Member postings for Nick Wheeler

Here's my quick and dirty attempt:

a 500w ER11 spindle motor, clamp, power supply and collets from Ebay for about £90. There's a 10mm square bar screwed to the back of the clamp to fit a QCTP holder. It drops into place just like any other holder, and easily crossdrills, face drills off centre and mills slots like this fluted knob that I prefer to knurling

I also tapped my vertical slide for it, but that's such a faff to install that it's going to be more use for jobs like gear cutting if I ever get around to making the clock I've been considering for ages.

I had the same thing when we studied metaphysics at school: it turned out to be a very complicated way of describing/explaining simple things, with little improvement for the effort.

It's utter drivel.

Is that simple enough?

The government has been using it for their Covid policy and general slogans for at least a year

You can get reinforced similar to the Speedclic ones, but without the proprietary fitting. They last almost as long, but are a lot cheaper.

I find that Dremels are one of those tools that seem like a good idea, but are not much use in practice. Especially if you're using them on steel.

John, the OP's post suggest he is looking for a vertical slide

The effect is small, but obvious. It's very short lived, which I suspect is due to the small temperature difference. But then I doubt that dunking a double row bearing in liquid nitrogen will do it any good....

I'm glad you didn't tell me that before I tried it! I've done several rear wheel bearings on Vauxhall Omegas and can tell you that if you place the bearing after a night in the freezer it goes about 2/3 of the way in(they're 47mm thick) with a single blow from a large hammer. After that it won't move without a press or forcing tool and a lot of effort.

Many of those phrases can be erased from a sentence without changing the meaning, but a huge improvement in readability - going forwards, solutions etc.

One company I worked for had a surplus of middle-managers with no real work to do, so we had a constant stream of stupid ideas, U-turns and appalling English. A few come to mind:

They were so susceptible to meaningless gibberish that we guaranteed to get it repeated back to us by the end of the week. Our record was the same afternoon

Our depot manager returned from a meeting/bollocking/indoctrination session at head office with some shiny new phrases stuffed into his tiny brain. Tony and I had very low tolerance for such things, so we handed round some Bullshit Bingo sheets before the meeting started. He'd used them all in under 10minutes, and that's how long the meeting lasted. The sulking went on a lot longer....

Tony cut another meeting short with the immortal phrase "If you empower me to do that, I'm going to punch you"

Some genius decided each department should write its own mission statement. There was a lot of moaning from everyone who had that dumped on them. I submitted "Arbeit macht frei" as ours, and the subject was never mentioned again.

Yes.

Although that quote predates him, it shows how daft complaining about split-infinitives is.

It's another invented rule, from people who learnt Latin grammar and arbitrarily decided it also applied to English. Consider how tortuous sentences appear when rearranged to not split the infinitive.

No, you are correct - number is the subject of is in that sentence, and it's singular. 'There is a number' makes sense, whereas 'there are a number' clearly doesn't. Your second phrase does still convey the meaning which is one of the things that makes English tricky to learn, and drives the pedants crazy.

That's one of the invented rules. It's a good idea not to start a sentence with a conjunction very often, but that's a style criticism not grammar. It does require reading and editing your own text, which seems to be rare when you can bash out a couple of hundred words, press send and do something else.

I wonder how Nigel wrote his 'coherent prose without breaking any rules' if he wasn't taught the rules? They never explained the rules of cricket to me, so I spent one summer afternoon a week dodging the missiles that occasionally came flying my way. I certainly wasn't playing the game.

We learnt about nouns, verbs, adjectives, tenses and basic parsing of sentences in junior school and were expected to correctly spell words we used frequently. More technical grammar was taught at senior school, under the reasoning that we would be able to write and speak clear, concise English if we knew how it worked. That's how I learn things today, 32 years after leaving school.

Grammar is the underlying structure that makes languages work. Knowing that makes using the a language precisely and accurately much more likely.

To continue your analogy, would you expect a physicist to do the necessary maths without a good understanding of trigonometry? Or a builder not to understand why foundations are built that way?

I do agree with you that the level of grammar taught to 7yr olds is probably excessive, but learning why one sentence works well and another doesn't - for example - can only be a good thing. We were taught such things at my junior school, over forty years ago, so it's hardly a new idea.

Yes, me too. Although I don't have a wife to do it.

Just because someone is grumpy, pedantic, opinionated and argumentative doesn't make them wrong. Just hard to deal with.

That's a style judgment, not a rule. And many grammar 'rules' are nonsense invented by people trying look clever. I could have used italics, or emboldened the text. Like all of these judgements, the thing to do is pick one, and always use it. I went with single quotation marks because each is one keypress, not two.

Going back to Tom's original complaint: many of the posters here are grumpy, opinionated, argumentative and pedantic, and the phrase 'model engineering' is a terrible description. But unfriendly is a big stretch.

Lets not forget the idea of leaving a large weight resting against a 50x50 stick of ash. Or the even smaller peg screwed to the bottom of that stick if you're afflicted with Hastings stays.

Ringing them down is the simple, common sense(that dreadful phrase again) way of preventing problems.

Isn't Oilite porous?