Member postings for David lawrence 3

I have taken several photo studios to small claims court, never got a penny, total waste of time, they all went bust before the court sort things out. there are some small business that will never pay you, I have often waited a year for payment. in Germany they pay in 30 days. best advice is to hound the guys, I have sent studios over 100 faxes in a day chasing money, it clogs up the system, I have sat outside the offices of several colleges and magazines waiting for payment it normally works, not in business now, after 30 years of chasing photographers I am making the odd clock. best of luck.

Hi, after watching these videos on clock making I superglued my clock wheel onto a rotary table to cut the gears, after 3 teeth the wheel flow of across the workshop, after 3 more attempts with a top rated superglue it happen again so I stopped and made a mandrill for the RT. I have made other superglue chucks for the lathe which worked better but the big problem was removing the superglue from the part, I tried every solvent made and still it wont come off, the part is still on the shelve. In the world of clockmaking super glue chucks are common in the US but not so much over here, the clickspring videos must the best ever made on you tube, puts all mine to shame. I am building the same clock as chris and thinking about redoing some parts as his are so good.

Just found this post, 10 mins ago finished wiring up a 2 tube high freq. 4 foot fluorescent fitting from screwfix, £ 38.00 works fab. for my work bench, the led version was about £ 10.00 more and had 1/3 less output. so why go for led in some areas. leds are fine if you want to run it from a battery but when its mains powered high freq. fluorescent's are great, you can dim some of them down to 5% and keep the same colour, the daylight tubes are more efficient than leds, not a lot of heat. I used to make fluorescent fittings for broadcast TV industry until a few years ago when leds sort of took over, they are the latest thing but not always the best. Getting the right colour is the hard part, you can buy 10,000 leds, test each one for output and colour, throw 9,000 in the bin, hard to make money from that industry now.

In my last house I fitted a high up, 12 foot, cantry wire to the workshop, 6mm armoured which worked fine. the consumer unit was plastic but with the right brass fitting and earth tag all worked well, screwfix sell all this gear, I had a new kitchen a few months ago and all the dishwasher, washing machine etc were fed via fused outlets fitted under the wooden sink unit carcas, easy to find and switch off and above the floor level. as for 2 x RCD in series, one on the consumer unit one in the shed, I had that and it never worked, I always had to go down the path and reset the house rcd, the shed rcd never blow, not a good system, best of luck.

Hi Neil, You forgot to sat what file size you are after for these pictures and what type of file, do you want jpeg, tiff, raw. Modern digital cameras are very forgiving in the lighting dept. but quite a few pictures in model magazines are spoilt by poor or no lighting. In the days of film photo you would need to think about the lighting to produce a good shot for reproduction and use studio flash. Thinks are easy now but adding a few lights does help with the dark corners and the more light helps to keep the shutter speed up, less camera shake and more depth of field.

As an owner of a new warco wm240 I have just bought the same quick change tool post as above, and it great. with a few extra holders its about £ 200.00 but so nice to use once you get all the tools onto the right height. no more messing around with bits of shim. Even the parting tool now works well, although I have bought the rear parting tool holder, it takes up quite a bit of room.

Hi Rik, I have a very similar lathe, a Warco 240 and that handle you made is just what I need, may start building it tomorrow. I have a small, warco mill, wm14 which has a similar control board, I tweeked the Min pot to the lower the speed to zero so I can turn the speed knob down to nothing rather than keep turning them mains on and off all the time, I did this a year ago when I bought the mill and it has worked fine ever since.

I used to run a mail order company for years until two years ago. I would send out orders over £ 100.00 post free, every now and then I would get an order and payment from Scotland, send off the box, then at the end of the month get the invoice from UK mail and see I had been charged £ 25.00 for sending a box to Aberdeen that should have been £ 10.00, the courier had there own ideas of what to charge for Scotland, it changed with the weather, I always lost out. As for northern Ireland if it too heavy for parcel force we gave refunds, £ 35.00 being a normal price for 10Kg to N.I. I see that Arc euro will send a 9Kg box to France for £ 9.00, now that's a bargain. The dealer often looses out don't blame him all then time, try paying with a debit card rather than a credit card, it all helps the hobby

Hi all, The 24 volt truck wiper motor I used was new and cost around £ 100.00 . it only draws around 1/2 amp at 24 volt so a small power supply is all you need. I guess you could find a cheap one on ebay but I happen to have it lying around. They are used in tv studios a lot to lower and raise lights from the ceiling, I was in that game for years and had one on the shelve, the problem is its too slow, you need a motor that can go quite fast to quickly move the table from one end too the other as well as fine slow adjustment.

