Member postings for Nick Wheeler

I bought one.

Read the instructions, and sharpened every blunt drill bit in the house(about 30 years worth, because you never throw them away right?) in about 1/2 hour. Well worth the £50 that it cost. Now I have to try and remember how to sharpen the blacksmiths's drills that I blunted on some awful work-hardening stainless that are too big for the machine.

That's exactly what my grandfather told me, thirty years ago - work in what you're given, and never try to convert. While I think in metric, imperial measurements aren't a problem.

Clive, I'm afraid you're going to have to explain the absurdity of your 5 miles example again, as I can't see how 11.45km is even remotely complicated? Whereas converting the mixed imperial units into one number to get that 11.45km was a pain.

I've an old toolbox full of spanners and sockets that I rescued from scrap cars. I have absolutely no qualms about modifying them for special jobs. If that means chopping them down to fit or bending them to clear an obstruction, then so be it.

This was a tired 30mm socket with worn 1/2" drive hole. I bored the hole to accomodate a Torx socket, and welded on a piece of strap to make a spanner for my cambelt adjusters. I could have bought the cranked spanner to do the job, but this tool took about 10minutes to make and saved about £40.

French stuff still does. That's before you discover that the bolts are made of an engineering grade of cheese.

Considering that Unipart was BL's parts division, millions of parts for thousands of cars would have been more appropriate. I bought a NOS driveshaft coupling for my sister's 1300 that looked like it had been machined with a blunt spoon.

It's why every tool manufacturer sells spanners/sockets in sets. I'd never used a 15mm spanner until I bought a BMW. Before this week, the only place I'd used my 7mm socket/spanner was on Jubilee clips; it's since had a workout on Sukhoi turnbuckles.

Does it really matter if a European M8 bolt uses a 13mm spanner and a Japanese one is 14? It's the need for hex, internal hex, the same in Imperial and Whitworth, then Torx, E-Torx, Ribe etc, etc that rankles. 22 years ago I inherited some BA spanners from my Grandfather, that I've never used, but they are another standard.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 28/10/2016 19:18:37

If you drive a lot(and I used to do fifty thousand mile p/a for work) you see all sorts of lousy sign writing. As you say; a company name but no way to contact them, or so much crap on the van you can't make out what it's for as it passes you on the motorway are common.

Then there's the graffiti on vans: white with a hint of M25 written in the dirt of the filthiest Transit I've seen amused me.

Another game to play is spot the stupidest slogan. Some of them are clearly the result of a boozy lunch between an incompetent manager and a hapless advertising wonk: specialists in all types of repair was one I saw recently.

Why would you do that when you could "Frow It Away Today"?

That list is exactly why I'm interested in one. I'm more interested in productivity improvements than some of the fancier CNC capabilities; automating the numerous small cuts necessary with my mini-mill would mean I could do more important stuff than just cranking handles. A conversion based around one of these units is going to cost a similar amount to a decent DRO, something else I've considered. I would get bigger improvements from a Bridgeport sized mill, but I don't have room for my current tools.

Spending months buggering about getting computers, operating systems, software, impenetrable electronic gizmos and mechanical bits working together would require time and patience I have better uses for.

Having been to a lot of(mainly car shows) over the last 30 years, I'd like to know when it was decided that we'd all be happy to pay £6 for a slime burger and a can of warm coke?

No, a Linux car is one that you have to assemble the mechanical bits, usually from junk you have lying around, and then install free software that was written 10 years ago for a 3 cylinder 10valve Gronkle engine, not your 5 cylinder turbo Aardvark. After six months of swearing and conflicting 'advice' you get it to run for 15minutes. Then you give up and buy a Ford that just works.

That might be a little modern for many of the elderly gentlemen who were there. I thought it fit really well with the whole shabby amateur atmosphere that Brooklands has.

I did have a good time, and was quite glad that there were so few traders tempting me with stuff I want but can't afford.

Interesting, as most people I know who aren't going to use a booth prefer a faster activator! I make no claim to be a painter, but swapping to two-pack paint and a (cheap) HVLP gun made a massive improvement to my finishes.

A quick look in the Yellow Pages will find a local supplier of any type of car paint.

Waiting days to brush on yet another coat of enamel isn't going to happen for me. Especially as anything I brush ends up looking like it was painted by a drunk blind man with his hands tied behind his back. Not that I'm ever going to paint a machine tool.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 15/09/2016 17:26:44

Every one of those can be painted with anything you like from hammerite(which is hideous), through old-fashioned cellulose, two-pack to modern water-base paints. Thorough preparation is the important part, not the paint.

I find it interesting that 2-pack paints are considered expensive and hard to get hold of. When a litre of 2-pack is just enough to paint a small car for about £40, how is that expensive? And then there is the convenience; if starting with a prepared surface, you could epoxy prime, primer fill, flat back and top coat the small areas on a small machine tool in a day.

It's that just that defines the appeal of this magic box. I've considered converting my mini-mill to CNC on a number of occasions, and while fitting ballscrews with a motor attached doesn't worry me, the whole knee bone is attached to the shoulder blade with a gronkelwanger that simply(?) converts a thingy into a whatsit via PFM amplified by a side fumbling throbnozzle has always put me off. Add in the need to acquire, and find space for, a computer to work it all, plus the usual hideously unfriendly(and they're the ones you have to pay for!) software and the whole plan goes out the window. This way, the conversion should cost less than a decent DRO, and actually make stuff while I do something else - the real appeal of CNC for me as cranking handles to make simple parts is just boring work.

Top of the list of stuff to do when I can afford the controller.

If classic bike clubs are like car owners ones, John would save a load of time and grief by wrapping each metal part he has in a number of drawings, repeatedly smashing them with his biggest hammer and dumping the whole lot in the nearest skip.

I have a set of six different sizes of those. It's still common to find that the bolt is between sizes, or that the socket won't fit in the deep hole in the wheel. The better bolts tend to be harder than the socket; my success rate is about one in ten.

I have a different set that have a taper that you hammer on to the bolt. My boss supplied us with these, and none of us ever got them to work.

As for retaining the security bolts, in the thirteen years I worked for a recovery company, we had one job for stolen wheels. That was the only time we ever used the multi-fit slave wheels that some smooth talking saleman convinced my boss to buy. Damaged or lost locking wheelnut keys were a daily occurance. None of them are particularly reliable, the ones that use three or four pins to drive the bolt are shockingly bad. I won't have any of them on my cars.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 10/09/2016 16:30:41

As will any garage that's been in business since before today.

If there's a rotating collar, you need to chisel it off.

Then, you might undo it by hammering a socket over the remaining bolt.

You can buy sockets with a left hand thread to do this, but I find my set of six rarely have a suitable size.

You could try drilling them, but they are supposed to be hardened.

A die grinder will remove the head, but you do need to be careful of the wheel.

If there's room. welding a decent sized nut onto the bolt head might work.

You probably noticed a lot of mights!

Undo them all, and replace with standard bolts.