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IndustryArena Forum > MetalWorking Machines > Tormach Personal CNC Mill > Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz
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  1. #21
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    I enjoy reading threads like this on what people are doing and how they are doing it. I always pick up some useful information, pitfall or technic that can be used on future projects

  2. #22
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by mountaindew View Post
    I enjoy reading threads like this on what people are doing and how they are doing it. I always pick up some useful information, pitfall or technic that can be used on future projects
    Thank you mountaindew:

    I sometimes wonder if other machinists or hobbyist are even into this kind of do-it-yourself home made stuff and the accompanying learning-curve problems it brings. I'm afraid the long winded posts I make on my threads are just a habit I've developed from being a member of other forums where the folks there are actually into the same kind of stuff that I am.

    MetalShavings.

  3. #23
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    I sometimes wonder if other machinists or hobbyist are even into this kind of do-it-yourself home made stuff and the accompanying learning-curve problems it brings.

    Yes. Yes, indeed. Keep up the long-winded posts.


    If you need to dial in the 3-jaw spot on (holding hex stock, fer instance) just hog out the mounting screw holes on the adapter plate. You can then chuck a dowel pin of about the same diameter as your part/barrel in the chuck and tap it in true before gronking it down to the 4th faceplate.

    Hillbilly Set-Tru chuck.

    If the tool path looks off when you use the marker, check the runout to see if it's off center in Y. I put a fine-point sharpie in an aluminum TTS shank for the same type of testing - I can trust it for checking the path, but not for a precision location due to wobble at the tip.

    Nice job on the setup, BTW. Can't wait to see how the barrel turns out.

  4. #24
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Thanks spumco:

    I'm still waiting on that 4-Jaw chuck. It should be here soon. I bought it off of Ebay and whenever you buy something being shipped in from China they give you an estimated arrival time. In this case it is due to be here between April the 10th-21st. That's a pretty large swath of time but no matter; as long as it gets here.

    The small 3-Jaw chuck I have on their now was mounted in the exact manner you described and it's always been "Good-Enough" for me but this time around I'm looking for a little more precision. Both the backing plate and the nuts within the slots of my 4-Axis are home made. I made them with what I thought would be enough slop to be able to tap it into zero. Now I think that a 4-Jaw will serve the same purpose and maybe be a bit easier for me to center dead-nuts.

    One of the other things now holding up the works on this re-barreling project is that last Thursday some pin-headed teenager crashed his momma's car through my backyard fence. No casualties other than my fence and this kid's mom's car. Now I'm having to fight with the insurance companies to step up and live up to their obligations. I need to repair my fence before I can get back onto this Tikka Rifle rebarreling project. I really can't do anything else with it since I'm waiting for that 4-Jaw to show up.

    I did use some of my wait time to draw up a 3D printable extended magazine model for this same rifle project. I was able to print out two prototypes. The first one clearly needed tweaking. The second print looks like it's going to workout pretty well. I had designed 3D printed extended magazine for a couple of my other rifles that turned out real well. I used what I'd learned from those projects to make up this Tikka magazine and now I can print my own at home. I do have to make my own magazine springs but that pretty easy using music wire.

    I'll be back after I've fixed my fence and fluted this barrel. In the mean time, thanks for the encouragement.

    MetalShavings

  5. #25
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Nice mag.

    I tried making an adapter block to fit desert eagle mags in a Ruger 77/44 & 96/44 as the 4-shot rotary just isn't doing it for me. Machining the prototype(s) was a major pain - no possible way to do it without either EDM or a 2-piece adapter block because of some fussy angles, and I had to make an ejector that attached to the adapter...

    Now you've got me thinking about 3D printing one.

    -Ralph

  6. #26
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    I may lead this thread way off topic by talking about 3D printing but once I got my printer I found that I could prototype my ideas a whole lot quicker than I can set them up on my mill; and I don't have to clean up the mill afterward. IF the prototypes come out with some promise then I'll go ahead and think about machining them on the mill.

    MetalShavings.

  7. #27
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    Feb 2014
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    MetalShavings is going to really derail this thread now! Just so we can keep it on track a little, I do a lot of my prototyping on my 3D Pinter as well. When this thread started it bot me thinking about fluting some of my own barrels. This weekend I started working on printing an adapter to spiral flute some of my Glock barrels. It’s showing a lot of promise.


