What's going on in your shop? Show us whats going on, and talk a bit about your work!

got my vortex all assembled and in place, fits perfect under my air filter fan. There's some stuff still to do, but the bones are there

view from either side of the wall
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in retrospect, I think it's a little weird that I was working on these two things concurrently today- a huge slab of W2, scale and a 36 grit belt, and a tiny, easy burn Richlite handle a 220 grit.
so now I have a bunch of filing and stick sanding on the little guy, and I can work on transferring the pattern onto the North Sword 2.0 when the handwork gets tedious. I like working through many projects all underway at the same time.
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Learned a good lesson yesterday! I did some Magnacut and AEB-L heat treating a few weeks ago in my new oven. Well, I thought it was AEB-L! I was 66-68 out of the quench/cryo (1975 for 15 and plate quench, temper at 300), which is way harder than AEB-L should be able to get. I noticed some issues using the shop knife; brittle, chipped easily and snapped the tip off twice and saw some larger grain. I snapped some tang off the other blade I though was AEB-L and it had huge grain. I dunked it in Ferric Chloride and sure enough, it etched. I had done some of the blanks in AEB-L and others in a carbon steel back in 2013 and didn't use the carbon ones, so it pays to label your steel bars and blanks so you know what it is!

I also snapped a piece from a Magnacut blade and the grain looks awesome! I was worried my oven TC was way off and I was overheating the steel, but it was mixing up a carbon steel for AEB-L!

What I thought was AEB-L (is actually a carbon steel!) on the left, Magnacut on the right:
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Quick acid dunk confirmed it
UFZ0QP9.jpeg


Label your bars of steel and blanks!!! Glad I kept this one for myself as a shop knife!
 
Taz said:
Learned a good lesson yesterday! I did some Magnacut and AEB-L heat treating a few weeks ago in my new oven. Well, I thought it was AEB-L! I was 66-68 out of the quench/cryo (1975 for 15 and plate quench, temper at 300), which is way harder than AEB-L should be able to get. I noticed some issues using the shop knife; brittle, chipped easily and snapped the tip off twice and saw some larger grain. I snapped some tang off the other blade I though was AEB-L and it had huge grain. I dunked it in Ferric Chloride and sure enough, it etched. I had done some of the blanks in AEB-L and others in a carbon steel back in 2013 and didn't use the carbon ones, so it pays to label your steel bars and blanks so you know what it is!

I also snapped a piece from a Magnacut blade and the grain looks awesome! I was worried my oven TC was way off and I was overheating the steel, but it was mixing up a carbon steel for AEB-L!

What I thought was AEB-L (is actually a carbon steel!) on the left, Magnacut on the right:
UM1R4dZ.jpeg


Quick acid dunk confirmed it
UFZ0QP9.jpeg


Label your bars of steel and blanks!!! Glad I kept this one for myself as a shop knife!
Click to expand...
The white paint pens that welding shops sell work awsome for marking steel and the markings survive heat treat.
 
Good to know! I usually use a sharpie and then redo it after heat treat. These were old blanks from 10 years ago!
 
Several years ago, I made a device to use my Dremel as a Milling machine to cut slots into guards in Synthetic material:
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It worked, but the threads holding the Dremel in the Aluminum cross piece weren't super tight and there was play in that area, as well as in the height adjustment and where the pipe went through the aluminum for the clamping assembly. The Dremel bogged down and shifted a biut under pressure. The vise was only held on to the carriage of the rails with 2 screws, too, so there way some play in that.

I decided to beef up the assembly a bit! I went with shorter pipes and have flanges top and bottom so I can bolt them to the aluminum cross piece to make the gantry more solid. To get the height adjustment, I used a manual linear slide actuator table to control the vertical movement and used some 1" scope rings to hold the hand piece of a generic Foredom type rotary tool, which has a LOT more oomph than the Dremel does! I used a section of Picatinny Rail to hold the scope rings/hand piece and made an adapter plate to go from the Scope Rail to the Sliding table piece, and angle iron to attach it to the aluminum cross piece. I just need to bolt the upper flanges to the bottom of the aluminum cross piece and I am hoping to test it out tonight after work!

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Once I get all of the hole spaces properly figured out, I will get some 3" x 3" X 12" or 14" long, 1/4" thick angle iron and make the gantry 1 piece and upgrade to a better drill press vise and redo the base as well. I am even considering using another linear slide table (or cross slide vise) instead of the linear rails for more precision in that area.

And yes, I need to clean my workbench!!
 
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