Member postings for Nick Wheeler

Rang out 2018, chimed midnight and fired in 2019 on Rochester cathedral bells.

I also repaired one of our handbells so our visiting friends could do some ringing with us.

You could easily fabricate a steady from your 6mm plate by screwing and welding it together after cutting out with a jigsaw; barely any milling required.

1.5mm hair is pretty impressive whatever head it might be on....

Ages.

You could deep fry it: LINK

I'm a hobbyist. My workshop is to support the hobbies, so a professional approach is necessary. Spending hours to make a tool that will only get a few minutes use per year when I can buy one for a few quid isn't going to happen.

Mainly because I've got better things to do with the time.

I do sharpen large drills by hand, but I do it so rarely that it takes me several attempts. As I mentioned in my first post, I sharpened every blunt drill I could find in about 1/2 hour which I reckon paid for the tool.

We straightened the front of a colleague's Metro by chocking all four wheels and pulling the damage with the winch on one of the recovery trucks. Longest bit of the job was waiting for the boss to go home!

The answer to Vic's original question is this: Carroll Smith's Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners and Plumbing Handbook. It's American, but fasteners don't know that.

You're unlikely to find one that hasn't been sorted.

But the cars do rust, and they're heavy on suspension that's expensive to fix. Also, they're at the dangerous stage where people can afford to buy them but not give the open wallet maintenance that they need.

This stuff DERMASHIELD is excellent, effective, long lasting and cost effective

just 22 years after Brexit it will cost about £11 billion. But it's OK, it's an American billion

Your normal inch spanners will work fine with BSF bolts.

It's Whitworth that you have to experiment with

Is it really that useful?

I just use my digital height gauge, having put a label on the lathe with the height from both the bed and carriage. Saves having to store a tool that I might use a couple of times a year, let alone making the thing in the first place.

What if you only have one piece of material to make the part, and the female thread is firmly attached to an aeroplane 3 miles away? Or the matching part is too awkward to fit onto the lathe?

Surely the whole point of owning a thread cutting lathe is so you can make parts that don't use readily available threads? I wouldn't dream of screwcutting an M12 thread for instance, but an M24x1(Russian fuel system) is a totally different matter!

Rochester Cathedral, where I learnt over thirty years ago and returned to 3 years back after a long break.

I'm only a 'model engineer' in the sense that we don't have a better term for having small machine tools in the cellar.

Other hobbies are bell ringing - I've just got in from one of the tower practices that I go to - modified cars, and cycling.

Wow that's twice as much as the only slightly smaller 250V! And my mini-lathe was no where near 40kg either.....

When I bought my 250V I had it delivered to work, where it was unloaded with the forklift. I broke it out of the crate, and removed the tailstock, steadies, chuck and topslide. ! wound the carriage to the end of the bed to balance the weight.

Two of us then lifted it into the boot of my car.

I drove home.

Then, a friend and I lifted the lathe out of the car, carried it across the road, down the cellar steps, through the obstacle course and lifted it onto the bench. While that wasn't fun, it's not difficult or dangerous either. If I'd bought it ten years earlier when I worked in a warehouse, neither of us would have raised a sweat doing it. I don't have the space to use an engine crane to lift it onto the bench, and think it would be more work than lifting it on by hand.

Don't you want a very light press fit on one part, and sliding fit on the part you're going to remove(cylinder head for example)?

I used to get the same question, although my answer was slightly different:

I told them that we all went to the local Mercedes dealers on a daily basis, closely followed by BMW and Audi. The last year I worked, I went to Toyota dealers three times; one was a clutch wornout at 120,000 miles, another was an immobiliser issue and the third was a turbo fault on a diesel. The Korean manufacturers are pretty good too. My experience of modern German cars is that they are overengineered, under developed and surprisingly poorly built. Plus, they're horrible to work on.

That.

One of the things that make metric a pleasure to use is that there are no coded sizes that appear to have been created by a random number generator. Like number or letter drills, dash hose fittings, weird wire gauges or thread sizes.