by Barry Young

Machines are expensive. Dust is abrasive. Don’t believe me? Go get that old motorcycle helmet that Aunt Beunice gave you for your 16^th birthday after you bought that 125cc Honda Combat Wombat with your paper route money. Yeah, the snazzy lime green one. See all that dust on the face shield? Give it a good rub and telephone me to tell me it didn’t scratch it up.

You keep your calipers and micrometers in a toolbox right? Those baseball cards that Grampa gave you go into his footlocker right? You keep your money in a bank right? So what do you do with your machinery? If you are like ninety nine percent of amateur machinists you let your machinery sit out in the open, unprotected, cold and lonely.

Next time you are using foul language to describe to a friend how your machine wouldn’t hold the tolerance you wanted it to, look back at how you treated the poor machine. You oughta be ashamed. Why would you put the bench grinder where it would spit abrasive particles onto the lathe? You mean you did woodworking in the same room as your metal machines are stored? Don’t you know that wood chips will soak up all the oil on those precision surfaces and make them rub together? The precision of your machinery is based on the wear that occurs to the ways and other sliding surfaces. So when you are done hanging your head, when your lip stops quivering, I will help you pay your penance. Even you can seek forgiveness at the chapel of the recovering machine abuser.

The only way to fix up your Karma is to make covers for your machinery. Yeah, a lathe cozy. This sounds dumb until you think about it. Like “Don’t run with the scissors,” sounded dumb until you either thought about it or found out why people told you that. This is the same, you can learn the easy way through logic or you can poo poo the idea and pay when your machines will no longer do what they should. I finally got sick of waiting for February 30^th which is when my wife said she would finish my equipment covers and asked her to show me how to sew fabric. This she was perfectly willing to do. It was not that hard to learn. We measured the extreme length, width and height of my Atlas horizontal milling machine and she made a sort of toaster cover shaped thing that fit like snot because the mill was not a perfect cube. Scratching my head I thought up a better way. That is what this article is about.

I took a cheap blue tarp and threw it over the mill. Everywhere there was looseness in the tarp got a row of pins. Eventually the tarp fit it snugly. I cut away all the excess tarp and cut nice and even around the base. Voila! We had made a pattern. We took it into the sewing room and laid cotton duck (fabric) down on the floor and laid the “pattern” over it. Dang! The fabric was too narrow. No Problem, We sewed on an extra ten inches and now it was wide enough. We pinned the pattern to the material, traced around it with a Sharpie marker and cut it out. She showed me how to sew the seams  which was WAY easier than I thought. I had her sew (hem) a piece of clothesline around the base of the cover and it was done. Yay! It fit all the curves and odd surfaces of the mill. It literally was a custom made cover.

Next came the Atlas 7-inch shaper. I decided to document the process and do all of it by myself.  Here are photos of the goofy shape that needed a cover

It is an ungainly thing to try to cover.

Under the tarp it looked like an ostrich trying not to be seen.

See that big flap ‘o nonsense hanging off the front? That is the excess we are trying to get rid of. Gathering all the excess material together then pinning it to isolate extra fabric leads to rows of straight pins pinching off whatever you want to get rid of like this.

Once the excess is pinned you can carve away the extra fabric OUTSIDE the pins with scissors leaving you something better looking like this.

Be sure to write on it before you take it off so that the outside is obvious. Otherwise the seams will show and your buddies will laugh even harder at you. When you trim away the bottom of the cover level with the floor it suddenly looks like a machine cover.

Now the pins can come out and you have a pattern. Lay this on the fabric you have chosen. You can see how I had to add material to get the width problem mentioned above solved.

Trace around the pattern and cut out the fabric. Sew up the seams and sew in the cord around the bottom. You now have custom fit machine covers. In this last photo you can see the incognito shaper on the left before the cord is sewn in around the bottom and the incognito milling machine on the right with the cord sewn in. The cord gives the cover a finished appearance so don’t be an idiot and leave it out.

That’s it! If you have a question or you want to leave a comment please click the “Join the forum discussion on this post” link below to log into the forum topic tied to this post.

- Barry

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Here’s a quick tip for you. Organize your small tools with this handy magnetic tool holder.

This was another project that caught my eye while surfing instructables.com, especially since I had just picked up some speakers at a second hand store to use as a mag-base for my dial indicator.

So if you have an hour to kill and some extra speakers laying around …

Just remember not to hang any tools that you don’t want picking up residual magnetism!

The original instructable can be found here, but I’ve included a PDF copy for those who don’t have an instructables.com account. This project was reposted with permission from the original author, klee27x. Thanks Klee!

  Organize-your-tools-with-a-speaker-magnet.pdf (237.9 KiB, 141 hits)
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Sometimes my laziness tries to get in the way of doing things properly. For instance, there have been numerous times where the proper way of approaching a setup would be to turn the piece between centers. For me that means removing my 3 jaw chuck so that I can fit a MT#4 dead center in my spindle.

I don’t know why, but I’ll spend 20 minutes trying to figure out an alternative setup rather than spending 5 minutes removing my 3 jaw chuck.

Then one day at GEARS in Portland someone asked me why I just don’t turn a sacrificial center and use that in my 3 jaw. Great idea!

The principle behind a sacrificial center is simple. It’s a center that can be re-chucked and re-turned to ensure that it’s perfectly centered. Whenever you need to turn between centers you simply chuck the sacrificial center in your 3 jaw chuck, set your compound at 30° (60° included), and shave off a few thousandths to ensure that it’s turning concentric.

It’s simple to build, but since this site is geared toward absolute beginners I’ll include pictures and directions below. The next time you need to turn something between centers, you’ll think twice before removing that chuck!

The Process:

First, find a piece of scrap steel an inch or so in diameter. Turn a shank down to about a half inch in diameter and at least an inch long.

Part off the piece leaving 2 to 3 inches of length on the larger diameter. The longer you make this portion, the more sacrificial cuts you’ll get out of it before you need to make a new center. Flip and re-chuck the parted-off piece.

Set your compound at 30° (60° included) and cut the center to a point in several passes.

You’re done once your center has a nice point to it.

Whenever you need to turn something between centers, re-chuck your sacrificial center, set your compound at 30° (60° included), and remove a few thousandths to ensure that the center is perfectly concentric along the axis of rotation. That’s it!

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