1)
Most excellent coolant jug. Next time you buy a soda pop or water in a plastic bottle with a screw on cap, save the bottle. This is a perfect coolant dispenser. All you have to do is poke a hole in the flat surface of the cap with a scriber or a sharp pointed tool and fill the bottle with coolant. You can make the hole as small or large as you want. These things are deadly accurate and extremely stingy with the coolant when you make a small hole. Be sure to remove product label and write COOLANT on the bottle with a magic marker. You will love this one.
2) Manual mill table work tray. If you are using multiple tools while running parts on a manual mill (ie: centerdrill, drill, tap, chamfer tool etc.), it only makes sense that keeping your tools close to your work saves time. The problem is if we put the tools on the mill table or the vise, they have a tendency to fall thru the t-slots or off the vise and they may chip or get lost. Solution: Take a standard clipboard and rig it up with a t-nut and a socket head cap screw thru the hole used for hanging it on a wall. Then, place a shop towel on the clipboard. The shop towel provides a nice soft surface for your tools and keeps them from rolling around. Hold the towel down with the clip on the clipboard. Install the clipboard on the table top and place your tools on the shop towel.
3) Simple parallel keepers. If you don't have spring loaded parallel keepers, the simplest thing to use is rubber bands. Put the parallels next to the vise jaws and strap the parallels to the vise jaws with the rubber bands going all the way around the jaw plates.
4) Unclog the flutes of your endmill. When milling aluminum sometimes we run out of coolant or we use to heavy of a feed or too many flutes in an endmill and the flutes will load up with aluminum. If you are fast enough to shut the machine off before the tool breaks, most times the flutes will be loaded with material. To remove this material, leave the tool in the machine and place the point of an automatic center punch at the top edge of the material right next to the flute of the tool with the center punch pointing down and put the center punch to work. It will take one or two pops and the material will come loose. Use caution, you can easily cut yourself.
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