Hi all, I am looking to build my second clock and the John Wilding English dial clock looks interesting apart from the wooden case. has anybody out there built this clock, easy , hard or is there a better clock. I have almost finished the great wheel skeleton clock and was looking for a clock I could hang on the wall. regards david

Hi, I started making a power feed for my warco wm14 mill using a 24 volt truck wiper motor I had. After making a nice power supply with adjustable voltage, limit switches etc mounted the motor onto the mill and it was a bit slow, and the power supply could make it go even slower, so a waste of time and money. I would say try the motor first just to see what revs it does before you spend lots of time on fancy controls like I did. I will get round to trying another motor sometime but as of now I use a battery screwdriver which I bought from B & Q for £ 10.00 which has forward and reverse gears and it works very well. you can just unplug it from the lead screw to give full manual control. One of the problems I had with the first system is disengaging the drive from the wiper motor to give manual control back. have a look on you tube at warco mill drives and you will see one my brother did on the same mill using an old 9 volt battery drill which works well with machano bevel gears which can be disengaged.

hi, to test the pot, if you have access to a resistance meter, dvm, dmm, just clip the leads onto the centre and one end contacts and see if the resistance changes from zero to 1000 ohms as you turn the shaft. you can take the rear cap off these old pots they are glued on, the resistance is often wire wound so can be cleaned. if not just buy a pot from maplins for £ 1.00 or so, should work. The colvern brand was quality British gear, I have a similar pot in an old audio signal generator of mine which went noisy the other month, a quick clean with ipa and it works well.

Hi, my Warco minilathe takes a 8mm tool and is a good small lathe, just upgraded it after 12 years to bigger warco lathe which is fine but I will the small lathe for odd special jobs.

35 years ago the repair shop I worked in bought a very expensive £ 300.00 Gould advance dvm. to measure 350 volts dc ( 1000v setting) on some electronic photographic studio flash as we thought the Mk 8 avo was a bit old. Second time I used it the board arched over and blew up, sent the unit back for replacement under warranty. They would not replace or repair it, they said abuse. We never bought any advance gear again, the boss got out the old avo and we carried on. 30 years on I was still using analogue meters measuring high voltage and fet voltmeters for small audio circuits. Digital is fine when you need to know that exact voltage but a quickly moving voltage can seen fine on an old meter scale.

Hi, I bought a 6" Moore & Wright digital caliper from them at the Doncaster show for around £ 24.00 which works ok. I have gone through many cheap calipers in the last few years, some have battery corrosion problems, other have been messed up with fine dust / swarf from other machines in the workshop such as bandsaw, grinder, the fine dust gets into the slide and give odd results. would the £ 120.00 item be any better.

I have a new Warco wm240 lathe which is very similar to the wm250, I have the warco quick change tool post which is £ 140.00 with 2 standard holders, it is expensive but made for that lathe. It took 2 mins to fit and your are off and turning again, no machining to do. I would not buy a kit with odd holders you wont use, just but the ones you need. Its a great lathe and a good upgrade from a mini-lathe.

Hi Neil, I went on a tour of the Whitechapel bell foundry, in London, about 10 years ago. most of the tools were pre war, thats the WW1, In the hand bell polishing room in chap had sat at the same stool for 40 years polishing small handbells on a lathe which I think was built in 1780 or so, " we had a motor put on it in 1924", still in action. They had a very big rotary table about 5 foot diameter mounted on the floor with a motor built in to slowly rotate a large bell with a lathe tool touching it slightly, this was to tune the bell. The bells weigh up to 12 tons, They bought this secondhand in 1908 from a bell foundry in Croydon, still in everyday use. A most interesting place. Perhaps Neil you could find the oldest lathe still in use. In these days of wanting the latest stuff some industries still use good old gear. When I was in the pro photographic trade a was asked to repair an old camera for a pro studio which was pre first war, they were using it every day to shoot catalogue pictures for boots the chemist, it was so old it did not have a shutter, yet to be invented.

Hi All, does anybody know the colour codes that are on some grades of bar steel stock. I have some 5/8" with green paint on one end and some I have seen with red. Are these EN8 or EN1 etc. I do put a red felt pen mark on my own brass metric stock just to save time when looking for something, no point re measuring loads of round metric stock when looking for imperial. What way does everybody mark the re stock. Some of my stock I bought 15 years ago so I cant remember what it was.

Thanks for all the advice. think I was going at it too easy, should have had bigger cuts, its was the mass of dust that put me off . I turned a cast iron flywheel about 12 years ago on a mini lathe but that was a long time ago. I will have another go this week, I think my speed was too high as well 800 rpm if I can remember.

Hi all, I have just started turning down a new cast iron backplate to fit a collet ER32 chuck onto my new Warco wm240 lathe. I am using a new replacable carbide tool from ARC euro which is fine on all other jobs I have done, its has a sharp edge on it. but on this cast iron backplate the amount I can take off per run is very small, its all fine dust. should I be using some special toll apart from the normal range of tolls we all have. So far today I have taken off about 0.5mm in 2 hour, I need to remove 7mm, it will take days, must be doing something wrong. regards David