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Thread to discuss positive things in a general manner


GearsNSuch

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My new hard drive arrived yesterday. It's the entry-level Samsung 870 SSD, so not computer-boots-in-three-seconds fast, but fast enough for my purposes. I migrated my data (Samsung's data migration software works wonders) and installed the drive yesterday evening - and again I must sing the praises of Lenovo for making most of the main components of my trusty old Thinkpad so accessible. The hard drive was just behind a panel on the side of the laptop.

It may not be the fastest SSD you can buy, but OH MY GOODNESS is it an improvement over the clunky old mechanical drive!

- The OS boots in 15 seconds, which is much better than the minute it used to take.

- Google Chrome loads almost instantly (I had to wait some time for it to display more than a white screen before)

- My modded KSP install takes 6 minutes to load (previously 15-20 mins), a stripped-back install 4 minutes, and a stock install in about a minute and a half.

- Scene changes are lightning fast, and FPS in all situations seems to have improved noticeably.

My computer used to be depressingly slow. Then I installed an SSD. Now I laugh at HDDs and their slow and sad ways!

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  • 1 month later...

Yesterday I bought a milling machine. Today we managed to manhandle it into the workshop.

I'm super excited about it, but unfortunately it is entirely in freedom units which I don't speak. I figure it would be cheaper and better to install DRO than trying to find metric leadscrews, nuts and dials, and mess with the mechanics.

It came with a decent bunch of accessories (again, most of them imperial), so I still have some expenses in my near future, but overall I'm happy.

It found a nice place next to the lathe and I have some cleaning and adjusting to do before it returns to functional state (we removed xy table for transport).

I also think I'll use this opportunity to make some drawers for all the tools for the mill and lathe. Happy times.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yo guys, where's that positivity?

Anyway, yesterday, the aforementioned milling machine finally got assembled and some chips started flying. The DRO still hasn't arrived (maybe I should contact the seller, I still don't have the tracking number or any other indication of stuff happening), but a project for the mill has cropped up and I decided I need to accelerate things.

My colleague has a modified drill press that he uses as a milling machine in his little home workshop, but while not particularly heavy (30-40 kg) it's not really practical to move it back and forth. Also, it's still a drill press and not exactly rigid. It can take light cuts in aluminium and brass, but cutting steel is very slow. Those two things convinced us to assemble my milling machine even without DRO and just deal with imperial stuff for the small project we need to do next week.

I also have a milling attachment for my lathe, but I should really buy a new vise for it. The thread on the one I have now is shot and even if it was perfect, it's still very limited. However, with a proper milling machine in the shop now, I see no need to do that.

Back to my new milling machine. I cleaned what appeared to be storage preservative (I'm not sure why the previous owner left it that way, but the gunk is gone) and oiled everything. I had a piece 5 mm aluminum plate with one nasty edge, put it in a vise and eyeballed a 2-2,5 mm cut to clean it up. Amazing! It had absolutely no problem with it and left a nice finish behind the endmill. I could probably have gone much deeper.

Unfortunately, my enthusiasm was short lived. The cleaned up plate now measured 37,28 mm, so I gave myself a task to bring it down to 36 mm. Freedom units, enter stage left. It took me a good 3 minutes and a dial indicator to figure out how much I should turn the Z axis dial, and, honestly, I will have to figure it out all over again, because I have no idea what I did in the end, but whatever that was, after the second cut my aluminum plate ended up being 36,02 mm. I think I ended up turning the dial exactly one turn, which would/should mean that one turn is equal to 0,05 inch, or 1,25 mm, but the marking on the dial go from 0, 10, 20, 30 ... to 100 (100 is 0 again) and there are subdivisions, with IIRC 0,0005 measurement between two smallest marks. That would mean one turn is equal to 0,05 inch of travel. The math checks out, but I am just unable to easily switch back and forth between metric and imperial.

I'll do the project next week, but DRO is going to be mandatory. Off to aliexpress to drop a message to the seller.

Oh, forgot to mention my metric collets arrived yesterday, so that's a good news.

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