How I make needles now.

[evildrome]

Hi All,

I used to make needles with a jig but you're limited to one geometry.

Now that I got used to using the tool & cutter grinder for making embossing cones I thought I'd use it for needles too.

Step 1: Parting off on the Clarkson T&C grinder





Step 2: Cutting the locating face on the Tiplap T&C grinder








Step 3: Clocking the needle in the holder (Colchester Bantam lathe).





Step 4: Setting the face angle. Here to 35.5 degrees for a full angle of 71 degrees (Quorn T&C grinder).





Step 5: Roughing the first side.




Step 6: Roughing the second side.





Step 7. Polishing the first side.



Step 8. Polishing the second side.


Step 9. Deburring the cutting face (Colchester Bantam lathe).



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Step 10. Polishing the cutting face.


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Upside... you can make anything. Downside... takes about 10X as long to do as with a jig. Just the visual inspections are time consuming.

Each cutting op needs 3 inspections per cut. One to check its roughly right. A second to check its going right & a third to see that it completed right. And that's if everything goes as planned. That's 24 visual inspections per needle.

Still... the results compared to what I was doing are in a totally different league.

I've got a lapping disk that I could charge with sub micron diamond paste for 'super finishing' but no point doing that till I know these actually work.

Just because they look good means nothing. They could look good & the geometry could be crap & they might not work at all.

We shall see I guess.

[jjwharris]

This sounds really interesting, it seems like the image links are broken though - maybe a permissions thing?

[evildrome]

Hmmm... its working for me but maybe I can see the images because I'm hosting them on my own site.

I'll try it again but with attachments.

[SONARC]

Hi folks - I'm wondering if anyone picked up any of these needles, and if so, what kind of results were you getting?
Beyond that, if anyone has one or two extra, would you be willing to let me buy one or two?

I had jumped on this right away, back in Nov 2021, and was curious to explore the possibilities of these needles - unfortunately, possibly due to some snafu between customs and the USPS, the package never arrived, and seemed to have fallen into a black hole. For some reason or another, neither of us pursued it beyond that at the time, and there was only so far I could go to try and persuade the Postal Inspector to look harder. Speaking as a former USPS employee who has actually seen a few Dead Letter Offices in a few cities, you really can't imagine just how much stuff is in those places. Sadly, most of it will never see the light of day, at least not in our lifetime.

Anyway, I recently stumbled some video clips on youtube, posted by Mack Stevens, who was using these needles to make his own rockabilly 78s on a Presto K8, and to my ears, they sounded pretty good in the context they were being presented. I got in touch with Mack, and it turns out I just missed catching up with him before he moved out of the US, and apparently he's working with sapphires now, so I missed that boat. But it turned out he was able to refer me back to this thread, which I had forgotten about in the past several months - only it turns out these are not being made anymore, so another missed boat.

In the end, I was only hoping to explore another type of cutting / embossing stylus, just to add to the tests I've done for a number of folks who were making their own tools for the art of lathe cutting. It seems pretty unlikely that I'll be able to carry this particular line of testing forward, even if I am able to try one of these out, but naturally I'm curious to see with my own eyes (and ears) what some of the variables might be. So.... if anyone reading this happened to get some of the embossing needles and/or cutting needles that evildrome was making as of last November, and you wouldn't mind selling me one or two of those - or at the very least, posting some info about the kind of results you got from those, it would really be appreciated! Thanks in advance to anyone here who might be able to help!