    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

  8. #28
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by andarxx View Post
    MetalShavings is going to really derail this thread now! Just so we can keep it on track a little, I do a lot of my prototyping on my 3D Pinter as well. When this thread started it bot me thinking about fluting some of my own barrels. This weekend I started working on printing an adapter to spiral flute some of my Glock barrels. It’s showing a lot of promise.


    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
    If this thread goes to far off the rails I'm thinking I can bring it back around once I get my 4-Jaw chuck in from china. In regard to this extended magazine I've mentioned, every part of it is printable except for the magazine spring. Many 3D printer folks are gung-ho for the printed parts but making the springs themselves kind of puts an end to that enthusiasm. Some folks are highly creative but when it comes to mechanical workings, not so much. To that end, I thought that I could also design a 3D printed tower-shaped-template to make winding the music wire to the exact shape it needs to be to act as the mag-spring.

    As a CAD model it would be like creating a rectangular screw with a real slow thread pitch. All that would be needed would be to run or bend the wire along the thread grooves and it should give you the correct finished spring dimension to fit into the magazine. There's a whole lot of things that are possible with a 3D printer. For me, there's not enough time in the day to work on all of the ideas I come up with so I stick to doing the easy ones when I have the time.

    You'll have to show us your adapter idea so that we -or I- can picture in my mind how it would work. If you'd rather keep it under wraps I'm OK with that too. I'm kind of reluctant to show some of my ideas since one of the design ideas I recently posted on Instagram was stolen by one of the larger Air-Rifle manufactures. I hate it when people steal my ideas.

    MetalShavings

  9. #29
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    May 2016
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    I'm not too reluctant to post the adapter, I just don't have any photos of it handy. It'd be such a low-volume part to sell I can't see anyone investing the money in an injection mold - and who would want to buy a $200 machined adapter for a $400 gun?

    A plastic molded 9mm adapter for an AR15 - sure. But the DE mags have to be modified in addition to the adapter - total non-started to make money with it.

    Here we go - back on the machining track.


  10. #30
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    Apr 2013
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    1788

    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    I'm not particularly interested in your Glock but I am interested in your trunnion. Is this your design or something commercial? Further details, photos, drawings, whatever would be appreciated.

  11. #31
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    Feb 2014
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by MetalShavings View Post
    If this thread goes to far off the rails I'm thinking I can bring it back around once I get my 4-Jaw chuck in from china. In regard to this extended magazine I've mentioned, every part of it is printable except for the magazine spring. Many 3D printer folks are gung-ho for the printed parts but making the springs themselves kind of puts an end to that enthusiasm. Some folks are highly creative but when it comes to mechanical workings, not so much. To that end, I thought that I could also design a 3D printed tower-shaped-template to make winding the music wire to the exact shape it needs to be to act as the mag-spring.

    As a CAD model it would be like creating a rectangular screw with a real slow thread pitch. All that would be needed would be to run or bend the wire along the thread grooves and it should give you the correct finished spring dimension to fit into the magazine. There's a whole lot of things that are possible with a 3D printer. For me, there's not enough time in the day to work on all of the ideas I come up with so I stick to doing the easy ones when I have the time.

    You'll have to show us your adapter idea so that we -or I- can picture in my mind how it would work. If you'd rather keep it under wraps I'm OK with that too. I'm kind of reluctant to show some of my ideas since one of the design ideas I recently posted on Instagram was stolen by one of the larger Air-Rifle manufactures. I hate it when people steal my ideas.

    MetalShavings
    I don’t mind sharing, I do this for fun. I won’t be back home until this weekend, but I can’t get you the STL when I get back.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

  12. #32
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by andarxx View Post
    I don’t mind sharing, I do this for fun. I won’t be back home until this weekend, but I can’t get you the STL when I get back.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
    No hurry; I just have a hard time picturing a 3D printed fixture in relation to spiral fluting a Glock barrel.

    MetalShavings

  13. #33
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    316

    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by kstrauss View Post
    I'm not particularly interested in your Glock but I am interested in your trunnion. Is this your design or something commercial? Further details, photos, drawings, whatever would be appreciated.
    Not commercial, although I'm flattered at the thought.

    I don't want to hijack this thread further, but I'll drop a few photos.

