Stuporglue.org

How to Turn a Drill Press into a Lathe

by stuporglue Posted on June 21, 2011

Lathes are pretty sweet. You can turn table legs, fancy lamps, cool wooden bowls, pens, baseball bats… so many fun things you can make! Unfortunately little ones start at $400-ish and ones big enough to turn table legs and baluster start at about 2 grand. Some day maybe I’ll pick up a used one, but for now I just wanted to try making some homemade fishing lures.

I started by considering what tools I have that spin. The main contenders were the router, the drill and the drill press. I decided that I use the drill too often to use it, and I thought that the router might spin too fast. For a test, I put a screw into a piece of wood and put the screw into the router (where the router bit goes) the screw folded over the the wood whipped around sideways. Not good.

So, I went with the drill press. This green machine is a reliable but dated 1982 1/3 HP 6 Amp motor drill press. The lid lifts up so you can manually switch the belt between gears to change the speeds.

Step 1: Do a Little Jig

The first step was to turn the drill press sideways. I had to find a way to turn it sideways while supporting it securely and being able to access the power button. I was able to unscrew the arms of the drillpress height adjuster and then I built this:

This jig holds the drill press drilling axis horizontal, and gives makes the drill press stable while operating in a horizontal position.

Step 2: Create a Dead Center

I used a grinder and a file to make the end of a bolt rounded and smooth, this would be my dead center. A live center would be better, but I didn’t have any appropriate parts available.

Failure Number 1 – Attaching Dead Center to a Wooden Platform

While a live center would be preferable, I decided to start with a dead center for simplicity. Since I don’t have any welding equipment, I used a piece of 3/4 inch plywood and some bolts to secure and provide the dead center.

The makeshift lathe with a wooden platform for the dead center

It started out find, but after about 5 minutes of spinning a piece of wood, the bold had vibrated loose from the wood.

Success! Bolting the Dead Center to The Drill Press Platform

Although I lost about 2.5 inches in doing so, I next tried bolting the dead center directly to the adjustable drill press platform.

Dead Center Bolted To Drill Press Platform

Failure Number 2: The Chuck Falls Off

After using the lathe for a short while, the chuck fell off. I pounded it on nice and hard, and have been using less lateral force. I hope that if I let the tools do more cutting and I do less pushing, it won’t be an ongoing problem.

Step 3: Cutting Some Blanks

I cut two blanks. One from a piece of lilac branch from the yard and one from a 2×4 (pine). I used a table saw and cut each blank to be 1.75×1.75×5 inches.

Step 4: Making Some Tools

I needed some tools to cut the wood so I turned to the two pieces of metal I had on my workbench which I wasn’t going to be using anytime soon.

Wood Turning Tools From a Chisel and A Railroad Spike

That’s right, a railroad spike. I have a handful of them, and I’m not sure that they’re good for anything else. As for the chisel, my grandpa had more chisels than he probably ever used, which means I have more than I know I will ever use. I sacrificed one of them to the grinder to make its cutting angle more appropriate for wood turning

Results

The pine (2×4) wood didn’t turn out well at all, but I didn’t really expect it to, I mean it’s a 2×4, not some nice wood. The lilac turned out pretty decent for a first time. A little bit more drilling and fiddling later and I am the happy owner of a drill press lathe and two through-wire construction fishing plugs that need to be painted.

Warnings

If you’re the sort of person who heeds warnings, don’t turn your drill press into a lathe. The comments on this instructible which I found while researching my own lathe project indicate that the chuck coming off is a common problem and could be dangerous.

If you’re the sort of person who doesn’t heed warnings, I’m not sure what you’re doing reading this, but best of luck, and be safe. I assume no responsibility for your success, safety or lack thereof should you undertake this or a similar project.

Posted in Projects, Something Interesting, Woodworking | Tagged lathe, woodworking | 1 Comment

Using Google Protcol Buffers with PHP and protoc-gen-php

by stuporglue Posted on May 13, 2011

Protocol Buffers are a binary data transfer protocol from Google. You define the structure of the data using a C-like text file, then compile that protocol buffer file into a library appropriate for the language you are using. Google officially supports Java, Python and C++.

