Do you have a threading dial on your carriage? They save an awful lot of pissing about - without one, you need to stop the machine, reverse back to your starting position, feed in a bit, rerun your thread, lather rinse repeat until done, all without disengaging the carriage feed. This puts extra str...

Neat. Yeah, hand-cranking is the safest way to go, but it's properly slow. The next one is to thread away from the chuck, for normal threads that means mounting the tool upside down and running the spindle backwards.

It is certainly true that, where what you're making doesn't have to interface with some other precision part, you don't ultimately care about exact dimensions. However, you do care about fit, and that requires measurement. Take the example of a sliding fit, sub 10mm piston in bore, not uncommon in w...

Hey, that's not totally cheap shit throwaway stuff, it'll probably be more than OK. Wedge style is a good call. Watch out for chatter, a QCTP brings the tool out away from the topslide, effectively it's hanging out in the void, any slop in your gibs will show itself here, particularly if you're doin...

I'd suggest you need metrology stuff more than you need a QCTP. At the very least a plunger type comparator and a finger type DTI, plus a decent mag base. The indicators you can get new from SHAHE on AliExpress, but avoid chinese mag bases like the plague - get yourself a good quality second hand on...

I kinda wish mine had automatic feed and thread cutting :) How's accuracy? Have you done all the alignment checks? If you don't have a machinist's level to level the ways, it's worth doing a quick eccentricity / alignment check using "Rollie's Dad's Method", i.e: Take a reasonably long piece of rigi...

Do you mean between movement and display? Yeah. My (cheap, admittedly) digital calipers have a noticeable "catch up" time between any fast movement and the display finally catching up. Even the Mitutoyos have it to a lesser extent, although I believe in that case it's more to do with LCD latency. I...

Neat.

Do they have the slight lag we see from, for example digital calipers? What happens if you run the carriage fast?

PVC primer and cement are solvents. They physically attack the surface of the pipe and fittings, and can produce weak spots exactly where you don't want them. PVC pressure rating charts give the rated pressure for constant pressure conditions, with the pipe properly supported, and without pressure s...

Nice, a much cleaner setup than my workshop. Hell, even your rustic stock stand is cleaner than my workshop :) I like your mill vice. Watch out with the LEDs, depending on the type they have a strobe effect that can make spinning things appear to be still, or jut simply give you a headache if you're...

Do you think his can suffer the same fate as theres ? Don't make me bring out Bob the Angry Flower. It's a 2" cannon, as opposed to the original's 3". For the same piston construction, the piston will have a mass that is at least 4/9 (2^2 / 3^2) less than that of the larger cannon. The force applie...

Do you think it would of been better to put a funneled reducer from the chamber to the barrel instead of an abrupt one? No, I think it would have been better to not use PVC. My guess as to what's happening is that the piston shoots backwards as intended, the pressure behind it perhaps blows off the...

There's a lot of mass in a 3" piston, and PVC is fragile. The break at the barrel end was clean and exactly at the stress riser where the reducer meets the valve body, looks like shock fracture rather than pressure rupture. Lesson to learn - don't do that. At 2:00 or so, he says "That's not funny. I...

Thanks for all your work, man.