Homemade Tool & Cutter grinder (with a difference).

[tonyfoale]

Thanks for the wonderful explanation.

My pleasure, I'm glad that you liked it.

I inherited a bunch of dull end mills that I've been able to put back to work.

I have friend in the US who has a shop with quite a few CNC machines, some churning out parts 24/7. I usually visit several times a year and often bring back my luggage allowance worth of used carbide milling cutters. Mostly they are perfect for me without sharpening, but they scrap them as soon as that new edge has gone off. After I finished the T&C grinder I collected all my cutters and drills that needed attention and so I was able to freshen up many of those "scrap" cutters.

But your explanation is probably the most concise breakdown of the process I've found. I would like to find or make some square hole R8 collets to do like what you did for lathe bits.

I think that I have seen Discount_machine on eBay with square in R8, if they have them then many other vendors will have them. Another option worth considering is to get a small 4 jaw chuck with an R8 fixing, that will give even more flexibility. I have a 4" 3 jaw chuck like that which is very useful for chucking work on the mill spindle to let me use the mill as a lathe.

I think it's sad to see the continued reliance on CNC. .... It was not progress IMHO, just another form of automation with a human servant.

I understand your stance and share many of those same feelings, however you are not going to stop it. Correct me if I'm wrong but I suspect that your main concern is more about the disappearing skills that seem to go hand in hand with automation. If so then I think that you should be more concerned about the effect of moving the manufacturing base eastward. Much work that is done there is not CNC because labour is so cheap. So the loss of manufacturing skills in western countries is not only due to automation ( of course it is an important contributor) but to the short sighted policies of shipping the work to cheaper places. We must ask for how much longer will that option will remain cheaper. There will be no incentive to make stuff cheap once nobody else has a manufacturing base left, nor the means to re-establish one.
However, loss of skills is by no means a new thing, people have been worried about this for centuries. How many cannon ball makers are there left? How many people can now make wagon wheels, shoe a horse? Less than there were because we don't need those things any more. Do you want to give up your car or motorcycle in exchange for a horse and carriage? Maybe you do but don't expect many people to join you.
As for CNC I have to confess to having a Bridgeport mill that was fitted out with an early CNC system from new. I still use it mostly as a manual machine because I find it fast for a lot of my work, but I use the CNC for work that would be very difficult or very time consuming and/or boring otherwise.
Remember that it was Henry Ford who endorsed the trend towards deskilling work and he had no CNC. but I am sure that he would have been an early adopter if he had the chance.