fritz15 - Machine Made - Last UPDATE 10/31

So, here is the overdue update:

I finally found some time to get started on the tail cap.

The lathe is still all nice and clean:

Now let’s make some titanium shavings!
The titanium rod has a diameter of 30 millimetres on the outside and my three jaw chuck has an inner diameter of 30 millimetres as well. Since I want the part I am working on to be as close to the chuck as possible in order to avoid rattling, the diameter needed to be decreased a few tenths of a millimetre. At this point I was pretty curious about how my lathe and the titanium would perform. As it turns out, it isn’t a big problem. There seems to be a lot of respect for titanium, and I have to admit that I can’t take off too much material at once, but with a little bit of patience, good lubrication and very sharp carbide cutting plates, it works great.

Now the chunk of titanium fits nicely in the chuck:

So, I began shaving off material to reach the right outer diameter:

Next, I measured and controlled the diameter. I always measure stuff like that, so prepare for a lot of measuring :wink:

24.99 Millimetres, where 25.00 Millimetres was desired - that’s a very good fit and I am satisfied. Actually it’s just a flashlight and not a normed engineering fit (can I say that?) so I wouldn’t need to be that precise and could just measure with a caliper, but whatever, why not be that precise? (Apart from wasting my life time haha)
Having gotten the right diameter, I started shaping the outside of the tailcap:

So that’s it for today, thanks for reading and tomorrow I’ll continue with the inside of the tailcap.