Member postings for pgk pgk

I suspect it'd take a chain hoist to get my 2 meter plus backache into one of those and on my narrow rural lanes I'd probably need a reverse gear too if they have them?

the link below shows boring bars that can be used down to 11mm (usual disclaimers) but I guess you'ld be going up a second boring bar size for rigidity. Or you could use the first bar as a pattern to make a second larger DIY tool once the hole has been started...

**LINK**

I can;t speak from using steam boilers but I always find that the yellow part of a flame has the most unburned components and sitting objects nesting at the top of the blue gets max heat. Alternatively you need to introduce more oxygen into the flame in the way a bunsen burner or gas torch does, perhaps, to get more complete combustion.

Soemwhere orother I;ve seen home made jaw collars held on with a bolt. Aletratively how about u-shpaed pieces of thin bar stock temporarily held with magnets while the wok is setup (then remove magnet to avoid the obvious swarf issue). I've used magnets to temporarily hold parallels against the chuck back while I set work up in the 4-jaw.

I've got pet sheep... just cannot train them to only eat grass and leave the fruit trees etc alone.

Neighbours flock broke in last year and ate half my veggie patch. Fortuately i grow 3-4 times what we need.

..just to give a flavour of my mowing needs...

I sympathise on the back problem.. also got troubles there althugh improved loads from the days of corsets and canes.

I've got two brushcutters.. the big husky with a harness and a smaller cheapo brand. It;s the twisting motion with the husky that limits how long I use it wheras the smaller one can be weilded one-handed to reach under some of the shrubbery.

You might consider a land clearer (rough cutter). Sadly mine has died at the mo' and despite having it apart several times i can't figure out why the starter pawls keep pulling adrift (and I;ve swapped most of the bits for new).. that and a dodgy engine that really needs taking fully apart - or even swapping for a decent honda power unit. But with largish pram wheels on the back and loads power it can bash its way through most stuff when it did work.. angled back on just the back wheels it's cutters chop almost anything...

Quite apart from the fact it's lawn rather than rough ground... it's has, what?, a 3-4 foot cut width? That'd be a 6-8 mile walk for 3 acres. Would have to make a towable seat.

One would be quite handy for the dodgy hill bits that my tractor skills can;t do except for wrestling it's weight about. feel free to bring one along and chop up the brambles in my steep hilly woody bit..... there's abut 4 acres of closely planted young trees on a 45 deg hillside with waist high throns and brambles - should make a man of you

I've 'owned' a number fo floors in my businesses.. including heavy duty vinyl as used in bus garages, 9-coat epoxy, floor paint, quarry tiles and pressed powder tiles (the sort used in shopping centres). Only the latter held up to the public trailing in grit and path debris.

For a workshop you either have to accept changing that floor at times or picking an option and then using mats in standing areas..or just leaving the concrete. pressed powder tiles wih epoxy grout are expensive and unforgiving of fragile items dropped.

The curtilage was probbaly originally sown with the same flower meadow/grass mix but has been kept mown short for several years and grass has outcompeted the yarrows, yellow rattles and the like.. essentially it's simple lawn.

I do use a topper around field edges and post hay cutting tidy-up, bracken control etc. It doesn't cut anywhere near as close and my one tractor has agri tyres.. which leave serious tracks on the lawns if they aren't bone dry. I'm sure you realise that changing back wheels on a tractor isn't trivial and owning a second tractor with grass tyres is a luxury beyond sense.. let alone the issues of backing in and out of the tree islands, soft fruit, orchards etc. Zero turn mowing is the way.

I;ve been meaning to take some current snaps of the land..perhaps i'll post some here in due course.

To kep the curtilage tidy takes both ride-ons, a push mower and a strimmer.. and around 5 hours work to get around it when this behemoth is in the mix..add another 2-3 hours if just the smaller ride-on. It's usually a couple of hours daily over 3 days and summer time repeat every 5-7 days.

Yes they are 6-bladed spools.

I'd have been inclined to agree the commnet about cylinder mowers for bowling greens etc.. but copared to the rotary ride-on the cylinders give a much more even spray of cuttings (party cos the back deflectors have corroded) compard to the clumpier trails from the husky mulching deck.

Many thanks for all the suggestions ..food for thought I'll ponder on.

It is cutting at the moment ..although certain types of stalks/clumps get missed and have to be gone over at 90 deg. Supriding really with 4 of the spools's cutters a good few mm from the knife. The blades on the 4 worn spools are virtually down to their supporting discs.

Neil, I have 45 acres of mixed grass/flower meadow - it's nice to have a bit that isn't thigh-deep walking in the summer before hay cutting And the pet sheep would eat all the fruit trees/bushes/veggies if lawnmowing.

I've only been playing with this thing for a few weeks and overall it does make mowing way quicker than the smaller ride-on I have as well as at a faster pace. Suprisingly for an 8-9 foot cut it gets between and under a lot of the trees too and has halved my cutting time - plus cheaper on red than petrol. Having been spoiled like this I'm thinking winter refurb.

To try and answer in one post..

Bending/twisting the 6mm isn't an issue.. but the helix means one's also bending in the 35mm direction?

I had considered welding a build-up onto the edge. My concerns there are my own welder is tiny (2.5m rods max though i'd love an excuse for a bigger one) and I was also worried about heat distortion. it'd need at least 1/4in build up to be worth it

I'm glad that the idea of welding an extension under the current blades has been brought up.. I also considered that but it was poo-pooed whan i discussed it locally.

Regarding regrinding.. one of the reasons for considerng blade replacement is that if one can get an even twist then it should be possible to set them in fairly close for just a tidy up...?

