Member postings for Nick Wheeler

Another thing to consider is that the forcing screw for a puller should be considered a consumable, as it's very easy to bend them or bugger up the ends. So making them from readily available threaded rod, with a nut welded on one end and a foot of some kind on the other or ground down like your pictured example, is more likely to be of use than spending ages worrying about turning a fancy finish.

As an example here's a car hub extractor fabricobbled out of scrapbinium, welded together on the car with no measuring at all:

It looks even uglier in the metal as the whole thing took about ten minutes for my own wheel bearing, but has paid back handsomely doing the same job for several other people.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 23/09/2022 22:50:20

That.

All of it. Although using a bench grinder would be quicker and easier

Bad earths on old cars were common, especially for the lights. They often earthed every nearby component through a couple of wires to a screw into sheetmetal. My fix on most of my cars that suffered from flickering, dull or other intermittent lights was to weld an M6 bolt where the screw went, and to add separate wires from each component. Washers, a nyloc nut and copperslip retain them. In every case, that solved each problem that wasn't caused by the useless Lucas bullet connectors.

Those are very short pins!

I've repaired one of my watch bracelets by turning new pins from stainless welding rod, and loctiting them in place.

Your carefully-extruded figure is exploding because the care really needs to be spent on the profile you extruded it from. The profile should be fixed so that its lines and geometry stay where you intend them to be. That means the relevant horizontal/perpendicular/tangent/parallel/coincident/etc constraints are more important than the dimensions, so they're defined first. Just because you drew a line that looks like it starts at another point doesn't mean it actually does. It can be more reliable, and much less frustrating, to draw your new item near where you want it, and force it into place with constraints.

That's why you want the part to be 3 dimensional as soon as practical, so the new features are referenced off the existing rigidly defined ones. The threaded hole in your T-nut example could be placed in the centre of the top face in a number of ways that make it stay in the centre if you later change any of the other dimensions. The T-nut itself has such an obvious profile that can be completely defined using two rectangles, two midpoint constraints and three dimensions. Or it could be projected from the slot it fits if you've already modelled that.

That's exactly what we were told about A-frames and spec lifts when I worked as a recovery driver: if any of the wheels are on the ground, the towed vehicle needs to be road legal - registered, insured, MOTd and taxed. If it doesn't have any of those, it needs a full lift on a trailer or truck. Flat towing something the size and weight of a model traction engine is a very bad idea, especially if it's not designed or built to exceed 15mph.

If you can get replacement bearings cheaply and easily then doing so is probably worthwhile.

But from those pictures, and knowing it's only a mill, I would just refit the existing ones.

I would thoroughly inspect the MT socket inside the spindle before making any other decisions.

The dealer was, and is correct, and there is a specified tool to tap/scrape with LINK

Most of the MOT is a visual inspection, and no dismantling is allowed to do it. That's why you often see comments like sill covers fitted, which actually means we've welded enough of these to know they're rotten but I can't see them to fail the car. Although that doesn't really excuse serious chassis rot passing a 'favourable' test.

That's all well and good, and I would only ever change springs in pairs on my own car. But many customers will not pay for the other side unless it has broken too - it can be hard enough convincing them that driving to the garage was what wrecked the tyre as well. Even on the cars where broken springs are a fact of ownership(Fiestas, C3s, Lagunas etc), the other side isn't guaranteed to fail.

Inoperative speedo could be as simple as not seating the connector properly when refitting the instrument cluster.

It would help to know what the car is, as the ABS fault could be relatively easy to diagnose - the Bosch ECUs used on 2000ish BMWs/Audis/Omegas/etc are known for faulty joints and can be repaired for far less than a new replacement. Losing the speedo is one of the associated faults. These systems require more than a basic OBD code reader to diagnose, but have been around long enough that any competent garage will should be able to do the work.

I've had several cars without working speedos pass the MOT.

The brake test is hardly brutal, and if a rusty pipe bursts during one then the test is serving its purpose. Far better than for it to fail in service. Additionally, I think any brake pipe that's been greased to extend its life should be an immediate fail.

The OP's garage doesn't sound very customer friendly...

Both my mill and lathe are benchtop machines, and are easily moved by two people.

It's the other stuff that would potentially cause problems.

