Adam Savage here in my shop with a tool tip for you.
And I'll be honest, I try and keep my tool tips to super
affordable tools that everyone should have. I
like doing that for the bulk of my tool tips but this one involves
a really esoteric tool that is kind of spendy but
there's not many other things that does exactly what it does as well as it does.
And I wanted to introduce you to it because
it's useful to know what is out there so for today's tool tip I've got a piece
of ... Hold on let's get some perspective on
this. All right so I ...
So for today's tool tip Ihave a piece chucked in uh on top of the vise
of my milling machine and i want to do some milling operations
but because this is just clamped onto the top of my vise uh i need some
indication of exactly where it is and i could do a
a edge finder like this and this but instead i'm going to do all my machining
operations off of the concentricity of this hole so what i
need to be able to do is line up the quill of my mill
with this hole exactly and there is a tool that does that there are lots of
inexact ways you could do this and i have done many of them over the years
and i'm here to tell you where precision is concerned the
inexactitude can lead to lots of long tail unintended
consequences
maggie hears somebody peggy what are you complaining about i'm just talking to
the camera okay so we're going to see what tool
gets perfect concentricity between your quill
and a hole on the mill the tool we're going to use
is colloquially known as a wiggler i'm not sure totally honestly not sure
of the exact official name of this tool but it is a measuring
instrument here's what it looks like and
it wiggles so when it wiggles it shows a certain amount of movement on
the dial and we're going to use that movement
to precisely calibrate the concentricity of the quill of the mill
to the hole and ah first things first you make your job a lot easier using a
wiggler if you get close to start so i've chucked in a end
mill into one of my uh into one of my collets and i'm just
gonna roughly set it here i'm gonna bring it
down to the hole and i'm going to just get
within a few thou of center right like by eye i mean this is the thing about
close enough is that you can get within probably
10 or 15 thou 10 or 15 thousands that's like five five or six sheets of paper
uh in terms of precision but that like that way lies madness you don't
want to try that but you can get close and get with intent now
uh so i'm pretty pleased with where that is i'm going to pull it back out
and now it's time to activate the wiggler
um so i'm going to lower this down a little bit
oh hey um
i forgot i'm shooting videos i should actually give you a
close-up bit of b-roll centered here we go
yeah okay i know on camera that doesn't look
incredibly perfectly centered but to be honest
it is pretty close yeah that's not bad okay
i think that's within yeah i think that's within a few
thousand just mark my dro so i'm close okay great
so i will remove that collet and the end mill
we're going to break out a collet that fits
the spindle of my wiggler
thank you by the way thank you to everyone in the comments who was telling
me the official name of this tool and what it is called
jamie had one years ago that he picked up when the old
uh chris whales shop shut down and um
i think i had to ask chris ran what the hell this thing was called
and he guided me towards where i could find one
but i don't quite remember okay so the wiggler
is in place uh you know what i want to lower this
let me get a close-up on this so here's how the wiggler works when you're
about to activate the wiggler you need to choose
a uh a probe that uh is appropriate for the size of hole that
you're going to you can use really big probes like this for holes i
don't know what the maximum of this but when i look at this i'd say
that could measure the out the inside of a hole that's
at least seven or eight inches in diameter
this little hole i have here is about a half inch so i'm just going to chuck in
this little bitty probe there's a wrench here for that probe but
i don't really need it uh and then this spins here and so to
prevent it from spinning i get you have an extension arm here and
the extension arm bangs into
this stop here i've used this little magnetic stop on the clamping setup
okay so now the wiggler is ready to be used and we are going to uh lower the
speed of our mill to the low speed and i'm gonna uh let's see
turn it on and lower the speed
all right
so
maybe you can already tell what's gonna happen here but here's how it's gonna
work um every marking on this gauge is
uh is half of a ten thousandth sorry half of a thousandths every
marking on this gauge is five tenths or five ten thousands of an
inch oh yeah really really uh
precise so what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring this
probe into contact with the interior of
the hole now when i turn the machine you'll see
that this dial starts moving like this and what will happen is i will use the
xy
handles on my milling table to dial in until the dial doesn't move and when the
dial doesn't move anymore well that means that we are concentric
with the hole so let's do it
now the philosophy of doing this is a process
of moving each of the handles until you see more movement on either
side and you start dialing to the middle and then you move the other one and you
move it until you see more movement and then less movement more movement and
less movement you keep on doing that x and y
x and y x and y eventually you bring it to where
uh as you saw the dial wasn't moving very much at all now i've got some noise
in my system my my spindle probably needs to be rebuilt
the bearings need to be repacked this mill was born in 1968 after all i don't
know when the last time it was the head was rebuilt if ever so that
noise causes the needle to move around a little bit because it's a sensitive
piece of equipment however i'm familiar with the operation
of this one enough and you can watch youtube videos of other
guys with better mills and you can just see that dial
eventually just stops moving um with the noise in my system there's a bit of
vibration but yeah the wiggler is how you get that
level of precision now you can also measure
the outside of a hole the out i could i could have
centered on the outside of this all the different probes that are part of the
wiggler uh allow you the ability uh
to basically center on any kind of circle an interior or an exterior circle
from super tiny to a literally like um
a punch point all the way to probably something about this big in diameter
these cost a few hundred bucks they're they're not cheap and maybe a couple
hundred bucks um however i will say i use this thing
almost weekly and uh when you get pretty good
at it the setup is not as laborious as it may have
seemed in this video uh yeah that's a wiggler and that's how
you center your machine above a hole thanks for joining me for
this tool tip i will see you guys next time