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I have a mill & use it for hobby items, nothing too complex to date but more intricate projects on the horizon. I rented the entire milling series. Overall I thought they were pretty good. Seeing milling in action is very beneficial especially speeds & feeds related to that machine & seeing various cutters in action. The video quality is good, he speaks clearly & is obviously a skilled tradesman. I really thought it could have been compressed to about half the DVDs. After you have seen how to indicate & converge on a measurement, you don’t have to see 10 minutes of progressive cuts, especially on subsequent DVDs. His machining is confined to similar blocks of aluminum which is ok for demo purposes, but I think is limiting to those who will be dealing with steel & different cutting/cooling implications. 90% of the setups occur in a standard mill although he did show rotary tables & indexing heads in one of the latter videos (that was a good DVD). I was hoping to see alternate setups using table clamps, 123 blocks, squares, toe clamps, workholding hints for irregular shaped items like castings more typical of what hobbysists are likely to encounter. But I learned a few things & felt it was worthwhile relative to the cost of a book or magazine.
I was hoping to learn about spring making for model engineering purposes since custom springs appear to be so integral to gunsmithing. But this video falls very short. It is really lacking in anything technical you can’t find in much better detail from basic internet searches, books & magazines. You never get to ‘see’ the material being heated to a specific color prior to quenching on video, it happens out of camera range over a few seconds & that’s it for heat treating on teh entire video. I’ve read where magnets or heat sensitive crayons were used, but he just does it by eye. The springs themselves are 2 ‘free hand’ shapes made on a mini belt sander, one of them has a few coil winds from a very basic winding jig. I did not find the video useful.
This guy has incredible talent as evidenced by his work. But the bad filming, fumbling around with the camera, lack of coherent topical 'script' makes it near painful to watch. The actual 'work in progress' isn't very revealing. It would be so much more useful if he filmed the project over key time step intervals so you could better understand how it developed vs holding the near finished object & talking about how it got that way. I came to appreciate the magic of sculpting even more, but didn't necessarily learn much more about how its actually done.
Excellent DVD. Rent this one over the others hands down.
Informative DVD, gets to the point. A few more machining examples/setups would have been good, but the info was useful.
Very good instructional DVD, especially if you are considering what kind of welder to get. Very clear & informative, not a 'garage DVD'. Could have used a bit better closeup photography on the 'puddle', but I don't know if thats possible given the temp & shield etc.
I rented all 4 dvd’s. At times they were a bit repetitive, but overall a very good primer on how to operate a metal lathe & properly use related tooling.