PHP Protocol Buffers

UPDATE!

I haven’t tested it yet, but DRSlump commented below to let me know about a new, alive and mostly complete implementation he is using and working on. I haven’t tried it yet since it uses PHP 5.3 and we haven’t quite moved over from 5.2 yet, but here it is for your enjoyment:

DRSlump’s Protobuf-PHP

I could find no complete implementation for PHP at this time. There are several 1/2 completed protocol buffer implementations out there for PHP, most of which date back to near the initial protocol buffer announcement from Google.

If you are going to use Protocol Buffers in a PHP project, you will probably want to evaluate the features and approach of each of these projects. For the project I am working on I decided to go with protoc-gen-php since it seemed to have the most complete (3/4ths complete?!) implementation and the most recent update.

Status of protoc-gen-php

There were two branches of protoc-gen-php when I started using it. Bramp was the original author and responded to emails, Iamamused has a few more features, but didn’t respond to any of my emails. I took the email response to mean, in part, that despite the lack of updates that Bramp was still interested in at least maintaining the project.After forking his project to add some features I needed, he did in fact indicate that he will indeed merge appropriate changes from my fork and from Iamamused back into the main branch.

Until that happens though you’ve got three choices:

Bramp’s branch — the original and probably best long-term choice
Iamamused’s branch — more features than Bramp’s branch (sint, for example) but no indication if he will be maintaining it long term
Stuporglue’s branch (mine) — See below for features and caveats

My fork of Protoc-gen-php

I don’t really have interest in being a project maintainer long term. If you use my branch, I’m happy to help in whatever capacity I’m able until Bramp merges the features I’ve added back into his branch.

Here’s what I’ve added:

Signed Int support (sint32 / sint64)
Float and Double support
Support for the [packed=false] option so that repeating packables can be used (ie. not packed support, just the ability to specify non-packed)

The big caveat with float support is that PHP uses doubles to represent both floats and doubles, so when a float-double gets packed into actual an actual float in the protocol format it does lose precision. The best solution will be to either use a string or a double.

Need Other Features Added?

I have implemented the features I did because I needed them for the project I am working on. I’d be happy to add other features on a consulting basis, or to merge in your changes if you submit patches to me. Like I said though, hopefully it will be merged back into Bramp’s branch pretty soon, and he can handle the patches. It would be one less thing for me to worry about!

Posted in Something Interesting | Tagged google prototcol buffers, protoc-gen-php, protocol buffers | 3 Comments

T-Mobile Customer Support Is Like Getting Help From A Child

by stuporglue Posted on April 21, 2011

I just spent 30 minutes on the phone with T-Mobile trying to change my plan. 5 useless conversations later with 5 different customer service reps, having repeated my phone number, name and the last 4 digitis of my social security number each time, I gave up and hung up.

UPDATE:

We went into a store and they called T-mobile again for us. It turns out that the magic words are “Close my account”. That gets you to customer loyalty. We are now happy prepaid customers. We did also sign up with a VoIP service and tie that into our Google Voice numbers to get free incoming calls when we’re at home, but that’s food for another post.

What I’m trying to do isn’t that complicated. I currently have a family plan with two phone lines on it. The 750 Talk plan for $59.99 per month.

Our contract expired last month, which meant I was in the market for a new plan. After downloading our recent usage into a spreadsheet and checking out all our options, the best place for us to be right now is on separate monthly pre-paid plans, the 1500 Talk & Text with 30 MB data plan, for $30.00 per phone.

Same price for 4 t imes the minutes, not too bad, right? What the family plan has that the prepaid doesn’t is that the family plan includes free nights and weekends, and free T-Mobile to T-Mobile calling. We’re both using about 700-900 total minutes per month with no texting; essentially what this plan would do is give us texting at the same price we’re paying now.

Problem 1: Service Reps Don’t Want to Talk to You If You Have a Plan That’s Not In Their Department

The first issue I had was that each service rep wanted to send me back to the post-paid department since I have a post-paid plan. I literally had to interrupt them and say “Wait!” to not get sent back there again and again.In the end, no one really knew who I was supposed to talk to.

