-)

Quinn, I just sold a PM932M-PDF I owned for 2 years and it was my first mill. It took me months to figure out how to get that machine running true. This video would have saved me a lot of time and headaches back then! I actually removed the column and head to check the surfaces between the column and base of the mill. What I found was that those surfaces were poorly machined, not even ground. I had to shim my column and that fixed the problem. It is very touch and go. I also found that tramming to the vise was more accurate than tramming to the table. At least that’s what my parts showed. Great video!

Good detective work there. You definitely mentioned a couple things that I would’ve been scratching my head to figure out.

To win at creating anything you must solve more problems than you create. Not giving up also helps.

Thank you for sharing!

My first instinct was definitely that something was amiss about the work holding of the extrusion itself. I've machined enough extrusions to know they never play by the traditional rules. Looks like your machine is running truer and better than ever at any case. I need to go through your level of rigor on my own little mill for similar reasons, definitely has come slightly off tram over the last year or so.

Very nicely done

Big take away for me is I have several things to consider beyond a well worn vise. Enlightening tutorial.

Now that was an emotional waterslide ride as Quinn fixes, fails, fixes, fails, and fixes to ultimately find success by applying the KISS rule with this type of stock. Issue resolution was an om moment. I confess that my eyes crossed more than once as my appreciation grew for what seemed to be a futile battle with the evils of nodding, leaning, kneeling, and tilting. May you always be my teacher. :)

Had exactly the same issue on my PM-728vt with a superfly. Followed pretty much the same steps. resolution, stop using wire on the movable jaw side. Tried both copper and aluminum wire. Thank you, great video.

eh, shim happens..... PS did you see Stefan Gotteswinters video on shimming his mill with epoxy? Advantage, because it covers such a huge area and a fluid levels itself.

The good thing though, is that the pivot rod in the vise distorting your workpiece enough that you noticed it, did help you catch and correct the initial 5.5 thou out of tram! So it wasn't a wasted effort!

insanely interesting, great video!

Interesting Video.... Lot of information shared here. BTW thanks for sharing it. I guess what i took away from this is.... Don't start shimming the machine, before you check ALL other possible variables. A real learning experience for both of us....! Keep up the good work!!

HI Quinn, great video and some great sleuthin'! I know its an odd mix or relief and frustration when you discover the machine was fine all along.....(I once was pulling my hair out blaming my machine, trying to figure it out, but it was the probe on the Heimer being loose that was causing all the problems). I have found every time I face thin stock with the fly cutter if it has ANY opportunity to flex under the cutting load that I get that high spot in the middle. A second spring pass will usually reveal this as the cutter will make contact with that high spot and leave the edges alone.

Great video . When I machine , I hold the work piece with 1/8" dowel pins . Also the side pin I hold it in the center of the jaw . I noticed it was held more to the top of the front jaw, and high parallel underneath. I'm a tool maker for 35 years . I must say it was great video .

Instead of adding pieces of shim stock around the various bolting points, you can use a small mill and the error in the machine to machine a wedge that corrects the nod or tram problem while making full contact and preserving rigidity. Since you are using the machine's own error to create the wedge, you don't even have to measure the error to get the correct wedge. When I did this, I double-stick taped my wedge stock (1/8" 5051 because I had some) to 3/4" thick piece of plate glass. The wedge and glass were clamped down to the table, and shimmed until tramming indicated it was square to the spindle. Glass has pretty decent strength in compression as long as you spread the load with something softish (cardboard from a beer 6 pack is what I used) and a block of steel to spread the force from the nose of the clamp. In my case I was fixing a round-column mill drill, so shimming the base to column joint was really the only option. On a mill-drill the quill is the only useful Z-travel, so you don't really worry about if the column is perpendicular to the X and Y travel. If anyone tries this, note that the wedge machining orientation has to be correct so that it fixes the error instead of doubling it. In my case, the wedge had to be flipped over diagonally between machining and installation. In my case the wedge was square with a square bolt pattern, so no chance of machining it wrong, but if the shape of the wedge is irregular, you will have to think it through carefully.

Hi BH. Magic words. Stefan Gotteswinter. He did an realignment of his mill column using a made for purpose metal epoxy to, needless to say, improve the rigidity. It’s a hairy operation though. Need to get the alignment sorted before the epoxy goes off. An enhancement to his approach would be to install some adjustment grub screws to help set the alignment, but that would make it an EVEN bigger job ... BobUK.

thanks, u nailed it,, helped me. easy to understand. My lil mill from H.F..

hey quin .... gotta pump out more vids to keep us all entertained in these dark times..... greetings from the virulent uk

@Blondihacks

4 жыл бұрын

Stay safe! Crazy times out there.

Thank you so much for this video. My mill is even smaller, less adjustable and more flexy than yours, but I think you gave me some food for thought that I can use to address it. If only I had a bigger mill,,, and a bigger shop to put it in :)

That looked like an extremely painful and infuriating process. I would probably punch the machine from sheer anger and break my knuckles doing so. Anyway, I totally admire how calm you seem to be about it.