Still Nibbling... but things go awry

[00:00:00]It's been of a dud of an episode. Sorry about that. As we last met, I've been playing around a bit more with that nibbler and trying to figure out what's a good way to mount it on this machine.

[00:00:10]And as I hypothesize, I thought it might be nice to mount it under a table, which I have done here. And I I still want to play with that a little bit more, but I'll share with you where I am on it today. But I did want to show you I keep iterating this drive. Um, you can see I have one of them down here that I was actually just driving this machine. Maybe you can see, maybe you can't driving this with.

[00:00:33]I've gone through a quite a number of variants on here with different levels of quality of finish.

[00:00:42]Um, all of them attempting to take us from a 5/8 inch drive shaft off the back of the headstock into the 1/4 in hex.

[00:00:51]Now, some of the comments that came up were really good and they were things such as, "Well, will it shear? If something were to go wrong over here, is that going to be a weak link? Is that going to shear?" Uh, the answer is no. I have given it some thought and maybe it could be made to do that. But I don't think that that's necessary because of the end where we're driving this accessory. We're driving it first off from the end with the poly V. if your headstock has a poly V-belt upper drive. The second thing is one of the main reasons you would ever need a coupler to shear is because we wouldn't want a part to go flying. If you're running something on a joiner or some tool where you got some rotary action taking place, it's nice to have it shear. Well, all that's happening here is a teeny little steel cutter is moving straight up and down. if if something were to fail, it it's not going to create a major catastrophe here. At least that's how I view it. Anyway, I I thought I'd go back to my original line of thinking, which was instead of building entire an entire drive hub, why not build something that would work with the half inch router chuck? So, that's what I've done here. I have created, let's just call it a bushing or a collet that's got a quarter inch through hole.

[00:02:26]It fits into the halfinch router chuck.

[00:02:30]It then has a hole that's not threaded.

[00:02:33]That hole is just there so that the set screw can pass through and engage with the flat on the quarterinch shaft. I think this makes a lot more sense. It could be made with very little material.

[00:02:49]If somebody didn't have a 3D printer, this part could be made and shipped very inexpensively.

[00:02:55]And because it is so simple, um you could have a couple of them where these having these printed uh couple you can see a couple of the examples of the infill that I was having. And maybe you again, you can't see. Why did I print these out of something black?

[00:03:16]Uh, varying degrees of infill.

[00:03:23]I can make those solid with no voids whatsoever and it would be a very inexpensive part, quick part to produce.

[00:03:32]So that's where I have landed. Now, I made this part, designed this part initially to just be a sleeve first with no hole in from the side, then with a hole from the side. Um, and that this would be slid in. Now, the first problem is if you pre-install this before you put it on the headstock, uh, it may it may push on in deeper than we intend it to. Um, also the hex on the end of that nibbler is just barely long enough to get down to the second set screw on this collet.

[00:04:13]And if I tighten that down, it wanted to push it back out. So, we really only need to engage with the outermost set screw. Um, it doesn't even have to be tight against the shaft. We're just keeping that bushing from spinning. As long as it's spinning along with this, it should work. So, I'm actually in use.

[00:04:34]I'm going to remove this lower set screw so it doesn't come flying out and also so I don't accidentally tighten it. And likewise, since I'm going beyond the steel portion into the plastic bushing, I think I would like to use a longer set screw than a stock on this part. And so I've got a set screw that is twice as long.

[00:05:04]And if we insert that set screw so that it's flush with the interior wall, you can see how far it's sticking out. Right now, guys, you can't see a thing. I'm so sorry. Um, I added a shoulder to this so that it can't drop in too far. That also aligns the hole. And now I can insert that and we'll check that out. See how that works. Slide that over.

[00:05:40]And there we go. Slides right on.

[00:05:44]And lock my headstock down.

[00:05:48]And just for fun, we'll go ahead and tighten that down gently.

[00:05:54]I think that's unnecessary, but we'll do it anyway. Now, in a couple of minutes, we'll flip this over and see what's going on underneath. But ultimately, I think that this surface is going to be covered with something a bit more slippery. Maybe some hardboard or some plastic laminate like for mica. And what's interesting about this nibbler is it can cut at a number of angles. And if I flip it end for end, I've got the end that will allow this part to swivel. Um, but what's cool about this is we could conceivably clamp a fence in place. And that fence could be imperfect. It wouldn't have to be locked in at exactly 90° and we'd still be able to get straight cuts with it. But let's let's try just a little bit of nibbling here in this piece of steel. Uh, let's add a drop of oil here onto that cutter just to be safe. We'll cycle that by hand couple times. Just give the quill a spin.

[00:07:01]And I probably ought to wipe off the excess cuz that's just going to go flying in my face.

[00:07:13]I was just doing another test. I don't need the dust collector on.

[00:07:19]We'll crank this up a little bit.

