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Paul,

What lathe do you have?

You can certainly make a drawbar to hold the collet chuck from a set like you show. I have done some myself, either from rod that I have threaded, or using threaded rod in a pinch.

Sets like you show would provide the sizes you need with some others for future uses.

Looking at information on the different ER collet ranges, you may have identified ER16 as what you need.

It is possible to make a collet chuck: There are others' projects which show what is involved. Unfortunately I can't easily find one to link to.... You do need to cut threads to make one.

There is another consideration for collet chucks and that is whether you want to be able to feed long stock through the headstock, if your lather allows it. I don't know whether you can find one for your lathe and for ER16.

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I'll echo what others are saying: You need the fundamentals first. I'l also add that Minh Thanh has a workable approach for hobby work. If you try to model the parts you want to make it seems less boring than doing the practice projects provided in tutorials.

I've learned what I know from several packages and from both informal and formal lessons and can't say any one way is perfect. The main thing is to keep working and use the features regularly.

I'll make a general statement that if you're looking for a designing package the more elaborate, "professional," and expensive packages offer more ways to do each task you want to do and allow more configuration of the software to fit the user's environment and approach. Of course, that means there's more to confuse you and more to have to learn.

I'll also add that 3-D design ("modeling") is a different approach than 2-D drawing in either software or on paper. I'm sold on starting a design in 3-D.

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I am one of many that believes a fly cutter should be in every cutter collection, even if you use indexable cutters for some of the jobs traditionally done with a fly cutter.

For general information, let your search engine loose and you'll find more information than any one of us can put together quickly. I just tried "making a fly cutter" and found lots of info easily.

From my experience, balancing cutting-edge geometry, feed rates, etc. is pretty much like using other cutters.

I grind my fly cutter tools old-school on a bench grinder, just like lathe toolbits. If you acquire more unground ones you'll have several chances to practice grinding them and cutting with them so you can contrast and compare. I have reground some chipped brazed-carbide toolkits with radii as well as grinding several all-metal cutters. (I have a green wheel for grinding carbide and typical stock wheels for steel.)

In use, I balance tip radius vs. sharp-pointed-ness and amount of cut vs. speed to cut efficiently without chatter and so the chips come out clean and as small curled pieces. I decide on whether or not to use lubricant/coolant based on material being cut and need to keep things cool and not abuse the cutting edges.

What have I done with my fly-cutter?  Mostly I have used it to clean up or dress large surfaces of material that will be further machined with other tools or machines. In smaller sizes, I have used a fly cutter to dress and square up small blocks for tooling I have made. It's great for making custom-diameter cuts for which I don't have a factory-made cutter. Material cut is mostly aluminum or ferrous metal. A couple of extreme examples include dressing a piece of 6-inch channel steel to make a base for a model and making a section of railroad iron flat on top and square before grinding it more flat to make a small bench anvil.

Have fun and let us know what you accomplish.

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P.S.: I like your restoration projects and I envy your ability to find the rough projects to work on.

SS

These are also known as EAR POLYPUS.  And I have had the (Ahem) pleasure of having one of them used inside my ear canal by my doctor.

I have so far not allowed my TCS (Tool Collector's Syndrome) to make me buy one. Seems a good thing to have, though.

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That's a marvelous scale.

If I let my brainstorming totally loose I could see building a tool grinder for finishing custom setup blocks or angled parts, or for sharpening cutting tools.

Of course the obvious use is a rotary table or indexer. Having a separate scale would allow building in a calibration feature.

If kids compete in science fairs where you live the device could be used by a student to create a precision instrument for studying optics, aiming laser devices, or studying reflection and diffraction of sound waves or radio waves.

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