Member postings for SillyOldDuffer

Hi Oldskool,

Welcome to the forum. Buying that lathe is the first step on a slippery slope. Are you interested in modelling or practical stuff?

Hot and sticky down here: I'd welcome a bit of chilly.

Cheers,

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 12/06/2016 21:02:38

Hi Mark,

Three things to try:

Try powering your router down and, after a minute or so, powering it back up again. Routers cache addresses and confusion abounds if they get corrupted as mine did during our last thunderstorm. A full reset causes the router to clear the cache and start again with a clean slate. As you have three different machines with the same fault, I think a router problem is the most likely suspect.

Disabling your virus checker won't help if web checking is being done by another software package, even if it is from the same vendor. You might have to look closely at your security set-up to find out what's blocking the site.

Related to point two, I tried to find out what the IP address of the site was to see if it could be called directly. The address is 212.48.75.22 but the website can't be accessed using it. I don't know if it's a security feature at their end or to do with the way the service is made available by their provider. I don't believe it's sinister, but the peculiarity may be upsetting your security software. If so try switching it off or using another product.

Good luck,

Dave

Hi Damien,

I live in the country about 15 miles south of a big city with lots of old fashioned sodium. My northern sky glows bright yellow and all but the very brightest stars are hidden in the murk. The southern sky is massively better. I wish more people could see the contrast: town dwellers lose so much. There's a lot going on up there!

I was number 5605.

Good luck,

Dave

Wow guys, thanks very much! That's a really good list of practical suggestions. As I have some spare roofing felt in the shed I'll be trying that first. It's easy to do and undo and, best of all, free.

The lathe is a WM280V weighing 210kg. Not sure about the stand but that's hefty too. My engine lift will do up to 250kg at maximum extension and I usually use the 500kg setting. It has no problem with the weight but two fixed wheels and two on castors make for a big turning circle. Getting the lift over the lathe's centre of gravity without fouling the stand is slightly awkward. And with the boom up, there's a real danger of smacking into the fluorescent lighting. Rollers are really tempting!

I'm putting off a workshop reorganisation because of the amount of stuff that will have to be moved and/or unscrewed. When it happens I shall give serious consideration to flattening the whole floor with a machine.

Thanks again,

Dave

Is there an easy way to level a concrete floor under a lathe?

A few months ago I bought a bigger lathe. My workshop is in a single garage and space is limited. My plan was to put the lathe parallel to a wall where the floor is smooth.

Disaster - my engine crane has a limited turning circle and there wasn't quite enough leeway to get the lathe in as intended.

Not a big problem thought I, the lathe can sit at a right angle across the garage. Unfortunately that part of the floor isn't smooth - there are a range of lumps and bumps rising 2 or 3mm above an otherwise flat floor. Before putting the lathe in I reduced the problem somewhat with a cold chisel. It was hard messy work.

For a while all seemed well. Then I noticed the lathe vibrates enough at 450 rpm to put visible stripes into an otherwise good finish. At other speeds the problem goes away.

My lathe stand is made of steel and the two pillar sections have thick sheet steel bottoms. These are strong enough to wobble slightly on the ridges in my floor. Putting small wooden wedges under three of the stand corners noticeably reduces the vibration.

Would sliding a sheet of plywood under the stand help? I'm hoping the plywood might hide the unevenness by allowing the high points to crush into the wood.

All suggestions gratefully received!

Thanks, Dave

Welcome Lawrence,

Odd coincidence from Wikipedia. The English village I live in has just about the same population as Dallas had back in 1850. I see Dallas has grown a little since the good old days!

Cheers,

Dave

Hi Roger,

I've not given it a comprehensive thrashing but so far as I can see your code runs OK on Ubuntu 16.04. I tried Python2 and Python3.

I have a gear wheel project halfway down my "to do" list and will be back to your program when it reaches the top of the list.

Well done!