    Basics - it's A36 steel, hole pattern matches the SMW fixture plates. 4th axis is homemade based on a harmonic drive. Tailstock is based on a 5C spindexer spindle.

    -Ralph


  14. #34
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Awesome DIY stuff. If I want something like this I have to save up for a very long time to buy it.

    MetalShavings.

  15. #35
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    May 2016
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Wasn't expensive. Harmonic was $157 delivered, spindexer was $75, had the stepper already, and maybe $300 in materials. Add $100 if you have to buy the rails (mine were a gift from a friend).

    Just takes time...

  16. #36
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    A few days back I spent the morning cutting air as a test of my tool paths with this fluted barrel project. My home made spring loaded felt marker confirmed that all my tool paths were good but I ran into a problem with the thread protector on the muzzle end of my barrel blank.

    It seems that my 4th-Axis unit worked well enough but when the tool path called for a clock-wise rotation it tended to just unscrew the thread protector from the barrel blank so I had to fabricate another type of thread protector with a slit cut along one side so as to allow the jaws of my vice to clamp down on the muzzle threads without damaging them and securely keeping the barrel from rotating during machining.

    I made a similar thread protector for the chamber end cause I knew if the muzzle end was unscrewing during certain milling operations the chamber end would most likely do the same.

    After running those air cutting tests with my felt marker I determined that I had crisscrossing flutes that were spaced to far apart so that it really didn't look balanced out so I went back to the CAD software and added another flute. Now with the crisscrossing flutes it looked like I had to many flutes and it still looked out of balance so, I decided to run all my flutes in the right hand direction and call that good. They looked evenly spaced and overall they looked well balanced for a short barrel blank like this.

    This morning I bit the bullet and decided to cut the flutes. My plan was to mill the flutes on the muzzle end of the barrel blank and while I had the barrel already indexed in the 4th-Axis I'd go ahead and do the short center flutes as well. The first three muzzled end flutes went off without a hitch so I loaded the G-Code for the center flutes and it was going just as well as the muzzle end flutes. The feeds and speeds seemed to be spot on. You should have seen the $#it-Eating-Grin I was sporting as I stood their watching my end mill do it's magic. Until, it got to the second to the last little flute.

    I don't know what the heck happened. At first I thought that my newly made muzzle thread protector had slipped and the barrel wasn't turning in step with the 4th-Axis. Like an idiot I let it keep running and it did the same darn thing. For some reason my end mill did a left hand turn and started cutting toward the last flute to be cut. By then the end mill had already cut down to about the .1" depth of a .128" deep flute and I really expected for that little 1/4" two-flute end mill to just snap and put me out of my misery. It was at that point that I regained the sense to hit the "E" stop. That little end mill didn't snap. It hung in their.

    The barrel isn't ruined by a long shot and it's not a loss of any kind. It's just a real head scratcher cause I checked to see if my muzzle thread protector had slipped and it was still synched down super tight. My computer simulations showed my tool paths working flawlessly but in doing the actual milling operation it went completely off the expected tool path on that second to the last flute. (enter foul language here)

    Tomorrow or the next day I'll be cutting more air. This time I'll be testing the tool paths on the chamber end of my barrel blank. If I can get them to come out like the muzzle end flutes I'll be a happy camper with a semi-nicely spiral fluted barrel. I'll then have to go in and doctor up the bad cuts made when my end mill veered off course. If I take my time I'm pretty sure I can make it look like I meant for it to be this way all along but, it sucks that everything is going beautifully and then something like this happens.

    At the time I thought to myself, "Oh well, if the bad cut is on the under side of the barrel blank as it sits in the stock it won't be that big of a deal, but as it happens, my tool paths started with the initial little flute being the one on the underside of the barrel blank. The tool path went off the rails as it was cutting the second to the last flute which sits to the right of the top-dead-center flute that I had pre-indexed when I mounted and head-spaced the barrel in the receiver. DAMN! I guess it could have turned out far worse. I did take some pics that I'll be posting a little later. I have to shrink them down so that I can upload them to the various online forums that are following this project.

    Just to let you know; my barrel blank is a $39.00 barrel blank I bought from Green Mountain Barrels so it's not like I'd be out alot of money if I had managed to destroy my barrel blank. Now that I've learned a few things the hard way I may just buy another of these barrel blanks and do it all over again with a little more confidence.

