Tips and techniques

 

These galleries show some tips and ideas for helping make the manipulator.

Experienced machinists might bear with us as we are facilitating constructors with no previous experience and please forward any ideas or criticisms that you feel might help.

 

Cutting, drilling and marking

 

 

Finishing and polishing

 

 

Marking coin centres for drilling

Download and print for use as shown in gallery below
Circlecentre.pdf
Adobe Acrobat Document 247.6 KB

 

TAPPING

There is no mystery or special technique to making a threaded hole and instructions for making a tapped M5 hole are given below.

 

  1. Use wood screw punch to mark hole centre.
  2. Drill 4.5mm hole using drop of oil and keeping drill bit upright and plumb in both planes.
  3. Insert tap into drill and drop of oil to hole. Then 'drill' very slowly into hole keeping drill bit upright and plumb in both planes. After a couple of seconds reverse drill for a moment to clear swarf and then repeat slow tapping. Keep doing this until threading is complete.