Member postings for ronan walsh

I have just bought but not collected an astra/elite as5-e tool and cutter grinder. I was looking for a small surface grinder but small ones are hard to come by. From what i have read the astra is just as good at surface grinding as it is at t&c grinding. Has anyone on here got one of these grinders ? Can you tell me anything about them ?

I have to agree with this. The lighter morse tapers are not the best for milling and i have often seen the no.2 chuck and cutter on my Tom Senior clearly flexing under load. I do notice that the runout is reduced if using end mills rather than 2 flute slot drills.

Who supplies tool holders for the Dickson quick change tool posts and doesn't charge the earth for them ? i'd like to pick up a few more for my colchester.

I was having trouble with local young scrotes climbing over our back wall (6ft) and messing with things, they never took anything but it was only a matter of time before they decided to help themselves. As a firearm licence holder the police have to inspect my security, and when they did i took the opportunity to ask what i can do , legally to make the place more secure.

Spikes or broken glass set in cement on the wall tops are a big no-no. Not only will the lowlife take the chance to sue you if they hurt themselves while robbing you, it can put your property at risk firemen will not climb over broken glass to put out your fire.

The solution was a trip to a local lorry yard and obtaining from them a nice big tub of filthy used axle grease. Smeared liberally all over the wall, it works at keeping opportunist lowlife out and makes the more hardened criminal think twice too. The police did tell me thieves deliberately search for weak targets and slack security.

I would also suggest cctv, its easy to set up now and the cameras are available cheaply, even from aldi. Recorded cctv footage can be backed up on the internet, making tampering with it impossible. Apart from that, plenty of steel bars or grilles in windows , heavy bolts and good locks, and a noisy dog if you like, is the way to go, sadly its a sign of modern times.

More amps dougie ? Take it out and give it a rub with a wire brush and start again ?

Terry Pratchett was on newsnight on bbc last week. He did not appear well at all, he was having difficulty speaking.

I read a few different versions of Brunels biography and it seems to me he spent as much time in westminster lobbying for different acts of parliament to allow different things to be built, as he did on site most probabily.

Good link John, interesting stuff. Yes new technologies can be developed in the uk , but how long before some slimy politician asks the chinese to "invest " in it and they walk off with the hard work of others for production in china ? Sadly it seems to be the modern theme in all industries.

Roger , have you considered electropolishing ? My old job used to send stainless steel parts used in the pharma industry out to be polished. Might be worth looking into.

**LINK**

Cutting internal keyways and gears, one of the few jobs a shaper excels at over more modern machinery.

Thank you Clive.

Are swiss tech milling cutters any use ? Is the quality ok for home use or are they chinese junk with a european sounding name on the box ? I ask because the local engineers suppliers sometimes have them on special offer.

I just wanted a reasonably large, say 1 1/2" or 2" diameter indexable milling cutter to use squaring up or facing stock. The work i do is a bit larger than model making usually, motorcycle parts etc.

Ebay is a pain to deal with imho. If anyone on here has ever paid for something they have won and not received it, because of a crooked seller, complaining is a long drawn out process with zero satisfaction at the end of it.

Well the er40 chuck had a 2mt taper shaft on it for tool holding, not work holding, Maybe i am underestimating the capacity the morse tapers have to cope with tools, but i doubt it. Surely the way machine tool manufacturers limit the size of the tools to be used in their machines is by the taper they use in the spindle ?

I was looking at indexable milling/ facing tools etc today, on one of the hobby suppliers websites and on ebay. Some of the indexable tools for a no.2 morse taper shaft were 3" in diameter which struck me as very large, then i seen a set of er 40 collets and chuck for 2mt , these collets have a capacity of over 1". Is there a rule of thumb for how large a tool the various morse taper can handle ? I realize its a bit of a "how long is a piece of string" question, but there must be some guidelines.

Exactly Trevor, you really appreciated the mill or surface grinder or lathe or whatever and the accurate work they could do, and as a tradesman every skill you can get under your belt like bench fitting ot hand scraping is an asset , even if you only use them occassionally.

Wot , no one ?

Hello Roy

When i served my time as a fitter/turner we had to spend 6 months away from the job in the first year at a training centre, a huge part of the work load was bench fitting. This comprised of mainly getting two pieces of metal and hacksawing and filing them to shape and getting them within tolerance, and getting them to fit together. One test piece was a piece of 6mm thick steel plate into which a square hole had to be cut and filed to a tolerance of +/- 0.02mm, when this was finished a second piece had to be cut and filed to fit the hole in the original workpiece. The work was closely inspected by the instructors for tolerances, squareness, fit and surface finish.

It was hard work at the time and remember going home knackered, but it really did teach you about how accurately you can work with the humble file and while i grumbled at the time i am glad i did it. The instructor in the other class was an aussie chap, he didn't bother teaching or testing bench fitting as in his opinion it was an unnecessary and outdated skill to have ! But he also reckoned using manual machine tools was out of date.

Has anyone here with a Tom senior milling machine used a spacer under the column to increase the distance between the table and tool ? I mean the horizontal type machines fitted with a knuckle vertical head , not the light verticals etc. This spacer is normally 3" or 4" in height. I have asked on the TS Yahoo group with differing answers, the main concern is that the bottom 3" or 4" inches of the knee are not engaged with the vertical dovetail on which it runs in the z-axis.

Any opinions ?