Member postings for Nick Wheeler

When the largest ships hold 20,000 containers(according to Google) just how economic do you think shipping them by train will be?

I bought them off Ebay about 4 years ago, so a link won't help you much.

A search for ER spindle motor will soon find what you need. I bought the motor, clamp, power supply and collets as a set, which comes to about £120 now. A length of 10mm square screwed to the motor clamp to fit a tool holder will have the the motor in use in a few minutes.

Air tools are horrible. Then you turn them on and they get worse.

This works well for what you mentioned, and I also use it for milling fluted knobs:

ER11 collets, drops onto the QCTP just like any other tool, and adjustable speed via the power supply. Cost about £80 all in from Ebay. I already had the 10mm square bar to mount it to the tool holder.

As file handles are cheap, you could buy a few and fit them to the best files you already own. Practice with those, and then decide if you need new ones.

Just buying new files won't improve your technique!

a few laser cut plates pinned together would do it

I wouldn't solder that even though I have the means. Step into the 20th century and loctite it.

Which is an effect that any ten year old cyclist could have warned them about. I wouldn't want a bicycle without disc brakes now, although they are very fussy due to their small size.

It's only real enthusiasts who can see enough of a difference between the same job on different cars to keep watching

As I have government approved credentials for being an expert on Wheeler Dealers(), I contend that they had actually run out of worthwhile subjects

Machine Mart sell them if there is one near you. LINK which looks better than the cheapo one I used to have. Bear in mind, this is a roughing out tool, not a precision one

Yet I looked at the picture of the car raised on farm jacks bolted to hub adapters, and wondered why I hadn't thought of doing that.

The important part of the MEW title is workshop, not Model Engineer. If the magazine hadn't grown out of Model Engineer, it would have had a far more appropriate title. Something like Workshop Tools & Techniques

I watch it occasionally, but have no interest in watching someone machine/file/weld/paint an entire part. I know what that looks like, and watching somebody else do it is almost as much work as doing it myself. I'm unlikely to restore a teddy bear, but that's what makes a quick glimpse of what's involved interesting.

Some of the history of the items are worthwhile, but just because granny bought the wotsit 97 years ago with her first pay isn't

I found modelling my projects in Fusion 360 as I made them was a good way of learning what I need to know.

I bought my first MIG in 1990, and CO2/Argon mix was recommended then. I used CO2 because I worked in a bar and got it and a regulator for nothing. Then I used friend's machine with Argoshield, and rented a cylinder on the way home. I was repairing rusty cars.

And it's 5% argon unless you're welding really thick steel.

CO2 is one of the waste products of brewing, and brewers struggle to get rid of it

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 08/01/2021 10:34:59

Why didn't I think of that? I often use the collet chuck for drilling, and already have four nuts for the various ER tools I have. Using them will save quite a lot of time and hassle.

Dave's description is exactly how I do it:

ER32 chuck for milling, and any occasional drilling needed as part of a job.

If the job is mostly drilling, I fit the drill chuck.

I decide which to do on the basis of time against hassle.

I have the one pictured(or it's twin), and a couple of much smaller ones that were about £10 from ebay. The big one works perfectly out of the box; less than a turn of the knob locks it up tightly. The cheap ones now do the same after I took them apart and finished all the mating surfaces of the wedges properly.

So I would say it's more of a wedging action than hydraulic

You'll spend more than £80 in consumables with poorer results than the tuition.

I'm not a TIG expert by any means, but surely welding two materials that are of very different thickness is one of the reasons for using TIG rather than any other process?

Having done some gas welding I found the action of feeding TIG filler rod to be the same, but holding a lighter, shorter torch with on the fly adjustments was much easier. On steel at least.

Aluminium is another matter, as it's very difficult to tell the whether it's hot enough to weld, or about to melt on the floor. You have to speed up as you work along a seam and I don't get enough practice to do this well.

I do most of my workshop welding with the TIG because it's at the end of the bench, whereas getting the MIG out to do it is more of a faff than is justified. But if I'm honest, the TIG is an extravagance that was bought using an unexpected windfall.

The mini-lathe takes up less space than a Myford, but its swing is the same. The vertical slides are similarly sized too.

Like Dave, I bought the vertical slide for the mini-lathe as I didn't have space for a mill. Most of my work was on car parts, but it was so limited in space, clamping and size of cuts that I quickly bought a matching mini-mill and lived with having to move it around on the workbench to do all of my work.

I've since bought a bigger lathe to improve my productivity(I can't accept that hobbyists don't have time constraints) and would have done the same for the mill, but I really don't have space for one. I did keep the slide, and have made an adapter to fit it to the WM250 lathe, so I could attach a milling spindle. That's because I would like to build a simple clock, and it seems to be the simplest setup for various wheel cutting operations.

I do have most of the parts to convert the mill to CNC, and that's intended as a productivity increase rather than making difficult parts. Standing at a machine cranking handles for ages just to cut a simple feature on a part, let alone initial roughing out, is just tedious drudgery. Automating those all those sequential cuts while I do something else(which doesn't even have to be engineering) would be far more sensible. I will need to come up with a quick way of bolting/unbolting it to the bench though!

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 27/12/2020 22:37:29