Cheers,

Dave

Hi John,

You're right! It even worked with my horrible example. I'm impressed.

Expecting to have loads of spare time after retiring I too decided to learn Java. I got as far as buying a book only to find I'm far too busy to read it. Ho Hum.

Cheers,

Dave

Tim asked:

So, it would help if you could let me know how expert you think you are, and how accurate would your output be, remembering that you would be working with a home or hobby machine, and not with stuff worth more than a three-bed semi in Alderley Edge.

• I'm a member of the amateur bodge team who is trying to improve
• I usually go for a good fit rather than absolute accuracy or precision.
• Only the most expensive of my digital calipers came with a documented claim, it's +/- 0.02mm
• The DRO on my mill sometimes jumps 0.02 or even 0.03mm
• My 4 digital calipers all produce similar results up to 30mm. Over longer lengths they start to disagree, worst case about 0.06mm
• None of my measuring equipment has ever been properly calibrated
• I'm not as careful about removing dirt as I could be
• I have precision parallels but no gauge blocks
• Depending on time of year, the temperature in my workshop varies between 4 and 28C. I never compensate for that.
• The unskilled readings I take vary noticeably with hand pressure and angle. I get better repeatability from my micrometer but the results still wobble about a bit.
• When I make to a specific size against some sort of fixed gauge, there will be cursing and quite a few rejects.
• I don't do much with angles apart from using an inexpensive rotary table with a vernier dial. I successfully made a short taper for a drill chuck once, I'm sure more by luck than judgement.

It would be interesting to test just how effective people really are at taking measurements at one of the exhibitions. People could show up with their favourite measuring stick, be ushered alone into a tent containing various objects, and asked to submit their results under a psuedonym. The winner would be the guy with the lowest error rate. All we need is the NPL to provide some test objects and MEW to provide a gigantic cash prize...

Cheers,

Dave

I hate to disagree but Comma Separated Values can be very difficult to work with. Think about decoding a CSV file where one of the data fields contains "Gerald's school has a minimum height requirement of 4' 11", unless you know the Head's secret password. By the way it's "girls' school""

Have you discovered Gambas yet? It's the linux equivalent of Visual Basic, not a clone, but many similarities. Excellent for moderately complex graphical applications and you avoid learning an object model like Qt.

Dare I suggest in response to other comments that Python is effortlessly better than Basic. The assertion is only untrue if you know Basic and have never learned Python. I agree there's no reason to learn Python if you're happy with something else.

Cheers,

Dave

Even more confusing than Francis suggests. In addition to the Alum family and various Alum substitutes, two rather different chemicals are commonly called "Alum".

Aluminium Sulphate is used for treating water, and I think it's the wrong one.

I've never tried it, but I think the Alum needed for dissolving a tap is Aluminium Potassium Sulphate as used in styptic pencils for shaving accidents.

The internet is your friend if you want to buy some.

Cheers,

Dave

My guess is that it's an Inspector's Stamp for endorsing something like leather hides.

Whatever it is it looks as if it does its thing to the edge of a sheet and it makes holes that don't seem to be functionally useful. In that sense the holes are rather like those made by a ticket punch. The flattened top and bottom of the pliers might be to make it easier to slide in to mark sheets that have been stacked.

Don't bet the farm on this suggestion - I'm too often wrong!

Cheers,

Dave

Hi Roger,

You've bumped into one of the differences between Python 2 and Python 3. Python 3 added the // operator to do integer division which is why / produces floats, for example:

dave@sparrow:~/Desktop/stirling$ python3
Python 3.5.1+ (default, Mar 30 2016, 22:46:26)
[GCC 5.3.1 20160330] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 8/3
2.6666666666666665
>>> 8//3
2

Cheers,

Dave

Possibly the phrase pre-dates trains. Tramways powered by gravity, men, horses and/or steam winches were very common in the UK before the steam locomotive enabled the railways.

Today's suggestions for an Engineering origin: blueprint and typecast.

