New manual milling machine

There is a new manual milling machine in the lab, an Optimum WF-20. The design of the machine is similar to the Aciera or a Maho, with the table moving in X and Z, spindle in Y. The spindle can be flipped over for horizontal machining.

We decided to get a machine with a small work-envelope (table XY travel is 260x170 mm), but with good rigidity and hopefully good precision. The machine is around 4 keur but with the magnetic DRO and some basic accessories plus delivery the cost is closer to 6 keur. Add another 1-2 keur for toolholders and tools.

The machine has an ISO30 taper spindle with an M12 draw-bar. In addition to the 0-13mm quick-change drilling chuck in the machine there are some tools on the shelf to the right: ISO30/MT2 adapter, an ER32 chuck, 63 mm carbide-insert face-mill, another ER32 chuck, and a tapping head. There is a 150 mm rotary table on the machine to the lower left. A new 100mm precision vise is on order but not delivered yet.

This means there are now no excuses for not finishing my very delayed lathe project...

Wiring FAIL

You would think that after a ~30 keur (thirty-thousand euros) pipe-renovation which involves a complete rebuild of the bathroom and moving the kitchen you could get working electric outlets everywhere. No Sir. Check out the brown live-wire in the picture below. The wiring is solid copper wire which breaks if you bend it too much - exactly what happened here. Everyone makes mistakes, and the devil is in the details, but shame on the electricians for not testing that every outlet works!

 

Thursday Ten

Long time no run. But apparently skiing and cycling does work as a substitute for keeping up a bit of fitness.

I went and signed up for the Helsinki city run half-marathon. The best I did last year on that distance was about 1h 51min, so it would be nice to improve on that with a 1:4x time. That requires a steady pace of about 5:00/km. Yikes!

Apparently my kind of blogging about skiing, cycling, and running is very old fashioned and I should be doing at heiaheia instead with the cool people...

What's that peak in the HR at <5min ??

First time I crossed the new "Crusell" bridge (see also here) in ruoholahti. It appears to have a concrete surface which is very hard on the feet.

Skiing summary

A picture with all the skiing from earlier this week. Roughly the places visited on the route, with some random links. See also Ylläksen latureittiopas.


Computer upgrade

A failed powersupply was my excuse to upgrade most of the other internals of the desktop computer too. Some notes on adding a disk to LVM, following Suji's notes from 2007 (all of these require sudo):

  • fdisk /dev/sdd

    (create a primary partition, type "8E" Linux LVM, exit with "w")

  • mkfs -t ext3  /dev/sdd1

    (this will create the file-system. option "-c" which checks for bad sectors is recommended by some, but takes ages to complete) (see comments)

  • pvcreate /dev/sdd1

    (this will create a physical volume)

  • pvdisplay

    will now list all the physical volumes and the newly created one should be visible.

  • vgdisplay

    will list the volume groups. On my machine there's one named "datadisk"

  • vgextend datadisk /dev/sdd1

    (this will extend the volume group with the new disk)

  • vgdisplay -v datadisk

    will now display info on the volume group. The new disk should show up in the list of physical volumes.

  • lvextend -l100%VG /dev/datadisk/data

    (this will extend the logical volume so that the new size is 100% of available space in the volume-group)

  • resize2fs /dev/datadisk/data

    (this will resize the logical volume. takes a long time to complete with big disks and there is no progress bar/display)

  • finally you can check that the mounted volume group is actually re-sized to the new size and has lots of free space: 
    df -h

There is more info in the LVM-HOWTO.