Member postings for Georgineer

My son was quite shocked when I bypassed a large part of an Ikea store by nipping through the café.

George

Gib in the engineering family where I grew up & also where I did my apprenticeship with the CEGB. If it was pronounced jib it would be spelled with a J.

Jeorje

Ah yes, from Bill Waggledagger's Julius Cæsar, Act 1, Scene 2 .

Or "omnia mihi græca sunt" as my Latin teacher put it.

George

Not necessarily comparable but I'll throw it out there for what it's worth: I bought a die from RDG a while back to fit the ML7 nose thread. The cutting edge of the die thread was 'smeared' to one side and took a fair bit of stoning to correct. I haven't bought from RDG since.

George

Thanks for posting this link, Dave. I've been researching one of the bell-ringers of St Mary, Portsea who was lost at sea in WW2, and this helped me to clear up a mystery about which ship he was serving on.

George

Gun carriage quoin? (I think I've rememberd the name right.)

George

"... and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

Given that there is most probably only one break in the winding, and that it's most likely on the exposed parts of the coil, the first thing I would do is give it a good coat of looking at under a magnifying glass. If you can identify the break it should be fairly straightforward, if a bit fiddly, to effect a reapir. You can spare a turn or two in order to give enough length to play with, and the soldered repair doesn't need to be particularly elegant, though it's a good idea to slip something insulating under the join to isolate it.. It has worked for me in the past.

As far as I can tell from the photo the yellow stuff is nasty gloop from the sort of sticky tape they used in the sixties, and it doesn't look as though there is widespread corrosion, which is the real killer.

George

We just received one of those automated cards through the post to "celebrate" an anniversary. It should be overstamped "untouched by human hand".

And John, I must remember not to send you our family Christmas letter. I tell it like it really is, but with humour. From a purely selfish point of view it saves writing the same thing, or a sub-set of it, multiple times. And, after nearly forty years the collected letters make an interesting family history.

George

My father told me that the brass turner only had one pair of chasers, so male anď female threads were all 26 tpi, and made to fit each other, which is why the shade rings on old lampholders aren't interchangeable. The brass thread diameters were later standardised for mass production, but (contrary to popular belief) have never been a "British Standard". Dad did his apprenticeship in the later 1920s. New Practical Metalworker was published after 1936, and the second paragraph of page 929 confirms that freehand thread turning was still practised.

George

I tried a radio-controlled clock in my workshop, and found it to be very temperamental. It had a metal case and a metal dial, so the only possible way for the signal to get in was round the back, which was against a brick wall. I'm surprised that it worked at all, and it often didn't. I gave up in the end and now use a very reliable quartz crystal clock, bought for £1 from a charity shop.

George

Lends a whole new aspect to turning between centres using a dog...

George

I get mine through a firm called UK2 (there are others) and it's not very expensive. However, I suggest you stick to the better known domain names [is that the proper name for them?] such as .com, .co.uk and so on. There were loads of new names released a few years ago, and it has taken the rest of the internet years to catch up with them.

Before I retired I took one out which ended in .engineering and it made a nice elegant email address. However, I never knew if an email would get though to my customers because the corporate anti-spam systems would stop my emails and I never knew if they got through or not. Eventually I stopped using it and took one out ending in .com. End of problem.

George

A bit more detail would help people to help you, but 13g could possibly be "13 gauge" which would be the thread on the end of a particular diameter of wheel spoke. My 1938 tandem used 13g spokes.

George

Ah, you youngsters don't know you're born! I had to master the dip pen before I was allowed to use a fountain pen, dipping into the inkwell at the right side of the desk (deuced inconvenient for us left-handers) and flicking the bits of pencil shavings and mushed up blotch off the nib before writing. My first founter was a maroon Osmiroid 65, and it cost 5/6d. Well, it was a few years ago...

Thanks for letting us know the outcome, Daniel. It's always appreciated but not always remembered.

As far as some of the other points raised are concerned, I have never come across Whitworth threads in 64th sizes, but Whitworth did specify threads up to 1/4" in 32nd increments. I still have a 3/32" Whit tap hand-made by my grandfather. I tried it and it's horrible, but he obviously needed it for his business.

The only time I have encountered a 1/16" Whit thread was on a feed pump for a model steam engine. The cylinder cover was held on by six hex-headed bolts that size.

Received wisdom from my father, who did an electrical apprenticeship in Portsmouth dockyard in the 1920s, was that the general practice was to use odd-number BA threads for electrical work, but there were many exceptions.

George

We never had this problem in days of yore.

George

I was given to understand that it stood for "Technology Without An Interesting Name". I wonder which of the three explanations, if any, is correct.

George

One of my favourites is "Repairing old Clocks and Watches" by Anthony Whiten, which he subtitles "Horology for the Hignorant". It's one of the very few technical books I have encountered which are worth reading for their own sake.

George

When I was an apprentice at Fawley Power Station in 1971 we had an experimental superconducting motor on one of the cooling water pumps - about 3000 horsepower if memory serves. I never saw it running because the refrigeration plant was so unreliable. I was intrigued to discover that it used copper as an electrical insulator for the superconductors.

George