Member postings for Nick Wheeler

???? Every one I've seen has gone from mouth upright, round to upright again. There are plenty of belfry videos that show this. The stay is about another 10 degrees past vertical. It shouldn't break if you just bump it, although learning not to do that is the first thing a beginner should be taught once they're ringing without help.

The rope is called the rope; the woollen grip for the handstroke is the sally.

What you've described is entirely normal for single piston sliding calipers.

There's nothing special about the bearings used in church bells. They're just pillow blocks, available from any industrial bearing supplier, bolted to the top of the frame. The 1500kg one I ring frequently(when not in lockdown) has been on the same bearings for the last 60years, as have the other, lighter, nine.

Stripping a machine to its components before you know what is and isn't good is a terrible waste of time. As a mechanic, I would much rather run a machine, even a simple one like an ML7, through its paces before dismantling just to start with an intelligent plan.

Completing such a project not only requires the knowledge to fix any problems, but the motivation, discipline and resources to actually see it through to the end. Those are the real issue; lots of hobby projects are bought for pennies in the pound as a collection of boxes full of part completed pieces because the instigator bit off more than they could chew.

Personally, I would never strip the paint off a used machine as it makes no difference to how it works. The many reports of how much filler was used to make castings look good is another reason.

So it is not negative to caution a new owner(that we know nothing about) about dismantling their acquisition without good reason, but honest practical advice. Or common sense, if you prefer that over used and poorly defined term.

ER collets are really useful for work holding too. So a chuck for the lathe is a good idea, plus the square and hex blocks make a lot of jobs quick and easy. Which makes buying ER32 a no-brainer

Interesting, as I think MEW absorbing ME by publishing strongly edited model build series would be a far better idea! In the twenty years I've been reading these publications, I've probably bought a dozen issues of ME. To me it has enough material to be published quarterly, instead of the fortnightly pamphlet that is still, somehow, excessively padded. Unfortunately its traditional subject matter is now more suitable to forums and simple websites than a published magazine. This is true of lots of niche publications, as the decreasing number of specialist car magazines also demonstrates.

Swapping the studs between chucks is daft. I loctited short lengths of studding in all of mine that didn't come with the lathe. I did the same with the mini-lathe when I had it.

That's pretty normal for me; I think of M5 as small.

When I need to to use a bigger tap on my WM250 a 17mm open spanner on one of the chuck jaws works well...

Also true if you have a small milling machine; power feeds and larger cuts save a lot of boring work. It's also a good way of using up stubs of material that are unlikely to be of any other use.

Which was probably meant to be "Pimp".

Wrong spectacles perhaps?

Four button control panels for multi-function devices annoy me far more than unnecessarily 'smart' ones. You don't have to connect smart features, but are forced to remember which one of several complex sequences of button presses whilst singing the Elbonian national anthem backwards at half speed in a minor key changes from automatic to manual. That's dreadful design, compounded by not having a clear, hardcopy instruction manual.

Touch screens should have reduced this, but the emphasis seems to be more on making the icons look pretty rather than actual use.

This forum's strength is that it doesn't restrict posts to a narrow range of interests.

I've been a member of ones that do, and still look in on others. They often have little traffic, or the same job is repeated over and over. Keeping them going is almost as hard work as reading them. It's like watching Youtube videos where every cut is shown in real time; necessary for a beginner's tutorial, but excruciating for anyone else.

This took about 20minutes and £5 worth of material:

and

I won't argue with anyone that CAD programs are complicated, but that's also true word processors and spreadsheets.

What a prospective CAD user needs to be aware of before they start is the underlying concepts, both in general and how each program applies them, but I would suggest that they're a lot easier to understand than those needed for 2D drawing!

By the time you've figured out how to clamp it to the mill, you could have filed it to size and fitted it.

Take the blank out of the lathe and using the angle grinder knock off the corners so it's 'rounder'

That will make your choice of lathe tool less critical because it doesn't have so much to do.

I remember visiting my great-grandmother in the mid eighties, and her cottage and her brother's next door were without electricity. Lighting was gas downstairs, and oil upstairs. Outside toilet at the end of the garden.

Fixed that for you....

You have that completely back to front: just explaining the conventions for representing 3D objects on a flat piece of paper takes far more explanation than being able to orbit around a '3D' object on a screen. Fusion even names each of the six faces Front/Back, Left/Right, Top/Bottom which requires no explanation, and clicking on those rotates the object so you're looking directly at it. One simple sketch can provide all the information to produce a 3D part like a single cylinder crankcase. A quick outline, constrain the geometry, add dimensions and extrude - the same work as drawing just one face. You add features like holes, slots, bosses directly to the face they sit on - what could be easier? And that's before you start on more complex operations like lofting, sweeps, sections, surfaces or moving parts that are very difficult to do on paper.

This all dramatically reduces the skills that a designer needs to create complex and/or multi-part objects from scratch. Creating a 2D drawing is then a simple operation if it's even needed at all; many parts can be made on manual machines from the information directly available from the 3D model.

I had an hour a week of Technical Drawing when I was 13, 37 years ago. That leaves me able to read a drawing, but designing parts in 2D would take me months of instruction, practice and frustration before I ended up with something usable. This model is completely dimensioned, animated with all the clearances worked out over a couple of evenings:

It means that the flat parts can be laser cut from the model, thus saving even more time.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 17/02/2021 17:32:46