My daughter's business at Open Door Escape Games wanted me to build another game prop. Now this is something I like doing and it helps keep me busy. This time I won't be working with wood, but I will be using metal. Now this is right up my alley because for the most part, metal working is a science, however, working with wood is mostly an art. Why? Mostly because wood is dynamic.

Working With Aluminum

I'll be making a laser pointer fixture that will have a base that rotates along with a second axis that will move as well. And nesting in this fixture will be the laser pointer. The material that I'll be using is 6061-T6 aluminum plate that is 1/2" thick. I'll be cutting my pieces from the plate below, which will consist of five pieces.
 

Next I used a center drill in the center and then mounted it on my lathe. What I'm doing is using my "live center" on one side and forcing it against my lathe chuck. Once I have the desired pressure on my work piece, I tightened my tail stock.
 

Here is the other side so you can see my work piece against the chuck jaws. This method works very well to turn the outside diameter of things. However, it's not recommended to take heavy cuts because your work piece might stop spinning, which is when things could go very wrong in a hurry. So light cuts are key here.
 

That empty spot that you see below that electrical box should have a motor in there. About an hour into my project and all of a sudden, my lathe just stopped working. And after checking a few things out I couldn't find the problem so I ended up calling a repair guy. He came out and determined the motor was the problem, so he removed it. Turns out it had a loose wire inside of it and it was shorting out. But it was a easy fix because all it needed was the wire to be tightened back down (if I knew that I could have saved myself a bunch of money). About five days later he came back and installed it and I was good to go again.
 

To keep busy while the motor was being fixed, I started working on some of the other pieces. Here I'm using my milling machine to machine both surfaces flat.