ADA: Ask Doc Anything!

[Carp]

DocsMachine In your extensive and vast paintball knowledge... Do you know why the ASP cocker threaded phantom body is called a "Roundhead"?

[DocsMachine]

DocsMachine In your extensive and vast paintball knowledge... Do you know why the ASP cocker threaded phantom body is called a "Roundhead"?

-Wasn't it because the original ASP bodies were square-topped?

If not, I have no idea.

Doc.

[Carp]

I have not the foggiest of a clue. I'll go with your answer until I find a different option.😁

[flyweightnate]

The original was the "Blockhead", designed for custom milling work like a slug automag. Then the round version became wildly more popular, very quickly.

[Jonnydread]

May I see a picture of your cat please?

[DocsMachine]

You want to see a picture of my what?!? Sorry, that's Onlyfans content, you'll have to join my...

Oh, wait. Right. Cat.



Kitty zonked in his bed in the mudroom.

Doc.

[Jonnydread]

Orange tabbies are the best. Ditzy and friendly

[Cdn_Cuda]

Except for my in-laws one. Meanest cat ever. Use to maliciously attack their Nana for no reason.

[ford]

Tried searching through this thread but forgive me if this has been asked before.

How do you set timeline expectations with customers for custom paintball work? Is there anything you wish impatient customers could keep in mind while they wait for projects to get worked?

[DocsMachine]

How do you set timeline expectations with customers for custom paintball work? Is there anything you wish impatient customers could keep in mind while they wait for projects to get worked?

-Those have not been asked before, and are very good questions.

For 90% of my custom work, I can give a fairly accurate estimate off the top of my head. Trying to keep in mind what I already have on the table, other time-dependent issues (IE, anodizing, ordering parts, etc.) as well as the occasional thing like holidays. For these, it comes in, it may wait a few days 'til the job(s) ahead of it get done, then I do it, and get it back in the mail.

That other 10%... Well, I'm a one-man band. Things don't always go smoothly, and this past year has been Exhibit #1 for that. Those Vee-Twins, for example, should have all been done and out the door by, like, May, but it seemed like everything that came my way this year, was intentionally scheduled to screw up anything I had previously scheduled. Almost like fate hates me, or something.

I am unfortunately a bit famous for blowing deadlines- I try my best not to, of course, but there's a limit to what even I can do.

As for the impatient customers, that's really the only thing I'd like to emphasize, the one-man-band thing. I'm it. I pick things up at the Post Office, I'm the one that unwraps it, I'm the one that machines and fixes it, I'm the one that wraps it back up. I'm the one that answers the email, posts the photos, posts to boards like this, answers the questions, etc, etc. Most of the time- thankfully the majority of the time- things go smoothly, but every now and then Life throws that monkey wrench into the gears again.

Doc.

[un2xs]

There is a thread in the ICD subforum on modernizing Cats.

https://www.mcarterbrown.com/forum/p...-modernization

One of the things discussed is enlarging the air passages for HPA. This was done with front ASAs. Would it be worth it to enlarge the rear air passage on a Cat? What are your thoughts on bringing these into the HPA age? Would you do it? Would you leave it as originally designed for CO2 use?

[DocsMachine]

I haven't done much hot-rodding of the ICD blowbacks, but generally speaking, any increase in the volume immediately available to the valve (within limits, of course) helps the velocity- that is, to get it up and keep it up.

The long passage from the back-bottle probably wouldn't help as much as drilling out the front ASA, and I'd want to dig into the body before trying, to make sure the drill won't weaken a wall somewhere, or worse, actually break through, like at a screw hole or something.

Doc.

[superman]

How did you end up with the omniturn vs something else?
Are you only using gcode? or conversational? fusion360?

I have been getting the itch to get a cnc lathe. Would love to jump into a torach slant pro but don't currently have the space for it.

[Roger7pball]

Why are the prices of your items (shipped) more expensive directly than through eBay? You would think it would be opposite.

For ex; Montneel rebuild kit
From you - $32 + $4 shipping
From the Bay - $32.95 shipped

Before anyone yells at me for bringing this up, Doc deserves all the money for what he does.

[DocsMachine]

How did you end up with the omniturn vs something else?

-It's compact, lightweight, can run on single-phase, and they're considered very good machines.

I'm operating out of what's basically a glorified two-car garage, and I simply don't have the room, and possibly not enough slab strength, for a full size machine. Even something relatively compact like a Hardinge Conquest, is bigger and some three times heavier, and anything like one of the smaller Mazak Quickturns, is bigger and heavier still. I'm a garage shop turning comparatively tiny parts, and in low numbers. I don't need a 20HP, 12K RPM spindle, thousand-inch rapids, and 10HP servos.

Also, any machine I bought, I'd basically have to buy sight-unseen. There's no used-CNC market up here. And by that I don't mean "there's not a very good selection", I mean there ain't none. Zero. Zilch, Nada.

Some exist, yes, but they literally never come up for sale. If anyone has one and decides to get rid of it, he has a long list of people waiting with cash to buy it- it never hits the open market.

