Member postings for Nick Wheeler

Don't those need a groove for the rope? The ones I've used and made have them.

Jason's approach is mostly how I do things now. Creating the 3D model does most of the thinking required to make the part, and I find that a few dimensioned sketches are usually enough to actually do the job.

Which means a drawing from the model only really needs to be clear to you. The examples above should be enough to allow you to do that.

I wish programs like Fusion or Alibre allowed you to add visible dimensions to the live 3D views, as that would be even easier - no drawings with all the fudges required to represent 3D objects as elevations no longer needed at all.

That's his Parcel Farce customer relations training, mixed with the real world disadvantage of only getting paid for parcels that don't return to the depot. I bet his van was blocking the road too. They do that because it annoys even more people for no extra effort on their part.

Parcel Farce haven't managed to deliver a package here for years. There have been occasions when I've been standing by the door to see them quietly push the 'I've got better things to do than ring the door bell and wait a few seconds for you to answer the door' card through the letter box.

The the 'service' got even worse, because it used to be possible to walk a mile down to the sorting office and collect the package within a couple of hours. Now it's a minimum of 24. They aren't kidding about that minimum; get there any earlier and you'll be making another trip tomorrow so as you learn your lesson. And they don't bother putting the date, let alone the time on the card just to add to the challenge. It's like this so that they can eventually do away with all the expensive drivers and vans, and just get the ordinary postman to deliver the 'You had better come and collect your parcel soon, before somebody steals it' card.

Foreign deliveries are even trickier, since they moved that distribution centre from Gillingham(about 3miles away) to Crayford. Yes, the card gives you the option to reschedule, but they won't give even a suggested date unless you pay extra for it. In advance. when they've already proved they don't do what they've been paid to do.

I'd have to swap to Workshop Anglo-Saxon filtered through Chathamese to accurately describe my considered opinion about this, but this forum is supposed to be civilised.

And on another hand, I prefer any bloody courier to the utterly useless Parcel Force.

For the use a soapbox racer will get, is the complication of bushes really necessary?

I agree with Dave, Andrew and Jason; offsetting the compound slide seems a complete waste of effort to me.

And why only 0.004" cuts? You might just as well cut with a toothbrush

How about supergluing a shim in the jaws to tighten the sloppy fit? That's ought to be good enough for a few uses. A cheap set of feeler gauges is worth having for such jobs.

Or you could machine some new nuts to match other fittings on the machine. Which is a permanent fix.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 12/03/2022 23:43:19

A lathe like that should easily manage that finish straight off the tool.

While I have, and like, a WM250, in your circumstances I would buy the Colchester.

There do seem to be a lot of stupid answers though.

The remaining 35% are badly calculated....

All of the workshop teachers at the school I went to were former Chatham Dockyard apprentices and workers. At least one of them was an old boy too, which was what the school was created for.

Teaching is a massively under rated skill, especially by those who have never tried it. And teaching the basics of any subject doesn't necessarily require the teacher to be at a Nobel Prize level; being able to competently demonstrate and explain concepts new to their pupils is far more important.

The best posts on this forum are the ones that are only tenuously connected to Model Engineering, whatever that is. I have no interest in steam, but repairs to random parts, unusual techniques, sources, tools etc are important to anyone with an inquiring and practical mind. The basic demonstrations of other hobbies are just the sort of thing I would have joined a traditional club for.

Dave,

'optimised throughout the value chain' is just jargon. It's not even particularly bad jargon, as its meaning is clear and concise.

'respectable to the landscape' reads like I suspect my attempts at German did 35 years ago.

One of my teachers was known for crossing out whole sections of work with a red felt-tip, with the comment 'write English!' nearby.

Job justification which is the native tongue of all middle managers. This one seems to be American from the 'z' in optimised

One of my requirements for this sort of thing is that tools are not needed for use. I've posted my current stop, but having made it from aluminium it's spread and becoming less effective. And I've never used the adjustable stop because it's not accurate.

So the new one will look like this:

and

I think we all have that tendency! Following on from the other thread about carriage stops, I made a start on redesigning my original one into an adjustable one. I got this far before sanity set in:

That's three complex pieces, full of fussy features which will need a number of setups just to make the adjuster dial fit into the body. So I took the basic dimensions and this simplified version emerged:

The body is now one piece, and the only 'complicated' feature is the notch to fit it onto the lathe bed; everything else is simple milling, note how the counter bore for the clamp bolt has gone so the hole can be drilled through from the bottom at the same time as the anti-rotation pins. The clamp bolt and pins are each shown as one piece, but the bolt will be made with the thread loctited in place and the brass pins will be simple rods retained with grub screws. Both of which are much easier to do, stronger and easier to replace if they wear.

The hour I spent on the first one isn't wasted, because it means I now have a design that's actually worth making:

In CAD, you would have created the jig by subtracting the part from whatever material you decided to use, and projected the fixing holes into the new piece. Then the program would have told you what the dimensions actually are, instead of you trying to work out what you think they could be. A huge time saver, let alone reducing the amount of wasted material. As we've said before, the learning curve is steep, but it pays back in many valuable ways.

And here's mine for a WM250:

I made that a couple of days after getting the machine. It's 1" aluminium bar, with a notch to fit over the bed, a pinned clamp plate operated by the lever, and a sliding rod clamped by the brass knob. 7 years use suggests that steel would be better as the aluminium has spread. The rod adjustment was a waste of time, because there's no sensible way of adjusting accurately, and adding/removing shims is not going to happen. It was intended to be easy to make from stock I had, and to never need a tool in use which is always a requirement for me. It means I use it most times I turn on the lathe.

I might modify some of the micrometer adjustment designs for my machine later.

Do they?

And most homeworkshop jobs will allow a nyloc to be reused several times before it becomes loose enough to be just a plain nut. If you can't turn it by hand, the nylon insert is still doing something.

Perhaps it would be possible to convert your UNC hole to a standard, readily available and cheap metric bolt using a common Helicoil? That would cost the same as the UNC tap, but then be useful elsewhere.

Americans love labelling things with weird designations, like number and letter drills, #threads, dash hose sizes, schedule pipe etc. Metric does this better; you don't buy 18gauge steel, but order 1.2mm thickness so that no tables or other arcane knowledge is required. Although I do think the earlier suggestion of using MC, MS and MF for common metric threads should have been the standard.