Inside Doc's Shop 2026

[DocsMachine]

Thought I'd switch over to yearly threads (previous 'inside' here) so each one doesn't get unusably long or cluttered.

And to start us off, I have a sneak-peek for just you ladies and gents. I have a little project I'll hopefully be doing a video on here shortly, and figured I'd give you a teaser.

The idea is, in a manner of speaking, to duplicate a grip frame. Now, ideally, I'd CAD this thing and feed it into my CNC mill, but I'm still learning that machine, and in this case, I'm only making one part. (Well, two- the extra both as a "just in case" and for myself if it all works out. )

We begin with this:



A practically-antique Planet Eclipse 'Cocker slider trigger frame, from back around the turn of the century when Smart Parts was the US dealer for PE's "splash" kits. Somewhere around... geeze, '99 or 200, maybe? SP fire-saled off some of their excess PE hardware, and I bought two of these unanodized singlescrew slider frames... and have been sitting on them for a quarter-century.

One's been in a box with some MiniCocker parts, that I paid to have the anno stripped from back in 1996, and still have yet to reassemble. The cobbler's kids have no shoes and all that.

I'll be both duplicating and adapting it to a different gun, but the overall profile remains unchanged. So, I shot that photo with a reasonably contrasting background, a ruler for scale, and as few shadows as I could manage.

Then, cropped and rotated to level....



And the background digitally erased. That part's kind of time consuming, depending on what you have for graphics software, but it's not bad.



In my graphic program, I then used the vector line and shapes tools to outline everything...



Delete the extraneous...



And finally delete the image itself, leaving only a to-scale outline.



The ruler was there to give... well, a scale, and the line below is nominally an inch. That way, when it's printed...



I can simply measure that line, and see how close to the correct size it is.



There's a tiny error, but acceptable. Laying the grip frame itself over the pattern, shows that same slight error. I could try scaling it up very slightly and reprinting, but for the purpose, this is plenty close.



What's that purpose? Anyone who's watched Clickspring can probably guess.

Stand by, more coming soon.

Doc.

[superman]

May want to add the timing rod hole and hole too.

[DocsMachine]

Unnecessary in this case.

Doc.

[RPP]

Nice. Looking forward to seeing the outcome.

[DocsMachine]

The Crate of Happiness®!

Regular reader, fan and malcontent Mark-T, hallowed be thy name, bestowed upon me the gift of true happiness. Happiness in the form of a crate of brass!



Of course, in the local context, brass has but one connotation, doesn't it. You would probably not be wrong were you to guess what all of those are...

Unfortunately, due to the usual and chronic time constraints, I am unable to leap right in and start modding and fixing and fobbing and bandsawing and soldering and occasionally defenestrating, but suffice to say I'm dusting off old lists and making fresh plans.

Stand by.

Doc.

[Drunkscriblerian]

Holy crap and other comments!

If what's in that box is what I'm pretty sure it is, your friend must really love you.

[Ecapnation]

If you ever need cad done fast I get board at lunch often and we could always work something out.

Pretty sure at this point i digitized most of a cocker

[DocsMachine]

Well crap- like others have said, they don't make things like they used to.

Longtime readers will know that my main machine in the shop is my Grizzly mill- a Bridgeport clone I bought back in 2002. I've used this thing close to every day since then, putting many, many thousands of hours on it.

And today, for the first time, it broke. I only got 24 years out of it!

I'd been doing a repetitive job using a fixture, that was a counterbore operation, using the quill like a drill press. I'd been noticing the quill didn't want to return all the way to the top of the stroke each time, and I was thinking the oil in there was maybe getting a little sticky. Since I was almost done, I figured I'd finish the job, clear off the table, clean the quill, etc.

Nope, I was setting up the last cutter and as I ran the quill down, something went "CRACK!" and the quill fell to the depth stop.



Quill still moved freely, but no spring return, so clearly the 'clockspring' in the quill handle decided to take the day off. I opened it up and... sure 'nuff:





I figure it'd been cracked for at least part of this run, which probably explained why the quill wouldn't fully return. That last pull popped it the rest of the way.

I could finish the run without it, but it'd be tricky. I leave the spindle turning while I swap the part, and this way I'd have to rely on the quill lock. I may wait 'til I get a replacement in.

