Member postings for Jelly

I believe you have hit the nail on the head.

You can also take a card issued by the electricity supplier to a shop with a "PayPoint" kiosk and pay cash, if you're not online.

Either way, if you're unaware of the change until your power cuts out, it does seem like a rather unwelcome surprise, executed with the sort of infuriatingly indifferent cruelty that only a large faceless organisation can achieve.

Edited By Jelly on 09/11/2022 22:09:40

It does indeed appear to be surface rust, and you most likely could remove it with no consequence... But you should absolutely expect some consession or reparation from Warco if you are going to do that.

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To Roberts's point, the tailstock offset corrosion of is the most alarming and egregious...

I'm not sure that means it's a used machine, my own interpretation of that photo is of long term exposure to moisture during transit allowing moisture to get under paint in a vulnerable area, which would fit with the lack of corrosion protective grease.

But it's still not good and that area warrants further inspection if you are going to accept the machine.

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My working thesis is that Warco has reached a level of integration with their suppliers that they can do their QC (which is generally pretty good, I have been impressed with Warco products when I have used them) in the country of origin...

But for some reason that lathe wasn't properly prepared for export after inspection, and has been subjected to high humidity during its sea journey, and was then dispatched to you still in its crate without a second UK inspection.

There should 100% not be rust on the machine if it's brand new.

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But (without seeing pictures, in which it may in fact be blatantly obvious rust) if it's just a slight yellow/orange bloom to the machined surfaces, then to avoid a red face I would wipe over a little patch with some white spirit on a rag, or otherwise somehow satisfy myself that it's not just a particularly grim looking cosmoline (other rust protective greases are available) application.

So as to spare a red face when asking the supplier "why the [explietive]-ing [explietive] have you delivered a rusty machine to me".

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That said if it appears to be just surface rust without any pitting, I would be inclined to:

• Ask for a partial refund, or some accessories you would like but couldn't justify with the original purchase (say additional toolholders, an additional type of chuck, or a goodly discount on the DRO?) by way of rectification...
• Then remove the rust with some OOOO wire wool and light oil, and finally...
• Spend years enjoying the additional cash and/or accessories.

Edited By Jelly on 08/11/2022 21:17:49

The Old's Elevator will either run in fully flooded mode, or not at all; and will run fully flooded in a wide range of material and feed conditions.

A conventional archimedes screw would require specific feed conditions to run fully flooded, and would require a much more involved design process to do so reliably as the difference between "doesn't run fully flooded" and "binds up easily causing compaction and over-torque in the motor" is narrower.

It would be easy to demonstrate with cut-aways, but otherwise is a bit mind-boggling unless you're already familiar with screw-conveyors (which fwiw are themselves generally far better than belt conveyors for flowable solids)...

It took me a good few minutes after watching the video to fully get my head round how the vectors and forces in the two situations differ.

The difference is best illustrated by the following:

• No matter how fast it's running, the olds elevator wouldn't be able to lift material to the top, if the feed hopper at the bottom was fully empty.
• By contrast a conventional archimedes screw can be run in a condition where it can only feed if the bottom hopper is full, or above a certain screw speed (for a given material determined by viscosity and angle of repose) can theoretically run fully dry.

Edited By Jelly on 08/11/2022 13:43:13

Did you buy any of the "ER25 146mm" collets advertised?

I would be curious to see what geometric form they take.

Question, why do you not want to stick with the current arrangement if it's all in working order?

The beauty of connecting machines by switch-socket is that you can get perfect isolation every time, and the switch mechanism prevents disconnection under load.

Carbon Fibre can be very rigid indeed, and interestingly you can control the rigidity of the part in each axis by manipulating the way it's laid up...

But I do find it extremely unlikely that carbon fibre that rigid can be manufactured for £15 profitably...

I use a Forticlient VPN to connect to work's intranet every day, and used to use CiscoAnyConnect to VPN into the Uni systems when I was working on a collaborative project with some academics.

They both work fine on the platforms I've tried: Windows 10, Slackware 15.0, OpenBSD 7.0, and some niche commercial *nix platforms like Solaris and Unixware 7 (aka System V R5).

It's ultimately all down to the server side as to how well or badly the VPN service operates, which is out of my control as a mere mortal.

Both work's and the uni's servers thottle the bandwidth of my connection (I'm fortunate enough to have "fibre to the house" ) considerably...

So when working with big files (say 100MB+), it's better to log into the VPN, move the required files to a secure cloud service like One-Drive or Atlassian, then close my VPN connection, and download them from the cloud service to a local drive, then reverse the process when you're done.

Edited By Jelly on 07/11/2022 15:18:07

I am struggling to place the logo, it "feels" like Moore and Wright at a glance, but I can't find any evidence of that.

