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No need to worry. It was the usual mix of other things that need fixing and my tendency to overthink things mixed with Thanksgiving. I was converging on just going ahead and putting it on the lathe. Put a dimple in the end with the biggest center drill I've got and use my live center. I used...

I'm surprised looking here that my last post was before Thanksgiving. I would sworn it was last week, Monday or Tuesday. After the base, the path I decided to go down is to make the cylinder, connecting rod and piston. The cylinder is cast iron and pretty much 2-3/8" in length, with the...

One question, Terry: is that brass or bronze bar in the top picture ("Sanity checking...") the 0.875' diameter you mentioned and the same as the one in the lathe? Just to confirm I understand.

Is that a typo? Those are a tenth of an inch different? I mean is it supposed to be 0.131 and 0.135 or .031 and .035?

Well, for me, I just did the half price sale on Alibre Atom, without the CAM module. Now to find some tutorials and get started. Not necessarily in that order.

And I've got to tell you that as an engineer, I loved this. I had the concept that instead of it being a bitmap (make this bit that color) it was more like a mix of both bitmap and some standardized fonts. There seems to be about 10^23 fonts out there and it can't contain all of them, but...

Is that Rhino 7? In addition to the model engine world, I also do things in the 3D Printer world, and have modeled the house, arranging all the work areas and tools when we did our addition for the shop, my ham radio antennas - anyplace where scaled drawings are useful. About the only...

In the case of importing the pdf file, I was thinking that the dimensions are text and that seemed easy to import. It successfully imports the lines forming the part. The lines for the dimensions, both the ones that lead to the measurement points on the drawing and the ones with the arrowheads...

Absolutely. Honestly, this deserves to be in a museum!

That's pretty much what I do. If I need a 3D model, nothing takes in the standard drafting views from a PDF and turns it into a solid model, so I do that. I've done that most parts of the engine I'm building so far; anything that goes on the CNC mill for repetitive cuts. The drawings import...

Here we are on Sunday night and I've gotten closer to pushing the candy-like "buy it now" button, and then backed off. I guess I'm going to miss the special deal. All of the file import/export things concern me; but mostly the imports. I have some degree of this problem in Rhino, although...

That's the kind of thing I see in Deskproto and it's barely visible on the edges of that horizontal area with a semicircular raised area that I posted above. Right next to the spot where the line stops and the circle begins, the first couple of steps are like the top of this piece. Are both...

Jason, thanks for the exceptionally valuable reply. I can see that both Fusion and MeshCAM do the same sorts of things, in that I can see the ridges in both of them. Fusion looks somewhat better, (value judgement) but there are ridges in the Fusion model from the interpolation, too. Your...

I've been silently watching this thread and learning all I can about the options. Right now, I'm using an old version of Rhino (v5) and working around its bugs. Alibre sounds like a high point for me. Even though I can upgrade to the current Rhino at a discount (any older version of Rhino...

If you're comfortable making the rings, and it sounds like you are, by all means go for it. I'm very inexperienced at things like that or even hardening steels, so I bought the rings figuring I'll do that on another engine in the future. The address that @a41capt posted from the prints is...

Making a crude measurement in a drawing program, it looks like that hole isn't centered in the brass strap. The left side of the nut is over air while the right side is on the brass with room to spare. Move it to the right about half the diameter of that threaded part and it centers the fan?

I went looking at just buying a Silver and Deming bit in 5/8 and saw several individual bits that cost more than that set. Pricey for one drill bit, and not that different from two flute, ball end, 5/8 mills. I have several drill bit sets, but none go over 1/2" except for those spade bits I...

Lots of good ideas here, especially @ChazzC and @Richard Carlstedt. Of those two, @ChazzC's is better for my place. But I'm seriously thinking back to @abby saying not to try to melt down chips and cast them.

I think it's mostly cosmetic, to make a nicer looking part while also getting some screw heads off of the bottom, but the designer (Brian) is watching the thread and might comment. Right now it's 1/4" radius and the whole bottom isn't the nicest looking surface I ever machined, but it is the...

Abby and GreenTwin - thanks for that well thought-out advice. I know that creation of aluminum alloys includes the thermal treatment it gets as being made. This doesn't have any soda cans in it, but I'm sure it's not all 6061. There's some 2000 series in there for sure, and other things I...