Well finally a thread that does not qualify for the Oddball category
My lathe came with a part off blade holder however it appeared to be designed for 1/2 inch blades whereas the size I had was 5/8th. Original piece is black thing in the tool holder. Not sure what it is called, perhaps the blade retainer?
Rather than buy the correct blade size, I decided to wait a few years until I had a milling machine
Up until now I had not really used the horizontal mode so this seemed to be a very simple project to cut my teeth on. Or probably chip my teeth on as is the case with this 3/8 x 3 inch horizontal side and face cutter. Unfortunately I don't have a slab miller yet and the shell mill couldn't reach.
I know horizontal mills can remove a lot of material quickly, so on this part I kept increasing the depth of cut for each pass until finally the maximum which was the target finished height. This photo here is the full 5.5mm depth of cut at about 9mm wide. One thing I learned is that these cutters prefer to be loaded up otherwise they make a "grr grr grr" noise. At 5.5mm DOC it did feel like the machine was starting to load up, which could be due to me feeding too fast or the teeth being a bit dull.
The chips looked nice, like metal sprinkles but probably not as nice to eat.
The finished piece in the part off blade retainer(?).
So not particularly exciting but in this case I can say for sure that using the several thousand dollar milling machine I was able to save $19.95 on a new part off blade
I would love to hear from anyone else on this forum who has a horizontal mill!