Lot of setups and fixtures for one little part. They look great. I've been meaning to do one for the buttstock on my Marlin 336. Did you make that round over bit used at the end of the process or is that a commercial piece? I haven't seen one that diameter and I was counting on doing that operation with files and stones. I don't have CNC so I'll be blending by hand anyway.
Happy Thanksgiving ! The material is 12L14 carbon steel as it produces a great surface finishes and rust blues very well.
I made a form cutter out of a straight flute HSS keyway endmill with my surface grinder. Using a radius dressed wheel with spin fixture. It cuts pretty good as a "flapper". I'd rather have a helical carbide form tool, but for now the home made form tool works well.
The variable flute 1/2" & 1/4" carbide mills are from Online Carbide and they eat steel and last well dry cutting. My mill doesn't have flood coolant.
These are the swivel of choice for most of the rifles I build.
Cool. How long does it take to program it to cut 8 at a time? Is each one a thing, or can you tell it to move 3" and repeat?
The first operation after sawing and deburring is done as a sub program where I just call up different work coordinates for each swivel location. You can see the sharpie doodling on the vise jaws G54, etc. Pretty easy to just keep adding vises and work offsets. The other operations are repeated programming the first one then repeated in a grid. The conversational programming on the Milltronics is much more versatile than I've mastered yet. I'm not really a machinist, just a gunmaker that learned to program.