Post Paid
    ||
    \/
Pre Paid
    ||
    \/
Customer Care ? (Gustavo)
    ||
    \/
Customer Care
    ||
    \/
Flex Pay
    ||
    \/
Pre Paid (but I said no, and hung up)

Above is how I was transfered. I was automatically started in post paid, which makes sense since that’s the plan type I have. They sent me to pre-paid (see problem 2 below, for more on this) who said that Customer Care should be able to help me switch plans. Customer care apparently wasn’t really custoemer care because they transfered me to the real Customer Care. The real customer care actually seemed like they understood my problem, but couldn’t change my plans for me, and sent me to Flex Pay. Flex pay got confused and tried sending me back to pre-paid. At this point I figured enough was enough and said goodbye.

Problem 2: Internal Plan Categories Don’t Match T-Mobile’s Website’s Plan Categories

Check out the Family Plan page. Go ahead, open that link and search for the term “post paid” or “postpaid”. The only place it appears is in the light grey fine print at the bottom of the page, and yet customer service kept referring to the post-paid department when they talked about transferring me. The term postpaid was pretty easy to figure out, after all, I am paying for my account at the end of each month.

Where it starts to get fun is if you visit their Prepaid Plans page. Looks like some nice pre-paid plans, right? You’ve got your pay by the minute section and your prepaid monthly plan. Pretty straightforward right? Except that once you have gotten transfered to the pre-paid department and start talking about the monthly plans, they get confused. The lady I spoke with kept saying “We don’t have any plans with 1500 minutes!”. Finally she figured out which plan I was talking about and said “OH, that’s not prepaid, that’s a flex plan”. What do you mean it’s not pre-paid? It says on the website “PREPAID PLANS”. Go back to the Prepaid plans page and search for the word “Flex” — it’s nowhere to be found.

Now, I’m not sure if the pre-paid customer service rep was just confused or what, but I don’t even see the word Flex anywhere in the Plans menu list.I have added it for your convenience.

There is in fact a FlexPay Plans webpage, but I suggest you use Google to find it because it’s sure not in the menu or on the Plans Overview webpage. Actually, I suggest not bothering with finding it because the plans aren’t very good.

In any case, it doesn’t look like the T-mobile website likes Flex Pay very much, and it seems like the pre-paid people need some more training on their pre-paid plans. Or the website needs to be more clear on the definition of pre-paid.

Problem 3: Getting Help From T-Mobile is Like Getting Help From a Child

I’ll give T-Mobile this much, I was speaking to a live person in about 3 minutes, and every one of the 5 people I spoke with was friendly.

Working with them was like getting help from a child though. A happy friendly kid who you have to explain things to over and over again. Every time you speak to someone you are required to enter your phone number, say your name and the last 4 of your Social Security number, and then you have to re-explain your whole issue to the new person. Isn’t this the reason that computers were made? To help us with problems like this? Once I have proven who I am, shouldn’t I be able to get transfered through the whole support system without doing so again?

Conclusion

After 30 minutes I’d had enough. I guess I’ll have to go into a physical store. It just seems that a phone company should be able to help a customer change phone plans over the phone. I mean, isn’t that kind of the business they’re in?

Sorry for the rant, I usually try to keep this website more technical and interesting with less whining, but this is what you get tonight.

Sidenote

Runners up in the search for a new plan were

H2O Wireless – $40/month for unlimited voice and text — GSM prepaid
Boost Mobile – $50/month starting decreasing every 6 months to $35/month after 18 months. iDEN prepaid

The price to match was $60/month for two lines for about 900 minutes per line. Boost would’ve been worth the extra money for unlimited data, but we got my wife a nice GSM phone with built-in GPS (no data plan needed!)and I haven’t seen a smart phone that fits my needs yet, so I’d rather stick with my smallish dump-phone. H2O would’ve been an acceptable option, but since we won’t be maxing out the 1500 minutes on the T-Mobile plan, the price was the only difference and T-Mobile won out. Well…it will if they can get our plans switched over.

Posted in Something Interesting | Tagged t-mobile | Leave a comment