Cylinders from solid

[jeffhills]

A few Pics of my newly finished (apart from tarting up) 5" Jersey Lilly Cylinders. Cost of materials for the cylinder set about £150 from Macc, as opposed to over £400 for the casting set. If you value your time its much cheaper to buy castings, but virtually every casting I have bought has had to be machined all over to get an acceptable result.
On the cost over the years, I started this model about 15 Years ago (no it has not taken that long, I got divorced and did not touch it for 13 years) I earned much less then than I do now, but I dont remember falling off my chair whenever I ordered anything, I recently paid £95 for about 16" of 5.1/2" 10swg copper tube.

[havoc]

Looks to be a very nice job. Honestly, I never saw any convenience in castings. They always need a lot of work, so starting from a solid block would not be much more time consuming.

Is that milk you use as cutting fluid?

[simonwass]

It's always nice to see something made from solid, I hope you collect the swarfe to weigh in!
One question though, as you are going to the trouble to machine from solid why did you choose brass/gunmetal/bronze as opposed to iron?
Nicely done work with the ball nose cutter producing all the radiuses to the corners, shame it'll hidden, you know its there though. Is it done manually or CNC?

[simonwass]

havoc said:

Is that milk you use as cutting fluid?

The 'milk' will be soluble oil, suds as we call it at work. You have to be careful with it though as bacteria can grow it in and old stuff goes mouldy. Best stuff I ever used was green and like water, no idea what it was though.

[jeffhills]

Thanks for replies, Fluid is normal soluable oil, yes it can go off, the green stuff as I recall is very high dilution, it works great but lets the M/C rust. The 3D work is MNC (manual numeric control), all machinining is manual as shown with the rotary table in horizontal with ball nose cutter, but working to coordinates from a model drawn in Autodesk mechanical desktop. I did consider CI, but its back to the old debate of corrosion in a model that does not get used much.
Jeff
Jeff