Member postings for Georgineer

Looks like wrought iron to me. You can often see the same grain structure in old anchors and similar things dredged up from the sea bed. My father had one where you could see the way the grain changed where the smith had fire-welded the shaft.

My blacksmithing instructor in the 1970s said you can identify wrought iron by the smell, because it's all so old...

George

I did try mapping pens (my Mum, a tracer, produced some wonderful work with them) but I'm left-handed which makes me literally a pen-pusher. On paper the straight nib caught in the fibres of the paper then broke loose with a splat.

Later I used Rotring pens on tracing paper, then Rotring on mylar which is my favourite. We had tungsten carbide tipped pens because the mylar wore down ordinary pens too quickly.

Later there were plastic pencil leads (permanent or erasable) for use on mylar film and they were horrible.

George

I'd like to learn how to make sodium nitrate from acetic acid.

George

Well, that's two minutes I'll never get back.

Another

internet

video maker

who

thinks

I've

got

all

day

to wait

for

a

cascade

of

obscenities.

George

This can be turned to advantage. When Dad was in senior management in Portsmouth Dockyard during the 1960s, the medical centre applied to buy an electro-cardiograph machine, a very expensive thing in those days. It was turned down by the finance department.

On being told of this, Dad said to the chief medic (who came under his aegis ) "Hmm... So in effect you are measuring the hardness of men's hearts?" and got the reply " Well, yes, in a way that's true." "Leave it with me," said Dad, and resubmitted the order under the engineering budget as a hardness tester. It went through without question.

George

If President Poo-tin (which I am told is also the Russian word for bed-pan) does to Kyiv what he has done to Mariupol and a large swathe of Syria, what it's called will be of academic interest only.

George

Dad used Formica stuck down with Evostik in Mum's kitchen in 1966. It was still all firmly fixed when we sold the house in 2005.

Nobody seems to have mentioned thixotropic cements like Thixofix and Timebond. They are similar to Evostik but are more forgiving of accidental touch-downs.

George

Don't forget that the makers of WD40 now market a whole range of products under the WD40 name, including a penetrating fluid.

Mind you, when we ran out of Plus Gas in the 1970s, Dad re-filled the tin with a 50/50 mix of light oil and paraffin. We used it for years and never noticed a difference.

George

It sounds like the stuff my father used when he was a dockyard apprentice in the 1920s. They used to roll it into little balls and fire it at each other through bits of pipe. Apparently there was a neighbouring house with a roof window visible over the dockyard wall. When the window was open the challenge was to fire a pellet through the opening. Dad wondered if the occupants ever worked out where the little black pellets came from.

George

How slight are we talking? I had no end of trouble getting the nylon bushes out of a friend's bike's seized headset. They had expanded to the extent that I had to apply extreme force to move anything.

Presumably, for Colin's application longevity won't be such an issue.

George

I came here to comment on Geo. H. Thomas's The Model Engineer's Workshop, but have stayed to thank the contributors for the very measured discussions of freeemasonry and school-teaching.

My late father was a freemason (as were my grandfather, uncle and brother) and for many decades a church elder. He would not have stayed five minutes in an organisation which was corrupt or questionable.

I started out as a power station apprentice and ended as a science and technology teacher, and became very disillusioned by the general public's jaundiced view of teaching, something they had never done and didn't really understand. It was only the interaction with the kids that kept me at it for so many years. The teachers I really admire are those who teach Maths, or History, or RE with no practical input.

Anyway, back to Thomas's book: It's full of really valuable information based on sound thinking and practical experience. However, having its origins in a series of magazine articles, there are lots of vegetables and gravy along with the meat. That's not a criticism because I learned when I was a technical author (yes, I've been about a bit) that one writes according to the needs of one's readership. When I write the occasional magazine article I put in vegetables and gravy, and a bit of seasoning too.

When I want to tackle one of his projects (or indeed, any other magazine-based project) I scan and convert the original and boil it down to what I need. It not only gives me a more useable text, but aids my understanding too.

George

A harmless hobby of mine over the years has been a search for the perfect surname. I'm quite happy with my own, but it has nine legitimate spellings (so far discovered) and countless illegitimate ones. So:

• It has to be capable of announcing over the telephone without spelling it out (so Bailey, Bayly, Baillie, Bailie etc are out).
• It has to be pronounceable correctly without guidance (so Hindley and Hindley etc. are out. I had one of each in the same tutor group when I was a teacher);
• It must have no negative connotations (so Slack, Idle, Thick, Loveless etc. are out);
• It must have no sexual connotations (think of your own examples. I was at school with girls called Hoare and Toplice);
• It should have no tribal connotations (so Douglas, Preece, MacHine are out);
• It should contain no diacritic or punctuation marks (so O'Really, M'Spreader and Brontë are out);
• It should be capable of no risible connotations (I have actually come across Walter Fall, Will Barrow, Nora Way and I.C. Double, and about twenty years ago a friend showed me an entry in the register of veterinarians for a man named Everard Cock) ;
• It should raise no questioning eyebrows when first announced (so Andrewartha is out);

and so on. The stongest candidate so far is Hill, but the search continues.

George

Edited By Georgineer on 10/03/2022 14:17:39

If we're correctly informed then, I'm breaking the law by having as a souvenir the first cartridge fired from an experimental 30 mm cannon I designed. Oh dear.

While I wait for the police to come and get me I shall pass the time by making an almost-relevant post in the Financial Surnames thread.

George

I never thought of that! I'm not sure if it would be so convenient to use, but I'll have a play. It's actually no problem to remove the handle. The rod fits snugly into its socket, and I don't tighten the screw.

George

I love my lever attachment, with one reservation. The handle sticks out a long way and catches me when I'm walking past in my cramped workshop. I've taken to removing the handle when not using it.

George

Certainly that's the exhortation cast into the urinal at one of the stations on the Watercress Line.

George (resident of Emsworth from 1966 to 1978)

Three of my fellow apprentices were named Pope, Mercy and Heaven.

Back to the financial topic, my son's former music teacher is called Tanner.

George

While I accept that any relay with a built-in snubber diode would get upset on a.c., and that latching relays with permanent magnets do exist, at the scale we're dealing with here I'm surprised that it would matter.

Please tell me more. I'm always ready to learn.

George

Correct theory, but I simplified it because, unlike your example (which is an interesting story in itself) we aren't dealing in kiloVARs.

I'd be interested to see a relay spec which refers to its power factor, or its inductance. I'm even a bit surprised that this one quotes its power consumption rather than voltage and resistance.

George

Is it the current rating you're after? If so, start from the well-known formula "Power = Ivy Watts", or

power = current x voltage

re-arrange it:

current = power/voltage

stick your numbers in with the units:

I [milliamps] = 550 [milliwatts] / 24 [volts] = 23 milliamps near enough.

You're unlikely to find one as small as that, but anything bigger will do the job without breaking a sweat.  The relay will not be fussy about a few volts under or over the 24, nor will it be fussy about a.c. or d.c.  If you haven't already got  the transformer, it's worth checking local charity shops as they often have a basket of 'wall-warts' which can be adapted to one's own purposes.

George

George

Edited By Georgineer on 04/03/2022 17:23:17