However, my actual point was going to be that at normal second hand prices, the risk should be low, and my experience of buying these kind of things sight unseen is that they usually work just fine if they arrive packaged correctly and intact; maybe 1 in 10 purchases has a minor defect.

To Roberts' point above, don't spend a significant amount of it, used examples go for £12-40 depending on condition and accessories, a new one from a far-eastern importer unbranded will be £30-40 without accessories, and a new Mitutoyo can be had for £70-100

Having owned loads from lots of different brands, it doesn't seem to matter one bit, the important thing is that the move freely still when you receive them 

Edited By Jelly on 01/11/2022 22:54:22

Looking into it a bit more it seems like certain sizes within the specification for Dead-Length Collets do use the resilient blocks, but others don't; without buying the standard it's hard to know which is which.

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I did notice that for my 185E chuck, a DIN compatible knock off of the rubberflex collets is available, offering a 3mm rather than 1mm clamping range on parts over 8mm in size... Although at £309 a collet, they would end up working out slightly more expensive for the same range.

Looking into it a bit more, it turns out the appeal of the rubberflex type DIN collets is apparently being able to grip black bar (as opposed to bright/centerless ground) for first-op machining on a production lathe with a bar feeder, thus saving money on raw materials.​

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I've done quite a bit of making smallish parts where concentricity and surface finish were key meaning I needed the ability to both move between setups without losing concentricity, and run at max speed (3500 rpm); injector cones, nozzles for atomising liquids, and a replacement spindle for a high speed engraver to name just a few.

The collet chuck was/is definitely a major quality of life improvement over doing work like that in a small 4-jaw chuck dialling it in with a "10ths indicator" (actually a 2μm indicator), especially with thin wall parts which are susceptible to being crushed... that sort of work could drive a man to madness done too often.

Edited By Jelly on 01/11/2022 15:44:10

Edited By Jelly on 01/11/2022 15:49:23

I'm open to this possibility, but looking at manufacturer's pictures on the web, it would appear that (admittedly in sizes larger than 163E) the little rubber things do seem to be standard equipment.

Links to Kitagawa collets size: 173E & 185E by way of illustration.

Unsure if this is a foible of that particular manufacturer or of the larger DIN 6343 collet sizes.

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That said, even if they are objectively worn out, as long as they're holding concentricity properly, I'm not sure I could call them scrap given that new collets are between £84 and £100 each, with a complete set of 185E's coming in at £3411.48.

In a production environment sure (and I'd expect to build the cost of tooling into the job), but I don't get sufficient use out of collets to justify the outlay of replacing them whilst they still function even if imperfectly.

Edited By Jelly on 01/11/2022 10:30:02

I think you're on the right lines, I have two collect chucks (different collet sizes) from the same manufacturer for my lathe, and have two thoughts:

1. my suspicion is that Chris is tightening the collet closer to be a very close sliding fit on the parts before actuating the lever, it's worth trying it a bit looser before actuating the lever.
2. My collets have little cylindrical rubber bits in the slits, which act as a sort of spring, if Chris's collets are absent these, or they've perished then it may explain the lack of spring back. (These could be non standard additions by my lathe's former owner, but they work)

I tend to put the collet in my chuck and screw up the collet closer until it just touches the face of the collet, and let the lever do all the closing, and it grips and releases fine.

So yes and no...

Both ISO and ANSI have standards for this, but...

They specify the use of hatching not colour.

I would consider ISO 128-50* definitive outside North America

(Yeah, part fifty! money grabbing charletans, at least BSI were good enough to consolidate all the ISO drawing standards into one document with BS 8888 when they moved over).

The most modern use of colour I've seen with the internal consistency to think a standard was in place was in BR technical documentation I saw when I was doing more heritage rail stuff.

So if you really want to know how deep the rabbit-hole goes, maybe emailing the archivists at the NRM in York would reveal an internal BR standard which is relevant.

Edited By Jelly on 30/10/2022 21:33:19

George,

I have always really liked the IKEA knock off of the clamp-down anglepoise lamp for this purpose, I think they're called "Tertial" and hold up really well.

You can use them as is with 240V, or if you need the extra safety of low-voltage, the power demand of a Modern 12-24V LED bulb is low enough for the cable in the lamp to still be suitable, so you can cut the plug off and wire it straight into a cheap and cheerful low voltage lighting power supply.

Not as cheap as Dave's find, but you're also paying for a lot more material.

That said, I find it much better to have good lighting design for the whole space, which with the genesis of unreasonably cheap LED Battens and Panels is much more realistic and affordable than ever before.

Since I replaced the old lighting in my workshop, and took the time to design a lighting setup which gives me option to have 500, 1000 or 2000 Lux down-lit illumination evenly across the whole workshop at the flick of a switch it's extremely rare that I need machine lights anymore.

