I guess that the blades would fit a normal parting blade holder with little modification?

Mark P.

Wonder if anyone has had any success in machining Dickson holders. I rather fancy trying those T form parting blades and have a surplus of MT taper drill carriers which would make nice holders if they could be machined with Home Shop equipment. I know the standard carrier would fit in a normal holder just fine but its always best to minimise overhang and joints. More elegant too and it avoids tying up a standard holder whilst liberating a cupboard queen.

Clive.

Try it on some 6082 Vic, may be ok at start then will pick up 1/4" in very quick with or without coolant. Found nothing to date that will plough straight through without repetitive prising aluminium off the tips. Have downsized to 9 part off tools all quality Arno, Iscar, Manchester with various guises of shaping and profiled tips neutral, left and right hand, makes no odds.

Just ordered one from the same supplier….hope it works as well as described….

I've had different types of the bladed variety, all seem to suffer the same binding effect..the latest parting tool I bought is if the wide blade/replaceable tip type and is great on my big lathe under power feed with no problem at all…only criticism I have is the blade width at 1/8" ….

Hi Duncan

Sorry I've not yet tried to machine a Dickson tool holder to direct mount an insert type blade holder. Best information I could come up with is that one of the high end centre cutting 5 flute end mills might be able to make a decent job. I've used such for taking taps out so they are certainly pretty capable beasts. They are also expensive and relatively easily broken.

Having more than enough on to keep me busy for ages it hasn't seemed worthwhile to spend time experimenting to do something that falls into the nice to have rather than need capacity. Of course if I ever get the blinding flash of inspiration as to a way they will work without too much difficulty I shall give it a go. Current thoughts are that chopping down one of the MT taper holders I have, and will never use, with a narrow cutting disk in an angle grinder might well expose a surface machinable with my Elliot 10M shaper. May need multiple tool re-sharpenings but shaper tools are relatively easy to do. Angle lip for the bottom edge, same sort of wedge clamp as used in the HSS holder for top. Tapping for clamp screws promises to be difficult tho'. I had one standard holder with a damaged thread (how!) which proved impossible to clean out with a tap. Ended up having to take the broken tap out with the aforementioned 5 flute end mill and getting very precise with a mounted grinding point to take the damaged section of thread out from inside the tool slot.

Clive

Duncan

It was the tapping issue that made me finally decide that life was too short for this project. Considered drilling plain holes with counterbore on the backside using a couple of those super "makes a hole in files" drill sets and loctiting or welding softer plugs in to take the threads. Which is about where sanity kicked in! Especially as I don't even have a set of superdrills.

Of course the forum being what it is maybe someone knows better how to do this.

Clive.

That's what I've got, it's very good, but when held in the small (Myford size) Dickson toolholder the tip is cantileverd a long way from the loctaing face. The idea was to make a holder with much less overhang. I supose I could get the holder ground dpwn and weld the balde to it, but welding steel that can be heat treated is a bit dangerous, heat affected zone and all that stuff.

CotswoldsPhil

Your last post implies that you have area tool post. Is there a reason why you use the insert blade in the QCTH rather than in the rear post.

I've often felt that the advantage of being able to permanently set-up and precisely align a parting tool in the rear post is a major contributor to the commonly found superiority of the rear post on small lathes. Clearly the well known extra rigidity of loosing the inevitable clearances in the top slide and operating the feed screw in tension are important but smaller machines are quite intolerant of small tool setting errors which a larger machine can easily cope with. With a semi permanent mount its worth taking the time to get things really right. So nice to have the parting tool ready and waiting all the time too. My Smart & Brown 1024 copes just fine with any slightly imperfect parting tool setting in the QC post but it would be nice to save on tool changes.

I often suspect the folk who find no great advantage to the rear post on small lathes are really, really good at tool setting, and sharpening too if not using inserts. Folk like me with more modest skills need all the help we can get.

Clive.