My Pilgrimage To Taig Tools!

This week is Spring Break for my wife’s teaching job.. and so to celebrate our entire family travelled today to Phoenix, Arizona to fulfill our various desires for things to do in that city.

My wife was going for a teachers’ convention, the high point of which was meeting an old idol of hers, Dr. Jean (a creator of educational music for the preschool and elementary audiences).

Little One and Auntie were headed off to the Arrow Mills Mall for an entire day of ‘shop till they drop’!

As for me… I needed to visit a couple of places.

I highly recommend Rutland Tools in North Phoenix, off of I-17 on the 24th Avenue exit, as a place to quickly obtain replacement endmills on a day’s notice, at a highly reasonable price.

But the high point of the day was to visit the manufacturer of my CNC milling machine which I use for both jewelery making and for making specialized tools toward same… Taig Tools!

BE SURE TO CALL AHEAD JUST AS YOU ENTER CHANDLER, ARIZONA ON HIGHWAY 202 EAST.

Why?

I had made the mistake of driving toward their mailing address on Nightengale, which turned out more to be like Nightmare as I chased down a divided dirt road without even finding the lone mailbox that they told me after the fact not to drive to!

The Taig factory is located south of the Chandler Airport in an out of the way cul-de-sack of Adams off of McGee Boulevard. I finally found the phone number and was very quickly led 1/4 mile away from where I had been trying to look while wasting a whole hour in the process.

I had a nice chat from the owner and proprietor himself, named Cliff. He’s old yet strong and sharp of mind, patient and completely giving of himself and his time. An utter mensch (gentleman squared) in my humble opinion. He and his wife were a pleasure to meet finally after hearing them on the phone over the last few years.

He told me the story of how Taig came to be. It is your typical American success story of finding a nice market niche coupled with the immortal virtues of craftsmanship and intelligent design, to build a business starting from the back of his house and gradually becoming a million dollar endeavor.

From what little I understand, Cliff had started making small lathes for the aerospace industry. He had two small sons, an older one named Craig. The younger one did not yet have the speaking machinery in place to pronounce his older brother’s name properly, it coming out as ‘Taig’ rather than as ‘Craig’.

And so that was the inspiration for Cliff’s branding of all of his products.

Since I had in mind to purchase a 3 jaw scroll chuck, Cliff showed me all of the facilities needed to create one, and upon my request allowed me to see the innards of one. I was expecting a 21rst century knockoff of the original 19th century Horton universal chuck design, such as I might attempt if I was ever planning on attempting to bootstrap my own.

Instead I saw the utter elegance and simplicity of an amazing single piece spiral track based on a mix of advanced mathematics and masterful mechanical engineering and crafting that interlocked with individually calibrated slots milled within the three independently designed jaws.

He also showed me several industrial scale machines where he could make parts for Taigs in batches of two dozens each… this where I had thought that he was using his products to
make more products… but Cliff says “that would be too slow.”

I had another reason for going to Taig besides buying things. Cliff is the only person I know who is a patient instructor, very generous with his time, and I needed instruction on how to indicate my 4-jaw independent chuck properly in a rotary table. I decided to buy a 3 jaw universal chuck to buy time until I would eventually be good enough with Cliff’s instructions.

Explanations off of the Internet were in no way a proper replacement for a hands-on lesson in something like this!

It turns out that you mount a dial indicator in the correct size collet of the milling machine. You then set the needle of the dial indicator against the work mounted in your rotary table. (assuming your rotary table is set up to rotate about the Z axis). Don’t sweep yet with the spindle!

Instead, rotate the table and adjust the jaws in pairs. Note the difference in deflection between one jaw and its opposite number 180 degrees away. If the dial indicator needle pulls counterclockwise you then need to move the work “towards” your left hand side, adjusting the jaws to absorb half of the deflection. Once you are done with one set of jaws, then move on to the other set and do the same. Once you are done with both sets, rotate the table completely around a few times and make any final adjustments you need to see so that your overall differences in deflection are under .001 inches.

Now you can rotate the spindle. Note the difference in deflection from the +X direction to the -X direction. If the needle pulls counterclockwise, you need to move the work towards your left hand side by adjusting the X axis crank. Do similar for Y axis.

With practice, this is all you need. Cliff highly recommends purchasing a less sensitive dial indicator than the very best and most sensitive type, because in his words “you’d go crazy trying
to indicate a rotary table that way.”

On the one hand, he was clearly right. On the other hand, I had to learn to do things using the tools that I had, because when I started out I bought several things, including an indicator, that I thought at the time I would only have the opportunity to only buy once. I had brought my own indicator because I knew I would have no other choice but to lay in the bed I had made, at least for the time being. So with some difficulty we had indeed made the process work using my own dial indicator and stand, and while he couldn’t make the example perfect (and I begged him to stop after he started hitting diminishing returns!), I still came away with the valuable fundamentals of this operation now clear within my head.

Eventually it was time to leave, as I realized that the rest of my family was expecting to be picked up from various place. I had noticed from boxes of drops and junk and since I was low on metal had offered to buy some from him (rather than resort to mail order from Metals Supermarket).

He pointed to the back of one of his construction areas to where he kept his main assortment of drops, and said, “Just take what you want, fill a box”, pointing to one of the larger paper boxes with wooden bottoms.

So he took his leave, having other things to do, and I spend the next half hour (at least!) filling the box he pointed with aluminum drops of various size and shapes, plus some iron.

But with me being an wimp, the box was too heavy for me to lift!!

So in the end I decided to take three much smaller cardboard boxes, transferring nearly everything I had loaded except for the iron or steel and some aluminum bars were much too large to hacksaw even with Mr. Ryobi. I wasn’t sure about taking anything but aluminum because I didn’t want to chance taking iron or steel that my Taig could not machine, figuring if I needed those I would get them special by mail order.

I filled three much smaller boxes and a double armful that I packed out to the trunk of my car, about 50 pounds (or less than half that in kilos).

I wouldn’t recommend taking anything like that or in such amounts unless I had bought significant stuff from him first, but evidently it was part and parcel of the courtesy of the pilgrimage he was extending to me today.

Be sure to be very, VERY courteous every moment you are with him. Gentle Reader: Don’t you dare ask poor Cliff for FREE aluminum drops! I myself had offered to BUY drops from him. Even with him being such a nice person, his wife and his two grown sons always look out for him constantly and they know when not-nice people are hanging about.

And so thoroughly dirty in my jeans and hands but feeling like a child at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, I thanked him effusively and then took my joyful leave. As I left I told him my identity on Ganoksin and told him I would be blogging about him (he is of course VERY aware of Ganoksin). I hope he has no objections regarding the result.

Heading home to my smithy,

Aulë