Hello World! Welcome to my very first blog post. In this post, I am going to share my experience starting my career in the manufacturing industry and the top 5 important lessons I learned in 6 months of my work.
Before we go further, here is just a little bit about my background. I have had a good amount of theoretical knowledge but every little practical experience on the workshop floor. So most of the mistakes I made might be silly and this article is for the absolute beginner. Anyways, let see if these mistakes are pretty common in the industry.
1. Cut little, Check often
This is one of the first lessons I learned, that it is never good to compromise your workpiece while squaring your block to size. Initial I made the mistake of trying to take big cuts and not paying attention to measurements and going undersize for which I had to restart the whole process again because there is no other way to put the material back and fix it.
Now, I always measure often at least twice and take small cuts when I get closer to the actual dimension and leave extra material.
2. Parallelograming your square block
While squaring a block it is easy to get 90 deg perpendicular angle for 4 sides but it gets little trickier when it comes to ends of the block. Despite knowing how to square the block, I quite often end up making the workpiece parallelogram in shape. but this is not that big of an issue if you are using a stopper on one end of the vise and it is always good to see some tutorials and practice to square it by leaving extra material before doing the final sizing.
3. Mark your Origin
This is one the things all experience machinist will advise is to have origin marked on your workpiece or have a reference point. because when you want to re-machine or do the bottom machine the same reference point is needed to get accurate results.
4. Make your way up for feed and speed
The first thing we do when we select feed and speed is to look for recommended values on google. there are many parameters which online calculator might not take into consideration. After breaking and chipping out a few cutters now I figured out that it is safe to take less depth of cuts with 90% of recommended feeds and speeds and make your way up.
5. Secure properly
After rotating a heavy vise on the drill machine and flying a block of the grinding table, I learned that it is extremely important to keep the workpiece as rigid and tight as possible and avoid any vibration and movement for the safety of cutter, workpiece, and the operator.
if you have made your down till here, thank you for reading and make sure to leave your comments and share it with the fellow apprentice.
Ali Farhan
Blogging and Creating Youtube Videos Tutorial on Industrial Design, Manufacturing, and Gaming. Toolroom Machinist at Nahanni steel plant, learning and sharing knowledge.