The blades on there do take a file.

In a worst case I considered following on with a jig to hand dress the new cutters.

Please bear with someone who has not done anything like this before.

The problem I'm contemplating is that the 'scrap' mower I bought has very worn cylinder cutters with no adjustment left. Replacement spools are near £300 each and there's 4 worn ones.

It occurs to me that it should be possible to grind out the old cutter blades and replace them. they are only welded in at one fillet on each support.

To be more specific and longwinded the spools are over 2 foot long (allowing for the end bearings) the cutter section is the central axis with 4 discs evenly mounted..each disc with 6 slots into which the blades sit. And the blades follow a 90 deg spiral from one end to the other over a 22,5in length

The new blades are near enough 1.5in wide and 1/4 in thick. I had in mind to replace them with hot rolled 35x6mm steels (which would have more years of life in them than the machine itself)

There;s obviously going to be a number of ways of shaping the blades. I could lay my hands on a borrowed torch to hot bend but i have no experience of using one and I'm guessing getting an even twist would be a serious skill.

So i was wondering about cold bending since that ought to give an even twist?

What i had in mind is to make up a jig.. essentially a 2 foot square section bar, say 45mm and create a fixed point at one end at the radius needed (about 4 5in guesstimated). I was thinking of making that fixed point out of a sandwich of two bars bolted together since that makes cutting a slot for the new blade-to-be-bent easiest as well as the fixing to the axis bar. For the other end a similar arrangement but turn a bearing surface so that end can rotate - with a much longer lever. (slip a scaffold pole over the end?)

The problems I forsee is that any attempt to clamp this in a vice would likely rip it out of my bench or rip my bench off the floor. I've come up with the idea of clamping the whole arrangment around the base of one of the vertical RSJ's that support a dutch barn and are solidly concreted into the ground.

What remains a bit of a mystery to me is what sort of force and lever length is going to be required to bend and twist this helix - whether that can be done by human power or using my tractors loader bucket?

Indeed whether this is likely to work at all or just a silly idea?

A while back I was making a table from a slice through a windblown oak on the farm. To fix the few checks I plaigerised the idea of mixing epoxy with brass powder (to make a feature of the damage)

Extrapolating from that it might be cool to mix up a batch of epoxy and swarf to pack your tube - bound to have a load of that lying around somewhere and free! Although it'd probably benefit from a degreasing rinse first.

No idea on cost but if you google 'special order knurls' there's a few co's making them.....

If you consider a right angle triangle where one side is parallel to the centreline of the lathe, the base side is the direction of the cross-slide and the hypotenuse is the angle of the compound then extending that hypotenuse at the apex and dropping a new perpendicular to the base has moved the base towards the lathe centreline... but by less than the distance the hypotenuse was extended.

Play with simple trig and you will see how that changes for a change of angle between base and hypotenuse.

If we play with very simple 3,4,5 triangles and change that hypotenuse from 5 to 10 then it has increased 5 units for a 3 unit change on base distance (from 3 to 6). in the case of a 3,4,5 triangle the angle between base and hypotenuse is just over 53deg.

In the case of a 60deg triangle all sides are equilateral of course.. say 10 units. To turn that into a rt triangle we cut it in half. Hypotenuse remains 10, base becomes 5

Now use an equilateral triangle of say 12 units and do the same...hypotenuse remains 12 and base becomes 6

So for 2 units increase in cross slide you have 1 unit increase towards lathe centreline

How about Jan ridders site?

**LINK**

If you make the balls self-returning ..as in powered and directed to 'home'.. then you cannot so do without destroying their playing characteristics.. weight for a start.

The only solutions here are either to have a playing surface that tilts or a ball-getter. To design a ball getter you need some identifier on/in the ball and a collecting device with a homing function. Such homing functions exist in most quadcopters and indeed in those robot lawn mowers that know their designated mowing areas and where to recharge.

Personally I'd go with a dog.or orphan rental.

Purists will doubtless be appalled by the current fix, Scarppy turned up with a rod end that did happen to have the same thread at the tie bar and a larger diameter thread under the taper. However the taper was too fat. Under his pursuasion I hand ground and filed the taper - eyeballed to match the opposite side.. no fancy measurments and one go with assessing it with a felt marker. Then a happy accident when we couldn't find a nut to fit. I dug out the wrong die to recut the thread... I'd meant to grab an m10 coarse but used the m10 x1.25 which ran down the thread one- fingered. Benefit of hindsight this was a 20 turn american thread or may have been a metric fine. Retapping an M10 nut to 1.25 pitch then worked with a few washers to really pull the taper down and it does feel solid in the female. Time will tell but this thing is hardly a racing car.

It really is salvaged scrap and the cutter blades are worn beyond further adjustment. It does still cut but will clog easily.

Next bit of madness we intend to attempt is to grind out the welds holding the blades in the cutter spools and replace them. New cutter units at £250 + vat would be silly, Scrappy is on the scent of suitable steel and something to make a couple of robust benders with to put the twists in the new steel.

Since the taper on the rod end that failed looks wrong.. to me that implies a range of tapers available. Finding a way of measuring it to order a cheapo replacement might be difficult. And of course it needs to have the correct thread to fit the tie bar. It's not a simple case of ordering by car make or model. So i may have to go via a dealer in this brand mower which will be expensive (all the parts i can find listed are).

My scrappy mate is popping by tomorrow. he often suprises me with strange skills. Well see what two heads can come up with.

(it cost me a few beers in the pub at lunchtime and some of the afternoon was sleeping them off...)