Although my apprenticeship was pretty comprehensive, when I was told that there were a couple of hundred drills in the tool crib that needed sharpening and I asked who was going to teach me to sharpen drills, I was told, "go buy a book". I did and by the time I'd sharpened 400-500 drills over the course of a couple of years, even the old timers were having me sharpen their drills. I could split a point freehand on drills as small as 3/32".
Anybody who can put a proper point on a drill bit isn't going to have any trouble grinding a toobit.
Bill, I too am a bit OCD about the kitchen knives. I use a combination of diamond and Japanese water stones for kitchen knives. Use diamond, ceramics and a extremely fine hard Arkansas for my straight razors.
Ian, I'm looking forward to seeing your first part(s) machined on your new lathe.
Here ya go, first part I ever made. I wanted to learn how to do inside threading because my next project is to make a spider. This is a scrap of flashlight tube, the only piece of aluminum tubing I had handy to play with this afternoon. Having no boring bar or HSS blanks to make one, I found a 1/2x13 tap with a couple of broken teeth and ground all but one tooth off of one side, then diamond filed the correct angles for 1-7/16x20. Then I ground a flat on the underside to keep it from twisting and get it to hold the correct angle to the work. After working on a cheap carbide boring bar for a while to get it sharp, I cut the minor diameter to depth and relieved to full thread depth plus a couple thousandths at the bottom of the hole, .100" wide at the bottom of the relief. My goal with this machine was to avoid having to thread toward the chuck, but there wasn't enough tooth on the RH tap to make a left hand tool so I did it the way most people do and set up a dial indicator for zero, and zeroed the carriage dial at the bottom of the hole plus put a grease pencil mark about .050" from the end to tell me when to throw out the half nuts. Try as I might, the part kept walking out of the chuck, so I had to find the threads again about 20 times, I guess I never did get the tube exactly centered in the steady rest, or .002" TIR is too much to keep the part from fretting out of the outside jaws in spite of me hanging the part in free air, indicating it in the jaws, and bringing the steady rest fingers up to the part without disturbing it in the jaws as I rotated the chuck by hand. Anyway, it worked, after a fashion, and I got a perfect fit with the battery end cap, no bind, no grind, and no wiggle. I was going to cut a thread relief and o-ring groove on the outside, but it's just a practice part so I chamfered the end slightly and called it good.
Don't laugh at my jury-rigged threading bar, it worked like a champ!
