It have happened a lot the past week. I have traveled from Berlin to Brno, Czech Republic, there have however been several stops on the way.
Last weekend was spent in Braunschweig, Germany. There I visited a guy I met at EHSM. I visited the hackerspace in Braunschweig, stratum0, it was really nice. We went to the Hannover Makerfaire on Saturday. On Monday I took the train to Dresden. I stayed there a couple of days and visited the hackerspace.
Nex the trip went to Prague. Brmlab was really cool, but unfortunately I missed the high voltage stuff they worked on.
Now I am in Brno, the second largest city in the Czech republic. It is a nice city, not as touristy as Prague which is nice. As of writing this I unfortunately have not been able to visit the hacerspace. Hopefully I will do that tomorrow.
The plan further is to go to Vienna and visit Metalab, which I have heard a lot of good things about.
I am interested in electronics, machining, programming and making in general. My main project at the moment is a Farnsworht fusor, a pretty simple fusion reactor. For that project I have learned myself welding, board layout, vacuum system design and a lot of other stuff.
I am currently traveling through Europe visiting hackerspaces and other cool places. I have been in Hamburg for the EHSM conference. I am currently in Berlin visiting the city and the hackerspaces.
I am going to the Hannover makrefaire, from 5.7 to 6.7. After that I am going to travel south-east towards Dresden, Prague and Vienna. For this I want tips for places and people to meet.
I will update the page as the plans change.
After some use I was now satisfied with the surface finish when using the collet chuck. I measured the run out of the chuck it self, it had about 0.25mm (10 thou). No wonder I was getting poor surface finish. The quill had about 0.025mm(1 thou) witch is not bad considering how the table of my mill looks, some pretty large chunks are chipped away.
I have ordered a new chuck from china, but who knows when it will arrive.
The problem
I recently accuired a milling machine with a rather special way of holding the collet chuck. The way it is designed with a gear head does not allow for the use of a draw bar. Instead it uses a special nut to hold the collet chuck in the MT4 quill. The problem with this design is that tooling commonly available does not have any where for the nut to hold on to.
The solution
For various reasons the collet chuck I have is MT3 and my quill is MT4. That’s no problem, adapter sleeves are commonly available. When assembled there is a space between the end of the adapter and the collet chuck. Just big enugh to fit a ring for holding the collet chuck in place. I decided to machine a ring the fit the grove. Luckily the dimensions on everything where just right so a ring would be strong and simple to machine.
I schetched out the outline of the ring and added some mesurements. Dimentions are not that critical since the nut have plenty of tread to work on. This comes in handy for a inexperiencd hobby macheenist like my self. Luckally I foud a pice of 50mm roud stock, just the right dimention. In its previous life it had been a cluch sentering device, for use when fitting a new cluch. Then it was just a siple matter of cutting of 25mm blank. When I say simple, I mean it would be simple if you had a bandsaw or power hacksaw. However I am not that fortunate, I only have a simple hacksaw. First I marked 25mm from the edge all the way around. Then it is just a simple matter of cutting it of. It probably took me ten minutes. 
Then it is of to machining in my mini lathe. As it is rather small, it’s not to happy about taking heavy cuts in steel. But with a relatively sharp HSS tool and light cuts it worked well enough. First the blank was faced and center drilled. Then I expanded the hole first with a drill and later with a boring bar. Then the outside was next, it was rather simple to machine In most places my tolerances were large enough for me to just measure it with a scale. Finally I broke the corners with a file.
After machining it was a matter of assembling it. I sandwiched the ring in between the taper of the collet chunk and the sleeve I needed however to fasten the the MT3 collet chuck to the MT3-MT4 sleeve, otherwise I would be just as far. I decided to super glue the chuck and the sleeve thogether. Aditionaly I beat the chuck hard in to the sleeve. The sulution that I went with is probably not ideal but it seems to work. Althugh it have fallen out ocationaly. Hoever this might have more to do with the qualety of cheap the chuck and sleve. When I tested the fit with bearing blue it only had contact about 1/3 of the way.
Conclusion
All in all it was a I am quite happy about the result, and wil probably make a few more rings for stuff like boring bars and fly cutters. If I where to put more work in to it I wold probably make something to fit in the slot on top of the sleve to draw the chuck up in to the sleve. This would probably be better than superglue.
Yay it works! Hopefully I will be posting stuff from projects that I am working on here.
Electronics 'n stuff 