Hands down the best £200 I ever spent on the workshop.

Edited By Jelly on 30/10/2022 15:52:27

It's near enough 100% recovery as long as it's in operation, when it eventually closes again they will loose some gas right at the end that's unfeasible to extract, but even then (depending on the exact geology of the formation) you might only be talking 10% of the last "fill".

The reason it closed in 2017 was that the cost of doing workovers on all the wells to keep it gas-tight was too expensive relative to the profit centrica was making from it... Now gas is expensive it makes complete sense financially, so they have paid for the work and they're away again.

I have to say is that it was unusually far sighted of Centrica's management team to keep paying to maintain the topside, pipeline and onshore processing facilities in mothballs rather than begin immediately stripping out to make them safe to stand until their shareholders were eventually ready to swallow the decommissioning bill.

It's rare to see that kind of good sense prevail in the boardroom these days, but I'm glad it did.

Edited By Jelly on 28/10/2022 20:57:51

I have a couple of points:

1. If the Transwave product you were looking at had a minimum motor size, then it's a static converter, not a rotary. Those can actually run smaller motors, but only if a large one is running on the same circuit, so for coolant pumps etc, it's not the end of the world.
2. I specifically compared payback to purchasing on the used market because converters are durable and long lasting machines with a service life of 30+ years, if you're concerned about cost it would never make sense to purchase new, but buying used is rarely any different due to the nature of the machine.
3. In the context of a workshop I have never found rotary converters to be noisy, yes they do create a bit of a hum, but compared to taking a serious cut on any machine tool, drilling, welding, grinding, rivetting or hammer forming, the sound doesn't touch the sides.

When I looked at replacing the system in my workshop recently, I found myself needing 5 VFD's between 0.35kW and 4kW. To do that would have  seen me spending significantly more than £1k on the VFD's, and having to do a major rewire of the control circuitry on my lathe, then having buy several other new components for the privilege of installing my VFD's...

Vs paying £380 for a 7.5kW Rotary Converter which was about 5 years old with low hours and documentation showing it hand been serviced by the manufacturer before it went into storage, which has been plug and play.

VFD's are fine and all, and have their advantages, but my experience is that they're not the only viable solution, and may not be the best solution for all use cases.

Edited By Jelly on 28/10/2022 10:57:19

I bought a bunch of Bisley Cabinets from a company who turned out to have had a re-organisation of their factory and bought new storage solutions...

They're kinda tatty, but the ones I've already collected have allowed me to condense a lot of my storage whilst also increasing accessibility of stuff.

This re-organisation has of course, temporarily created a fantastic mess into the bargain, I'm due to pick up the last of the cabinets tomorrow and will hopefully get stuff squared away over the weekend.

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Whilst I was at it I also took a bunch of broken motors to the scrappy, my local EMR yard was offering well above market price (£570 a tonne, over a market rate of £450) on motors, so the timing was right. weighing in 250kg of motors and transformers paid for all the cabinets, whilst clearing a bunch of useless, heavy and bulky stuff out; Win-Win!

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I finally procrastinated from finishing my re-organisation by fitting the X-Axis Scale for my Lathe DRO.

It's rather crude in the bracketry department again, but I was able to use the mounting holes for the X-axis adjustable stop assembly and avoid modifying the lathe at all.

I do have a better approach in mind to mount it more permanently using the casting on the saddle which carries the taper attachment and a welded bracket assembly to bolt on, and will probably do that using 1μm scale to replace that 5μm one in the fullness of time...

But for now, that's a significant improvement on no DRO, and whilst the X-Axis stop is very handy and it would be good to get it back, it's somewhat less useful once you have a DRO fitted.

Buying a RPC is cost-neutral with a 240-to-415 VFD for the first machine...

But for machines 2 to n+1 the phase converter costs nothing, I am very happy with my Transwave (recently purchased second-hand to replace my home made Converter) and am confident that it made more financial sense.

A static converter has some drawbacks by comparison to a rotary one, but could work out cheaper than a VFD altogether second-hand due to being unfashionable.

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If John is intending to buy or open to buying additional 3-phase equipment I would recommend a phase converter over spending hundreds on a VFD conversion on each successive machine.

I need to clarify this after having a closer look this evening.

The S32 and Multifix B combination works with 25mm tools for me because my 25mm tooling is all CNMG and WNMG, where the cutting edge is below the top face of the holder due to the geometry.

For HSS/Brazed tools which have been ground to use the top of the blank as a cutting edge, or CCMT (and similar) type insert holders, the Multifix holders would need to be modified for that system to work, and 20mm would be the maximum as standard.