Member postings for Hopper

A Chinese 1330 sized lathe would be ideal for a school or college setting. EG the Warco GH1330 for 6,000 Quid a throw. I know several owners of the Australian-sold equivalent the Hafco 1330 and they are a good solid machine that has given no trouble to the several owners I know. A bit bigger (13" swing, 30" bed) and more robust than a Boxford yet with approximately the same footprint. Solid enough to stand up to student abuse though. Much more robust than a minilathe or its near-cousin the SC4 etc.

Like Tony Pratt says ^^^^^^ running vintage machinery as a daily user requires post-restoration TLC and constant fettling, whether it is old motorbikes or old lathes. I have both. The old bikes are great, but if I want to just go out to the garage every day, turn the key, hit the start button and ride somewhere with no dramas, it is the new bike every time. My restored Myford is pretty good and reliable but it does need treating with "mechanical sympathy" and TLC.

I can't see the financial controllers at a school being convinced to invest hard-won funds in stripping vintage machinery, regrinding beds and carriages and reassembling by skilled machine tool fitters etc etc when brand new is available at the above sort of prices. Accountants always seem much more happy with capital expenditure than maintenance as it can be "written off" etc in the vagaries of their trade.

Better to sell the old Boxfords to someone on this forum who will restore them at their leisure and give them occasional hobby use.

Or to get 68 divisions on a 90:1 div head, you can use 1 turn plus 22 holes on a circle of 68 holes. If you have a 68 hole circle. If not, probably machining an aluminium disc with 34 holes would probably be your easiest solution as suggested already. Then you have the rest of the disc to fill in with any other oddball circles you may need in future.

PVC might deform out of shape under continuous use? And it is rather slippery. The cheap Chinese horizontal bandsaw I use has aluminium wheels with some rubber bonded on to the outer diameter.

Seems like most bandsaws the wheels are about the same width as the blade, or just a little wider, and slightly crowned rather than flat so the sawblade stays on the wheel without wandering.

Edited By Hopper on 04/05/2023 12:59:33

Glorious to see. I am sure the old coal-burners were more than welcome out there in the heart of coal-mining country in the Hunter Valley. Some lovely models toward the end there too.

When the Myford ML7 came out in 1946 it cost about 40 Quid. According to an online calculator, that is equivalent to about 2,100 Quid today. About what a similar sized Sieg SC4 hobby lathe costs today.

Thanks. Been living up to my name and hopping around on one foot after a bit of minor surgery. Glad I did not sign up for anything major.

Could some kind passing mod please remove the extra "s" on the end of Chinese in the thread heading. I don't seem to be able to edit it out. Thanks.

And there are ISO metric threads, DIN metric threads and JIS metric threads...

Stumbled over this little snippet of video and thought it quite clever. The basic principles could be adapted to just about any lathe. I don;t know if you can buy it outside China but looks to have a built-in bar-feed collet set up and dead simple "capstan" arrangement for either/both cross slide and main carriage using nowt more than a disc of steel with offset pin and a bit of flat bar for a linkage.

(Warning: Those of a sensitive nature regarding WHS should look away now or forever hold your peace.)

On paper. In practice they are owned by the same people and operate out of the same address in Mytholmroyd. Genuine Myford parts ordered from the Myford website arrive in a package listing the sender as RDG Ltd, in my experience.

The current state of the Myford "factory" is an interesting study. Keith Appleton did a series of promotional videos for them a while back in  a series including the one posted below. Looks like the factory these days at Mytholmroyd is a two or three-man workshop hand-assembling a small number of lathes  from the quite extensive warehouse of parts they keep for the main business -- keeping the existing old Myfords running. He says in there somewhere that the casting and machining is done by outside contractors in the Halifax area and surrounds. It does not look like they do much machining in house these days. Perhaps surface grinding the beds, but he is not clear about that, other than saying they still have a surface grinder and a small milling machine.

The other factory videos in Keith's series are quite interesting too.

Edited By Hopper on 04/05/2023 05:18:03

Edited By Hopper on 04/05/2023 05:22:12

You should be able to buy a length of threaded rod of the matching diameter and pitch and machine the end for the handle to turn it into a feed-screw. Most likely it is a trapezoidal thread (metric Acme, sort of.) Although some hobby lathes have used a standard 60 degree thread. May be left hand thread, depending on your lathe. Plenty of such threaded rod for sale on the net. Sometimes listed as leadscrew etc.

