Other than the local tech school...where might I learn about using a milling machine? Are there videos, books etc that might be of use that any of you know of? I just acquired a machine that has a lot of tooling...but how fast to run, when to use centering cuters, fly cutters. I just have no clue. Thanks.
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Learning about milling machines?
- Thread starter John L
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- Feb 8, 2006
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Books might be a good place to start. There are a lot of them that give the basics of machine tool technology and how to do the usual stuff. I never had any courses and picked up on the stuff fairly easily. A place like Amazon is bound to have tons of good books out there.
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- Mar 8, 2006
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Lots of books, lots of videos. Try http://www.homeshopmachinist.net/. There are a lot of industry magazines but you'll probably find The Home Shop Machinist and Projects in Metal the most useful magazines. Your city may have a metalworking club too. A large bookstore like Barnes & Noble or Borders will have the magazine. You'll find lots of ads in there for videos and books.
http://www.americangunsmith.com/ has some extensive video machining courses for the mill and lathe too.
George
http://www.americangunsmith.com/ has some extensive video machining courses for the mill and lathe too.
George
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Here is a speed and feed chart that may answer one of your questions.
http://www.endmill.com/pages/training/spdfeed.htm
http://www.endmill.com/pages/training/spdfeed.htm
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Check out www.practicalmachinist.com . There's a few top name knifemakers that hang out there and a LOT of experienced home shop and pro machinists. There's probably even a forum for your type of mill (Bridgeport?).
A good cheap and not too thick foundational book is How To Run a Mill by Fred Colvin. It's avaialble in reprint for from Lindsay Press. It was written in the 40s, but if you're running a manual mill, not much has changed. Setup and cutting speeds and most of the tooling is the same as it was then. There's certinaly been some further development in materials both for cutting tools and workpieces, but it will give you all the basics.
You can also look here for some online training:
http://mmu.ic.polyu.edu.hk/index.asp
The best thing to do is watch the local garage sales and classifieds and when you see used machinery or tooling for sale, call and see if there's some old guy selling off his stuff. You can often get some great deals on cool tools, but if you're really lucky, you'll find an old fella that will come visit and give you some pointers
I'd recommend buying some aluminum and cold rolled steel and some endmills to start and make some chips. This approach mean's you're going to scrap a few cutters, but it's going to happen anyway so you might as well get used to it now
If you're really ambitious and want to become a rell versed and versatile machinist, buy a copy of the 27th Edition of MAchinery's HAndbook and read it. When you're done, you'll be good!
There's a few guys around here that know how to turn the crank on a machine pretty well
Tell us about your machine.
A good cheap and not too thick foundational book is How To Run a Mill by Fred Colvin. It's avaialble in reprint for from Lindsay Press. It was written in the 40s, but if you're running a manual mill, not much has changed. Setup and cutting speeds and most of the tooling is the same as it was then. There's certinaly been some further development in materials both for cutting tools and workpieces, but it will give you all the basics.
You can also look here for some online training:
http://mmu.ic.polyu.edu.hk/index.asp
The best thing to do is watch the local garage sales and classifieds and when you see used machinery or tooling for sale, call and see if there's some old guy selling off his stuff. You can often get some great deals on cool tools, but if you're really lucky, you'll find an old fella that will come visit and give you some pointers
I'd recommend buying some aluminum and cold rolled steel and some endmills to start and make some chips. This approach mean's you're going to scrap a few cutters, but it's going to happen anyway so you might as well get used to it now
If you're really ambitious and want to become a rell versed and versatile machinist, buy a copy of the 27th Edition of MAchinery's HAndbook and read it. When you're done, you'll be good!
There's a few guys around here that know how to turn the crank on a machine pretty well
Tell us about your machine.
- Joined
- Aug 15, 2005
- Messages
- 1,297
You can rent videos & dvds from technical video rental (http://technicalvideorental.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=115_13).