Scott just turned 55 last week. He looks like a retired lineman for the Bears. When I first came home from the hospital after my foot amputation he was the one that pulled me up three stairs in my wheel chair so I could recover at home with my wife and our fur children instead of in an institution. He is a Navy vet - has the tats to prove it - and one of the most dependable and trustworthy persons I have ever met. His only problem is he sometimes doesn't know his own strength, I have to hide the cheater bars I need to use when he's around. Even w/o help he can twist the head off a 3/8" bolt. He's getting better, he used to work in a fab shop where problems were solved with muscles, in our shop we solve problems with brains.
The lock ring nut is used for a quick check on the part while its in the machine; every die gets its threads measured with a thread mike after its off the machine. The on-machine test is to make sure the threading insert hasn't chipped or has some other problem. If we catch a bad thread there we can usually fix it right away. The off-machine test is to get an actual size which we can use to get an idea of the trend in dimension. Using the material we are using we usually don't see any significant wear over hundreds of pieces and probably won't need to index the insert even once.
Brad, I'm always looking to make things people want. I'm glad everybody with an opinion had a chance to shape the design with their input. We were running Star dies, which use the same material and some of the same tooling as the Lee type dies, and we had a few days between major jobs so it seemed fortuitous to run a batch. When these are done we will start on a batch of pneumatic tailwheel hubs - I've posted a thread on these a while back - and since sales are good we will have the lathe tied up for several weeks. So now is the time.
I'm thinking of making a special collet with a 7/8-14 thread so we can backface the piece w/o damaging the threads. I've made several special collets, I think I even posted two threads about that here, but I've never made one with internal threads. We'll see how that works out.
Jake's perch is right by our dining room table and right next to my chair, at breakfast tomorrow he will do his jungle gazedown on me while I eat my bacon and eggs. When I finish my raisin bran I put a little milk back in the bowl and put it on the floor, he jumps down and drinks a little, and then our mornings start.
More later, its after midnight here and I had an eye injection at 3 this afternoon and my left eye is sore and my vision is still blurry and I've got a bit of a headache so I'm going to call it a day.