And that part, at least, isn't bad- this mill is a bolt-for-bolt copy of a Bridgeport, made in the same Taiwanese factory that used to make Bridgeports for... well, Bridgeport. (Now Hardinge.) As such, replacement parts are both common and ubiquitous. The new spring should be here by the end of the week, and I should be back up and running by then.

I suppose I'll just have to sit here and twiddle my thumbs 'til it arrives.

Doc.

[Drunkscriblerian]

Grizzly tools can be weirdly tough like that. At my old job we had a Grizzly 24 inch planer that was purchased in 2003, it ran until 2018 and then the ON/OFF switch finally gave out after who knows how many button pushes. After replacing the balky switch, the thing ran fine for another year until the business closed and we sold the machine. As far as I know, the planer's still running fine in 2026.

I've also seen Grizzly stuff catastrophically fail after a comically short amount of time. I guess their QA is a little wanting, but the designs are not bad.

[DocsMachine]

Grizzly got stuff- and may still- from both Mainland China and Taiwan. Generally speaking, the Taiwanese (which is where this one's from) is better quality, easily up there with Western makes. Mainland can make the same quality, but they're also more than happy to cut corners if that's what the manufacturer wants. (Take the ubiquitous 9x20 lathe- JET, Grizzly, Harbor Freight and Busy Bee all come out of the same factory and the same production lines. Jet and Griz get the 'cream of the crop', HF gets the stuff that didn't pass QC for those, and Bee gets whatever's left, regardless of quality.

But at the same time, Jet and Griz don't always have one of their own QC guys in the factory, and so yeah, sometimes "didn't quite pass QC" slips through.

Doc.

[Spaghetti Overdrive]

Do you happen to archive/digitize things in general, or just doing it as you need it for projects?

[DocsMachine]

You mean make something like a blueprint, or a dimensioned CAD drawing?

If so, yeah, I've been doing that for years. When I started out, everything was the proverbial cocktail-napkin sketch. As I eased more and more into production- even if it was still just on the manual machines- I started working up proper dimensioned drawings. At this point I have hundreds or parts drawn up.

Last few years, since about the time I got my CNC mill, I've been starting to work things up in CAD, specifically Fusion 360. I'm still a really green novice at it, and since it's a bit of a booger to take a 3D model and make a dimensioned drawing out of it, I don't really have many of those.

If you mean just drawing random parts, like Phantom bodies or 'Cocker back blocks, no. I don't have the spare time for something like that, although a library of such things would have some use.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

Mill's back up to full speed!

The new spring came in Friday, and I took a moment this afternoon to slip 'er in place. But first, I had to get rid of the old one:



I set it up in the outside vise, and used a chunk of aluminum rod as a drift to tap it out. That way, when it inevitably exploded, it wouldn't break three windows, sever an important vein or two, and possibly startle the cat.

And explode it did:



I guess I was expecting to unwind more, but either way, when it did, it did so with alacrity.

The new one arrived safely tied up and wired, so I set it back in the adjuster collar, and used the same drift to tap it into place- sliding the wire off as it went.



Et voilá.



Now, the trick is, that mounting collar is also an adjuster, you have to "wind" it to preload the spring. That is usually done with a pin spanner, except I don't have one- at least, not one that fit this application. I was also feeling a little lazy today, so I made a quick-and-dirty one. First, by turning a .210" spud on the end of a longish bit of 1/4" mild steel rod.



With some aluminum pads, I bent the ends in the vise....



And then bent the whole mess in half.



That let me hold and 'wind' the collar easily- which is a good thing, as it took a surprising lot of trial and error.



This spring, unfortunately, apparently isn't as strong as the old one, and by the time I got enough tension on it to actually retract the quill as the old one did, it ended up going into coil bind halfway through the quill travel.

So I had to do a lot of back-and-forth to get the most tension, but not to the point it binds. And I eventually got there, but while there's enough spring tension to help the quill raise back up, it won't slide back up on its own anymore.



Anyway, it's back together, and works fine, I'll just have to get used to manually raising the quill from now on.

And, with that buttoned back up, I was able to finish up the delayed project that was in the fixture, clean the table, re-check the tram, and move on to the next project.

Doc.

[DocsMachine]

And a sneak peek for those of you who aren't watching the StuporBowl: The World's First properly Freaked SL-68!



The drawback is it's not a drop-in, the body does have to be machined. But after that, you can use any Phantom barrel, Freaked or not, and you can still disassemble the gun (removing the bolt and hammer) normally.

More info on Monday.

Doc.