Last modified: 2025-06-27 22:57:29
< 2025-06-25 2025-06-28 >I turned the other end down to 19 mm, I had a lot of trouble with this one, the chuck wasn't grabbing hard enough, not sure what was wrong. Possibly my piece of material at the back of the chuck had fallen out and was no longer supporting it? I also don't have the spanner for the ER32 collet chuck so I have just been tightening it by hand. I found greater success when I used a hammer and screwdriver to tighten it.
I didn't bother making a 19 mm bush for my "tailstock", instead I just rotated the vice slightly (!) so that the shaft was bearing against two sides of the bush. Certified Good Enough.
I measured the taper that was being turned on it and kicked the back end of the lathe back and forth until it was pretty straight, ended up 18.94 mm on one end and 18.97 mm on the other, as measured by the micrometer, which is definitely Certified Good Enough.
And then I loaded it into the vice on the CNC machine to machine the flats on the end.
I expected to have to provide some support to the loose end of the shaft, but it turns out that the machine is heavy & rigid enough, and the vice clamps tightly enough, that that was not necessary, great success.
Machining the flats went reasonably well. This is the first non-trivial machining I've done in steel on this machine and it handled it well. I used a 6mm 4-flute corner-radius end mill, at 4000 rpm, 300 mm/min, 0.5 mm depth of cut. It handled a full-width cut OK, but made less noise at maybe 50% step-over.
I cut the flat down 2mm from the top surface. Actually I didn't measure this very well, I should check carefully when I do the other side to make sure that it is going to fit inside the wheel.
But when I was done I crashed the machine and broke the Y axis motor mount! D'oh!
It turned out the threaded inserts got pulled out of the base plate, and also the material cracked. Bad. I super-glued the chunk of material back on, and stuck the threaded inserts back in with green Loctite, will see if this is good enough or not. I may need to make some more substantial mounting for the Y axis motor. I'm letting the glues set overnight before I try to use it again.
I took the steering gearbox out and make the new input shaft.
When I am done using the vice on the CNC machine for the flats on the rear axles I will cross-drill this and pin it on. Also wants a cross-drill for a split pin to retain the upper bearing.
Immediate things:
I'm getting fed up with all the VS Code junk in Cursor. Owen suggested https://github.com/yetone/avante.nvim as a way to use AI in vim.
So now I get to try to get on with neovim. I'm using neovim from snap, with https://www.lazyvim.org/ and avante, and "Ubuntu Mono NerdFont" from https://www.nerdfonts.com/
To be honest it is still a bit too VS Code for my taste, but let's see how it goes.
The first thing that is annoying is it has "mouse support", which is another way of saying it breaks my terminal's mouse support. To start with: selecting text doesn't put it in the middle-click paste buffer, and right-click to paste moves the cursor before pasting, instead of pasting at the current location of the cursor.
I think Avante is not working. I have set an Anthropic API key. It says I need to make sure to "build avante",
but the README says it will download a prebuilt binary if I don't have cargo. ChatGPT said to run
:AvanteBuild, but that does nothing and it is still telling me I need to build it.
It has started working now, maybe :AvanteBuild did something in the background.
It is referring to parts of the code by pointing to specific line numbers, but the lines it is talking about are not at the numbers it gives. For some reason the numbering is not matched up properly. And it is giving loads of bogus advice. I don't have a direct comparison with Cursor, but it feels like Claude is much smarter in Cursor than it is here. It's supposedly using Claude Sonnet 4 though, so not really sure.
But when asked what model it is, it claims to be Claude 3.5 Sonnet. In Cursor it identifies itself as Claude Sonnet 4. Very curious.
Possibly the Cursor prompt tells it what version it is. On the command line I get stuff like this:
curl -X POST [https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages](https://api.anthropic.com/v1/messages) -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "anthropic-version: 2023-06-01" -H "x-api-key: $AVANTE_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY" -d '{
"model": "claude-sonnet-4-20250514",
"max_tokens": 100,
"messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What model version are you?"}]
}'
{"id":"msg_01EPZde3QLo7jMySrYSU7qyg","type":"message","role":"assistant","model":"claude-sonnet-4-20250514","content":[{"type":"text","text":"I'm Claude 3.5 Sonnet, created by Anthropic. My knowledge was last updated in April 2024. Is there something specific you'd like to know about my capabilities or how I can help you?"}],"stop_reason":"end_turn","stop_sequence":null,"usage":{"input_tokens":13,"cache_creation_input_tokens":0,"cache_read_input_tokens":0,"output_tokens":51,"service_tier":"standard"}}
So even if you ask for "claude-sonnet-4-20250514" it self-identifies as 3.5.
And as for why it works so poorly... maybe same problem? Maybe Avante just isn't as good as Cursor?
Also, lol, what, nvim doesn't have :sh? How do I get back to the shell? Ctrl-Z works.
Also, Avante isn't offering automatic tab-complete suggestions, how do I make it do that? There is an "auto_suggestions" setting in the config, marked as experimental, but it doesn't appear to do anything.
I think Avante is just nowhere near as good as Cursor, annoyingly.
< 2025-06-25 2025-06-28 >