So I'd have to buy through a dealer, and a bunch of dealers don't even bother powering it up- you buy it as is, where is. Some will hook it up to power and let you run it through a couple paces, if you're there in person, but for me, that'd add several thousand dollars to any purchase. (Air travel, hotel, car rental, etc.) No biggie if I'm buying a quarter-million-dollar Doosan or something, but I had to borrow heavily just to buy these cheap, used machines.

The possibility of getting a "pig in a poke" was too high, in my opinion, so I was heading for the Tormach, myself. Basically the best new machine I could (barely) afford.

I was saving my way towards it when one of the guys on the Tinker's Guild mentioned this OmniTurn a buddy of his- a tool dealer- had. The dealer had a video of it up and running- not cutting, but the spindle sounded quiet, the servos jogged, etc. The Guilder had seen it in person and could more or less vouch for it.

I looked up Omnis- I was at the time unfamiliar with them- and saw that they were easy to work on, the company was still in business and still supported even the early models, tooling was, while not inexpensive, was available and had a wide selection of options. I liked the compact size and relative light weight (I wasn't going to be doing any heavy hogging, so rigidity wasn't a high priority, whereas shipping weight, slab weight and forklift weight, were) this one was known-working (more or less) and even with the estimated shipping, was going to be several thousand less than a Tormach Slant-Pro.

The kicker, for me, was this video- where a guy machined an entire part- admittedly delrin- in less than the time it took the Slant-Pro to just change tools.

Now, after a year, I'm very happy with it. I had to do a lot more minor repairs and upgrades than I was hoping to, but nothing major. I'm also still a CNC idiot, and it turned out to be fairly easy to program. I can easily recommend these for anyone that needs a decent gang-tooled machine. They can be found used for between $15 and $25K, or even bought new for just under $40K. You won't find one much below that, they're popular and well-regarded enough they hold that value well.

Are you only using gcode? or conversational? fusion360?

-More or less straight G-code. The Omni has a very simple control- it's basically an old hardened DOS box, not a Windows machine, and the operating system is considerably pared down from anything modern. There's very little "conversational"- though there's a few canned cycles, and of course things like the usual threading and radii shortcuts. You can't even number the lines of code, you can't have a header dialogue box, there's certain punctuation you cannot use, no matter what (like commas) and so forth.

You hand-write out go here, go here, then go here, all in the usual X/Z coordinates.

I'm told that Fusion has a postprocessor for Omni, but I've never tried it- and for most of what I've made so far, it's quicker and easier to just type it all out in Notepad.

Would love to jump into a torach slant pro but don't currently have the space for it.

-One option is to find one of the converted Hardinge lathes.

Omniturn started out making "attachments", which were bolt-on true CNC conversions, to upgrade the old Hardinge DV-59 (and similar) turret lathes to modern computer control. Hardinge had made tens of thousands of the little turret lathers, if not hundreds of thousands, and to keep them viable into the start of the computer age, this kit was developed, and proved very popular. Omni parlayed that into making a from-scratch turning center, and the rest is history.

Anyway, those converted Hardinges are still fairly plentiful, and I've seen them down as low as a couple or three grand.

They're about the size of a typical cabinet-base Southbend or Logan, so they're not huge- and both Hardinge and Omniturn parts are readily available.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Why are the prices of your items (shipped) more expensive directly than through eBay? You would think it would be opposite.

For ex; Montneel rebuild kit
From you - $32 + $4 shipping
From the Bay - $32.95 shipped

Before anyone yells at me for bringing this up, Doc deserves all the money for what he does.

-Easy, eBay's an ass.

I planned on giving you MCB'ers first crack at the parts, of course, and then list them on eBay. But when I listed them on the 'Bay, it defaulted to "free shipping"- eBay does that a lot, along with defaulting to "allow offers", and you have to click the box two, maybe three times to be sure it actually disables the feature.*

I've since corrected it- they're $22 plus $4 shipping here, and $22.95 plus what will probably be about $4.85 to $5.15 shipping on eBay. With eBay fees, I'll actually make about a dollar less on sales over there.

Doc.

(*I once had one of my ads switch- automatically, without my knowing- to "allow offers", for my flattop front block bolts. I only make about two bucks profit on those as it is, but suddenly I had people offering, like $6 each- or roughly half what they cost me. [I was having them made by an outside shop at the time.] AND... I couldn't switch it back while I had open offers, I had to either cancel them or wait for them to expire before I could disable the feature. And two days later, eBay unilaterally re-enabled it, and I went through it all over again. I'm sure I wound up pissing a bunch of people off, by allowing offers and then not accepting any, but there was nothing I could do.)

[Walker]

Hiya Doc.... Are you going to make any tank rings?


Walker

[DocsMachine]

Hiya Doc.... Are you going to make any tank rings?

-Yes. Making them manually is tedious, and I'd have to charge way more than any of you would pay.

With the CNC mill, however, and an indexer (which I now have) I should be able to do them faster and simpler. I have a basketful of blanks (no holes) that I made two or three years ago, and I hope to be able to run them through the machine before too long.

Absolutely no ETA though. If you want one, probably quicker to commission one. Won't be particularly cheap, but I can have it to ya in a couple weeks.

Doc.

[Walker]

Thanks Doc.... I'm in no hurry, and can wait.....

[Trbo323]

Hey doc, I'm looking to stock metric o rings, any guidance on what sizes I should carry?

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