[00:07:35]Oops. Hey, guess what? I think we may have sheared my my little doohickey with this device.

[00:07:45]Well, I guess now's as good a time as any to flip this thing over and show you what's going on on the other side.

[00:07:57]You can see what I've done. And this is the swiveing end is I've mounted two blocks of wood. One that does not have a through hole. It's got a hole large enough 2-in diameter to house the body here. And then the other one has a slightly smaller. Oh, and I split that pretty good when I ran my screws into it. Um, but the the next size down I had with a forstenner bit was uh a little bit too large. And so I wrapped that with some some tape to get a decent fit.

[00:08:30]Well, okay. I guess I need to unscrew this part.

[00:08:38]This was all completely unexpected.

[00:08:55]And I did kind of sort of intentionally mount this off center because it has a mouth where the chips spill out and I wanted to have it open. I I think if I were to redesign this, and I and I think I will, I'll uh I'll drill a slightly larger hole and center it. U because right now I can't get a a socket over this to remove that. And I should be able to do that.

[00:09:27]It's uh these are now held in place with double-sided tape.

[00:09:36]That's had a little while to cure.

[00:09:48]Fast cap speed tape to be exact.

[00:09:59]This might be a moot point to talk about this if it's uh if it's not going to work, but you can see how I bored a hole partially through.

[00:10:08]Um, I think I went a little deeper than I had planned because I wanted this to basically retain and apply a little bit of pressure against this one.

[00:10:19]And you can see I did some measuring as I was going 2 mm 2 in in diameter, 3/16 deep gets us there to where we are. And then uh ultimately my plan is to build these out of a hardwood and to drill and tap a hole or two for a set screw to lock all this in place.

[00:10:54]Yeah. So 100% I believe the problem is my fancy bushing. So, that's back to the drawing board on that.

[00:11:05]Let's pull that out.

[00:11:16]Do a postmortem. Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's uh that's wrong every which way it can be.

[00:11:26]So that has allowed that quarter inch shaft to just ream that thing. It's cracked it.

[00:11:36][sighs] Back to the drawing board. But I I think we can get there. I think we can get there. Um it looks like I left a little bit too much of a shoulder in here for the set screw to impact.

[00:11:50]Yeah, there's no It has no business doing that. That needs to be a bit more of a clear hole.

[00:11:57]And the fact that it cracked tells me that maybe we have a little bit of a little bit of play here. A little too much. I didn't want this to be too tight, but that might be a bit loose.

[00:12:11]Back to the drawing board.

[00:12:14]All right, so this video isn't a complete waste of your time. I am testing something. Uh, somebody over at mygrowthrings.com in the chat posted that they had uh added a power meter to the back of their headstock and it forced me to go ahead and do something I've been wanting to do for a while and that is to get a plug-in meter. Um, what this allows you to do is to plug this into the wall, plug your Mark 5 or your power tool into it, and it'll tell you exactly what's the highest amount of amperage that you've consumed, what's your total kilowatt hour of consumption and so on. And what I was very curious about is because I'm using an automatic switch that when I turn my Mark 5 on, there's a slight delay, then it turns the dust collector on. Both of those are running then through the exact same receptacle at the same time. Exactly how many amps is it consuming and is there any concern there? So, I'm going to do a quick a quick test. I'll set the camera up in front of the receptacle in front of the meter and I'll tell you what I'm doing. And the first thing is I want to turn it on at low speed and turn it off with no dust collector being triggered. Then I'll crank it all the way up to high speed and turn it off at high speed.

[00:13:30]I should put the saw blade. We'll put the saw blade on here. So there's a bit of a a bit of a load. Crank it up to sawing speed. Turn it off. I'll turn it back on at sawing speed again. Dust collector off. And we'll see what it reads. And then we'll try it with the dust collector triggered on. So let's do all that right here.

[00:13:51]Okay. So, first we're going to try this uh starting at slow speed and we'll see how much amperage it pulls.

[00:14:07]You saw there was an initial surge and then it leveled out. Let's uh start it at slow speed. I'll take it up to saw speed and then I'll turn it off at saw speed.

[00:14:27]All right. So, here we go. Starting it at soft speed.

[00:14:48]Notice there's a little bit of a lag before the automatic switch turns off.

[00:14:53]The one that should be triggering the dust collector. That's a huge initial surge. Wow. I'm going to turn the dust collector switch on, which means when I turn the Mark Five on, there'll be a few second delay and then the dust collector will kick on. Here we go.

[00:15:34]So what did we learn? Well, we learned the obvious, and that is that uh the Mark Five and the dust collector together exceed the maximum amperage of this meter. So, I'm going to keep looking for another one that would be worth using and worth recommending. Uh stay tuned for that. It's been of a dut of an episode. Sorry about that. But, thank you for sticking around to the end. I welcome your questions, comments, and cheap shots. And make it a great day.