So, I would bin/donate/lose any bit of stock under 25mm diameter/300mm long as not being worth the effort of packing and moving. The various bits of dismantled wreckage that might come in handy would also go straight in the bin where they should always have been. Parts left over from unstarted/uncompleted projects would join them. I recently found the 3 valves I didn't bend in an engine blow-up 32 years ago; they went in the bin as do any similar parts.

Duplicates of rarely used tools would be moved on to people who could use them. My dad was a woodworker and I'm not, so keeping more than one of each type of plane/etc is already daft. Moving them would be idiotic. I would probably cull all the can't live without one of these tools that I've had for years and never used while I was at it.

The shelves of unlabelled tins full of random junk would be skipped without a second thought.

Doing all of that would mean the new workshop could be laid out for efficient work and storage, and not only would I know what stock I had on hand but I would know where it was. While I've not needed to move my own workshop, I have done it twice for work, and the best thing I can recommend is getting the biggest skip you can dropped inside the building. It's extremely liberating to toss all the accumulated junk that's been getting in the way but no-one is prepared to take responsibility for get rid of. Saves a fortune in storage too.

I'm waiting to find out why anyone needs to grind a co-ax indicator

My min-mill is a morse 3 taper. The tools I use, from a drill chuck, through ER32 holder to a face mill all release with a sharp tap from a decent size hammer just like morse tooling always did. I have better things to do than faff about with a self releasing arrangement.

Slotting two small screws that won't get used very often?

I'd use a hacksaw.

A couple of dozen of them? Time to set up a collet block and slitting saw. Or the toolpost spindle and a Dremel cutting disc.

The reason I'd buy a dovetail QCTP instead of a Dickson is that the holders are far easier to make. I probably wouldn't bother making standard ones, but there are a number of specific tools I'd like that would benefit from being built into a holder rather than attached to one.

This slotting/engraving tool for example:

Is it just me that thinks Chris is getting ahead of himself here?

He's struggled with a bought parting tool, so milling one of GHT's fussy tools in the lathe is likely to be several steps too far. Buying one is a significant cost that needs to be justifiable.

I think he would be better off buying some material suitable for the actual projects he has in mind - practicing on stainless steel is not helpful if most of the parts will be brass - and using the lathe to figure out what he actually needs to use it efficiently. I would put a QCTP at the top of my list, but that's twenty years after buying my first machine.

I've never found any need for a rear toolpost, although I would consider adding one to take another QCTP if doing production jobs. Similarly, I've never turned anything between centres but my powered toolpost spindle gets a lot of use for cross holes and fluting knobs.

My point is that everybody's work is different, and one man's can't and won't do without could end up rusty scrap in another toolbox. Beginners can spend a lot of money and time following well-meant advice.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 25/08/2022 12:40:42

Just because a QC Tool Holder will take a 12mm(for example) tool doesn't mean that there will be enough movement on the post to get the tool to centre height on the lathe.

There's no real reason to use such large tools on most of our lathes - I use mostly 8mm on my WM250, which I bought for the mini-lathe that preceded it but 6mm would be entirely adequate. A homemade tangential tool with a 1/8" square bit does a lot of useful work....

The 10 files isn't a huge problem if you manage them properly. And you can reassign at any time which of your files are the 10 you can edit. Completed jobs can still be viewed even if they're not one of the 10.

The chassis I showed earlier is just one file, with each of the parts within it a separate component. Not doing this would be like storing the manuscript for a book as a separate file for each paragraph.

Cloud or local storage for my own stuff is unimportant. That would change for business use, as some form of local and secured storage would be necessary.

So far, I haven't needed to stump up the cash for a Fusion subscription, but will do so if it becomes useful. I think it's a terrible way to buy anything, and would much prefer a one-off, own it forever deal. And any software that is free to download and is likely to end up costing you at some point.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 22/08/2022 18:56:03

It's about politics, so that's guaranteed

I've been buying hobby magazines for forty years. In that time none of the more practical car/bike magazines have covered workshop engineering practice and tooling beyond we machined a new part in a friend's lathe or buy a planishing hammer to do this. MEW is the only one that does that, and the various projects are usually good demonstrations of design/tools/methods/principles. I'm far more likely to recover a shed roof than produce bevel gears on a CNC, but they're both equally interesting.