What brand of taps are you using? Sometimes you get a duff shipment that are not correctly manufactured or heat-treated.

Try drilling and tapping a hole in a piece of known mild steel that you have machined before without problems. If it taps OK, then your problem is the bright steel stock you bought for the toolmakers clamps.

No choice: the ML7 has no power cross feed. The only time I have ever snapped a blade was feeding in hard and fast without stopping, using a non-inverted parting tool. So, back to inverted and backing off regularly to clear the chips and cool the tip. Plenty oil too.

Steam oil today still most often contains tallow, as its makers and sellers proudly proclaim. Sometimes it is referred to as fatty oils or fatty compounds, other times as tallow. Here are two of many examples. LINK LINK  (Edit: As Nick posted above while I was sweating over a hot keyboard.)

As I said before, oil is not mixed with the steam in turbines -- no sliding surfaces on the steam side to lubricate -- so you won't find steam oil in a modern power-station. And it is not mixed in with process steam because process steam is used for heating or for injecting into chemical processes, foodstuffs, refinery heat exchangers etc, not for driving steam-operated sliding mechanisms that require lubrication. In most process applications, oil would be a very unwanted contaminant.

High temperature oils used for lubricating conveyors etc outside the steam environment is a different beast but might be second choice if no proper steam oil with tallow is available.

Edited By Hopper on 24/03/2023 11:10:25

Good luck with the hunt. I doubt you will find steam oil at a modern steam turbine power station. I never came across it in quite a few years of working in power stations and boiler houses.

Steam Oil was/is a mix of very heavy mineral oil and tallow rendered from animal fat, designed to stick to the cylinder walls and valve chests of reciprocating steam engines without being washed away by the mixture of steam and condensate blasting through them.

It is not used in modern turbines or other rotary steam-powered machinery. Their bearings are lubricated by circulated mineral oil with no contact with steam at all. It is akin to hydraulic oil. The bearing housings are usually separate from the turbine steam casings to stop crossover. You would not want steam contaminating your oil on a 3,000rpm bearing, nor oil contaminating the condenser where steam is recycled into feed water.

I think the only places you might find steam oil are those still running the old reciprocating engines and pumps. Or any of the heritage steam train operators in Thailand. But some of the steam men at the power station might know of any old rice or sugar mills around still using their "heritage" reciprocating engines. Or they might be able to put you onto a national oil distributor who supplies such old installations with steam oil.

As an aside, it certainly is a testament to 19th century technology and craftsmanship that so many of those old engines are still running daily in hard use across much of Asia. There are quite a few in India, Vietnam and Indonesia that show up on YouTube too. I see a busman's holiday coming up now airfares are getting back to pre-covid affordability, sort of. Hop skip and jump from northern Australia.

Edited By Hopper on 24/03/2023 05:43:30

Magnetic base with a bit of sheetmetal such as an old biscuit tin lid attached can be handy. Move it around to where it is needed most.

There are sugar mills and rice mills in Thailand still using 19th century horizontal steam engines, according to that fount of all knowledge YouTube, thanks to a guy named Rob Dickinson. They must use some kind of steam oil? Might be obtainable at the back gate in small quantities?

Hmmm. Click on the link in the below box and it will take you to the very interesting video of "Temples of Steam" in Thai sugar/rice mills.

Edited By Hopper on 23/03/2023 10:48:31

Edited By Hopper on 23/03/2023 10:49:24

Edited By Hopper on 23/03/2023 10:52:20

Good holding power for precision work on bigger lathes with high cutting forces. But if the stock is a bit out of round or rough, a three-jaw will often give better grip. You absolutely don't need a six jaw chuck on the average hobby lathe.

That sounds like it would work. That is assuming you will bore the hole in the middle to fit the eccentric afterwards and not before.

Yes might as well do the fitted bolts now you have solved the problem of the nut hanging over the edge etc.

Some discussion on this old thread here LINK with some good sources to check up on .

More recently Julius DeWaal has done external drawings and Sarik Hobbies also.