Also, if we allow science fiction: I heard the groom say "Beam me up Scotty". after emitting a resounding bottom burp during his wedding. Of course being English no-one mentioned his indelicacy at the reception later.

Cheers,

Dave

Edit - can't spell for toffee!

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 03/06/2016 10:51:43

At risk of starting another hare, I fear the next big thing will be Climate Change. At least we will be able to photograph it.

Dave

Got me beat. Surely not Cholmondeley. Borough perhaps? Please put me out of my misery.

I'm not too sure about how to say New Orleans or Maryland even though I watch a lot of telly. The Wire had me speaking street like a drug dealer for a month or two.

Cheers,

Dave

I often notice US sources saying sol-dering when everyone I know in the UK does soul-dering.

Different pronunciations isn't uniquely a transatlantic problem , for instance there doesn't seem to be a standard UK way of saying scone. On a bad day I want to vapourize people who pronounce it Skon.

Thought I'd ping you because baseline, going ballistic, blockbuster, and pixelated (meaning drunk) are all on my radar this morning.

Can anyone confirm that the rhymes in Chaucer reveal that he spoke English with a northern accent.? Very hard to believe I know. My locals assure me that civilisation definitely ends at Cold Ashton crossroads. I've not risked going that far north myself.

Life got very difficult for the likes of IBM as computer technology advanced. I once went to a customer presentation where a big company told us why we should buy their stuff.

• First on were the Microcomputer group. They explained that micros were the future and that minicomputers and mainframes were far too expensive and inflexible.
• Second on were the Minicomputer team. Their sales position was that the microcomputer was a puny joke incapable of real work and that the mainframe was a hideously expensive behemoth only good for old fashioned batch processing.
• Third on were the Mainframe boys. They explained that microcomputer and minicomputers were a fashion that wouldn't last. A mainframe apparently could "tuck everything they could do into a corner" without noticing.
• Last to speak was the parallel computing team. They explained that they were developing a multiprocessor machine that would outperform the company's most expensive mainframe by a factor of 20 for about half the cost.

Then as now technology companies have as much trouble seeing into the future as everyone else. In consequence this big computer firm was competing with itself, which cannot be good. And they weren't the only one!

Another way people get it wrong. Having spent a lot of money on producing profitable old lines it is all too tempting to stick with them. Kodak, for example, did a lot of original R&D on digital photography but walked away afterthe board sold all their digital patents to competitors after deciding that their huge investment in film, conventional cameras and processing was "safe". After all film images were of much higher quality!. Unfortunately film was about as good as could get, whereas digital has massive untapped potential. Alas for Kodak, film sales all but collapsed whilst digital boomed.

Digital is no sinecure. The rise of good cheap cameras in phones has seriously damaged the market for compacts , whilst bridge cameras are busy undermining the profitability of SLRs.

If I could predict the future I'd be rich!

Cheers,

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 02/06/2016 12:34:26

Certainly true that God usually favours the big battalions but there are lots of counter examples in IT. The classic reference is "The Mythical Man Month", often quoted and usually ignored.

Messrs Gates, Wozniak and Jobs all started very small. After their initial growth spurts both Apple and Microsoft had serious problems with big projects, as do many other enterprises. For example, despite or perhaps because of a large team, Microsoft lost about $8bn on mobile/smart phone software. It's not because they employed stupid people!

Small software projects are much easier to manage and can benefit hugely from good leadership, high morale and a tight vision. The architecture of FreeCAD is worth understanding too: it's not being developed from scratch. What we think of as "FreeCAD" is actually an interface to a number of powerful underlying libraries, each of which also have development teams.

The underlying CAD engine is OpenCascade, which was a commercial product until the owners decided to move into services rather than software development. OpenCascade has not been exploited in full yet by the FreeCAD developers.

I'm not banging the drum for any of the alternatives. Choosing software is very much horses for courses. We're lucky to have so much choice.