Member postings for Bob Unitt 1

I always greatly enjoyed anything he appeared on, A delight to watch (and listen to). Will be much missed.

Still, not a bad innings - 91 is a fair age.

Edited By Bob Unitt 1 on 20/01/2015 19:13:38

I have fond memories of mending the gearbox of a Velocette Viper by the light of a roadwork's hurricane lamp at 2am, in the middle of nowhere between Bristol and Gloucester. A selector fork had broken, so we stripped the box, jammed it in top gear and reassembled it. Having push-started the bike I then rode all the way back to Alcester on the clutch, including stopping at traffic lights. That clutch was a sod to set-up (11 springs) but was a superb piece of engineering.

Google "Cherry Hinds Hill"

I can't remember the stainless steel I used, probably something I scrounged from a friend who was company secretary of a steel distributor (a really useful guy to know ). It was for the 'wet end' of a steam engine. The cutter was most likely hardened & tempered 'silver steel', and I doubt that it ever produced more than the half-a-dozen bolts I needed for that engine. I just went into the workshop to see if I still had it, but it's disappeared somewhere in the intervening 20 years and 2 house-moves.

You could try a 'rose bit' - a hollow end-mill held in the tailstock through which you pass the workpiece to reduce it to the diameter of the hole. Advantages are that it always cuts to the required dimension, and applies no lateral pressure to the workpiece as it cuts. I don't know if they're commercially available, I made my own years ago to produce some 8ba bolts in stainless.

As suggested it controls the clearance on the engaged half-nuts. Someone on another list dug out the S7 manual page for me, and based on John's post and on that page I :-

Unscrewed the Stop-screw.
Engaged the leadscrew nuts.
Put a DTI probe on the Engagement lever.
Wound the Stop-screw up until the DTI indicated movement.
Removed the DTI.
Wound the Stop-screw up a further 1/4-turn.

Thank you all for your replies.

I'll now print this sequence off, along with my pictures, and put it in the manual - for the next time I can't remember what that screw does...

Thanks John, enjoy your pint.

Thanks. I wonder how it's supposed to be set ...

I have those thanks, I didn't want to reproduce them in full in case there was a copyright issue.

A clean lathe is the sign of a sick mind...

Oil drain plug.

This is all I have - I know it's a stop-crew, but not what it stops (Excuseme if I get it wrong, this is the first time I've posted an image here) :-

I'm servicing my Myford 254s and I've found an adjuster which isn't described in the service manual, and the guy at Myford doesn't know what it is either. Is there anyone on this forum who might be able to help ?

Try googling "Model Boiler Insulation" - lots of helpful stuff to be found.

I went there once, best part of 20 years ago - I'll swear that bench looked exactly the same then !

Although I do recall a post of John's on one of the old forums (or possibly a newsgroup) in which he claimed to have discovered something untoward underneath his feet - which was later identified as the very rare object known as a 'workshop floor'...

If you've got a front-end loader on that tractor, you could suspend a fairly heavy machine from the loader-arms with lorry tie-downs, and counterbalance with a load of stone in the rear box (if you haven't got a proper rear weight).

I bought some about 8 years ago, bifocal and tempered glass (couldn't have plastic as they won't stand up to splatter from brazing). The bifocal is medium-range and short-range, as I don't need long-distance vision in the workshop. They were about 1/2 the price of normal spectacles as they were classed as 'work-wear'. My usual spectacles last about 2 years, but I haven't even managed to put a scratch on these yet.

Bob Unitt

If your main interest is restoring old motorbikes, you may do better to look for an old imperial lathe - ebay or one of the model-engineering magazines should have plenty of those for sale - cheaper too.

OK, probably an ancient 'Model Engineer' log-on of mine.

Thanks for the answers, I'll go and play with the settings

Having recently joined this forum, I have 3 questions:

Having registered as 'Bob Unitt', why is my user-name 'Bob Unitt 1' ?

Is there any way to 'Mark all as Read' across all Forums ?

Is there any way to 'Go to first unread' on an individual thread ?