    I'll be back with those photos later. I'll be back when time permits. Pray for me brethren; and don't act like nothing like this as ever happened to you either. If it hasn't, just give it some time and I'll be able to empathize with you; or maybe commiserate.

  17. #37
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    477

    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    I have had this happen when the backlash between the ring gear and worm is too tight. In my case the motor was actually skipping steps. I mistakenly thought that the adjustment had to be VERY tight. For us the cutter took a right hand turn and started to widen the groove on a barrel cam.

    We make these cams out of 1144 Fatigue Proof hardened to 36 Rc for a 3/4" cam follower in lots of 100 pieces. Roughing is done using a 3/8" end mill but if you are familiar with barrel cams, the last cut must be made with a 3/4" end mill. The 1100 doesn't like it but it does complain and finish the cut. We have run about 1000 of these parts and you really learn a lot about 4th axis work. The cam is 2" in diameter by 2-7/8" long. The rectangular pocket in the end must be precisely timed to the cam groove.

    gary

  18. #38
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by nitewatchman View Post
    I have had this happen when the backlash between the ring gear and worm is too tight. In my case the motor was actually skipping steps. I mistakenly thought that the adjustment had to be VERY tight. For us the cutter took a right hand turn and started to widen the groove on a barrel cam.

    We make these cams out of 1144 Fatigue Proof hardened to 36 Rc for a 3/4" cam follower in lots of 100 pieces. Roughing is done using a 3/8" end mill but if you are familiar with barrel cams, the last cut must be made with a 3/4" end mill. The 1100 doesn't like it but it does complain and finish the cut. We have run about 1000 of these parts and you really learn a lot about 4th axis work. The cam is 2" in diameter by 2-7/8" long. The rectangular pocket in the end must be precisely timed to the cam groove.

    gary
    Well I feel a little better now knowing I'm not the only one who has ever had one of these 4th-Axis snafus. I was thinking before that I might be able to emboss some lettering on the part of my barrel when my 1/4" end mill started wandering with the letters, "223 Ackley Improved" or something like that just to make it look like I meant to do it that way. I'll have to wait and see after I get the rest of my fluting cut. Seeing the lettering on your part just reminded me of that.

    MetalShavings

  19. #39
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Nope, not me. I've never butchered a $1k STI slide by touching off on the wrong surface. That slide was really, really light when I got done with it...:tired:


    I can reinforce nitewatchman's comment about worm gear drives - adjust it to be a little loose and take up the slack by indexing in one direction only. Or manually edit the code so it backs up past your intended angle/position and then goes to the right spot in the original direction.

    If you adjust it loose and have some backlash, also try to make sure the cutting forces are in one direction, rotationally speaking. That one bit me when a part kinda made a thunk as the cutting force switched and the part & chuck rotated a litle bit.

    Final advice: you're doing a Savage barrel nut if I recall... just clock the threads so the goobered flute is under the forearm.

    Oh yea - pics please, including the boo-boo.

    -Ralph

  20. #40
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    Re: Spiral Fluting A 17" Rifle Barrel With 4th Axiz

    Quote Originally Posted by spumco View Post
    Nope, not me. I've never butchered a $1k STI slide by touching off on the wrong surface. That slide was really, really light when I got done with it...:tired:


    I can reinforce nitewatchman's comment about worm gear drives - adjust it to be a little loose and take up the slack by indexing in one direction only. Or manually edit the code so it backs up past your intended angle/position and then goes to the right spot in the original direction.

    If you adjust it loose and have some backlash, also try to make sure the cutting forces are in one direction, rotationally speaking. That one bit me when a part kinda made a thunk as the cutting force switched and the part & chuck rotated a litle bit.

    Final advice: you're doing a Savage barrel nut if I recall... just clock the threads so the goobered flute is under the forearm.

    Oh yea - pics please, including the boo-boo.

    -Ralph
    I had already clocked or indexed my flutes so that my fluted barrel blank screwed into the proper head-space but, (wouldn't you know it) it ended up with the top dead center of my fluted barrel being where the wandering end mill bit me on the behind. If I can't do my cosmetic surgery on it so that it comes out looking presentable I'll clock it so that the milling error is facing downward in the fore-stock. This would mean that I have to face off the tenon or chamber end and hand ream it to the proper head-spacing again. Such is the life of a hobby machinist.

    MetalShavings

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