Member postings for Jelly

I believe it's something to do with:

• The French equivalent of the HSE executive shutting down a large number of filling plants built to a common design due to safety concerns identified after one of them had a fire and explosion.
• BASF cutting back on production in the acetylene plant (and the other 148 plants in that city-sized complex) at Ludwigshafen due to reduced gas and naptha supplies, reducing German, Dutch and Belgian supplies.
• BOC only filling their own cylinders at their shiny new Immingham acetylene manufacturing plant, the last commercial one in the UK.
• Air Products and Air Liqude taking time to negotiate the transport arrangements for using filling plants in Spain and Portugal, which would allow them to start reselling cylinders to Hobbyweld et al.

If you take away any one of those factors, and there wouldn't be a problem.

Impatient as I am, I just ditched the other jobs I was partway through doing to put the curtains up, in the hope I could begin to move forward with a bigger reorganization more easily that way.

I think I've done a decent job of getting the curtains installed, and the layout works well for maximising effective use of space (there's a 210A oil cooled arc welder in frame, but totally hidden.

The whole job was about 95% moving stuff around and 5% actually installing curtains.

Need to finish the other side and trim the excess off the baffle at the top in my lunch break tomorrow, then I can really make some space.

Thanks, this is one I hadn't spotted yet, so there's hope.

The "Flame Ace" is perhaps a bit on the small side when thinking about draw-off rate, but if either Sheffield or Nottingham branches of Engweld stock or can order them, then at least it's an available option!

I do seem to remember there being some sort of widely used maxim about beggars not being choosers...

Edited By Jelly on 28/09/2022 01:11:59

Edited By Jelly on 28/09/2022 01:13:24

Thanks Steve.

Unfortunately, I spoke to him yesterday as it happens, apparently he's due 10 cylinders next week, all already spoken for, the next set are due in 3 months and he'll give me a call if he has any spare cylinders then.

Edited By Jelly on 28/09/2022 01:12:30

Does anyone know of a gas supplier who offers rent free Acetylene Cylinders other than Hobbyweld, or J&R Gasses; both of whom are unable to get cylinders filled at the moment.

Speaking to a couple of hobbyweld stockists, there's a 3 month backlog of existing customer's cylinder exchanges for dissolved acetylene, so they're not allowed to take on new customers for that product.

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I don't use acetylene in the kind of volume which would ever really warrant renting cylinders from BOC/Energas/Air Liquide unless there's no other option, so I'm keen to search out any remaining rent free options in the UK.

Any help much appreciated.

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(Before the inevitable comments: my insurance policy covers acetylene cylinders explicitly; I use oxy-propane for heating, brazing, and cutting already; and I'm using it for flame-spray welding and occasional fusion welding of mild steel, so there's no obvious substitute).

SNAP!

I'm literally in the process of doing the same thing to my workshop.

In my case to create a 1.8 x 3.2m welding bay right by the main door where I can create sparks, jets of molten slag, and plumes grinding dust with impunity, without risking it contaminating the machine tools at the other end of the garage, between the curtains and a sort of DMZ of shelving and storage, I'm hoping to be able to have machines and grinding co-exist in the same building ok.

I think this is going to mean that any woodworking gets booted outside though.

My experience has been that TPI is more or less set by workpiece thickness independent of material, so it would be the same for both.

If you're cutting aluminium then you will be fine with the cheaper carbon steel blades, and may get away with using a wood blade if you want to chance your arm to get it done quickly.

Tuff-Saws also has a handy reference guide on choosing metal cutting bandsaw blades buried on their website; which I often use that as the starting point when selecting a blade (I keep a bunch of them on a hook, but can never quite remember what's most appropriate for what, I should probably put a chart behind the hook).

In practice you can "get away with" using a blade which is a bit finer than is really ideal most of the time, but not using too coarse a TPI on a thin workpiece (noise, terrible cut quality, broken teeth, blades jumping off bandwheels, etc.) So I would err to the finer side of what's considered appropriate if you're just buying a blade for a one off job.

Edit: accidentally linked to a vacuum cleaner on EBay rather than the reference page.

Edited By Jelly on 24/09/2022 12:07:33

If the surface speed is appropriate, and you're using blade of an appropriate tooth count then I generally find lubricant on a vertical bandsaw unnecessary for cutting mild steel.

Using an M42 bi-metal blade will make an appreciable difference to blade longevity and cope better with the higher surface speeds of a bandsaw optimised for wood.

Tuff-Saws are my preferred source of blades, and offer a well designed Vari-Tooth Bi-metal blade which has additional room for chips compared to conventional designs, resulting in less friction and heating anyway.

Alternatively PP Profiles offers a very inexpensive laser-cutting service for steel, and if you send them the drawing and a specification for the thickness and grade of steel, they will get you a quote back the same day.

I generally use them for any complex shapes as it's usually more economical than buying plate from the stockholders and cutting myself with the torch (which itself is far less faff than using a bandsaw).

I have a stalled project which would be an ideal contender for the JS Cup, was it not for the fact that it's still a pile of parts...

Hopefully next year.

In an entirely related note, I could probably share workshop pictures if the workshop was visible under the thick layer of disorganisation I have going on right now.

Edited By Jelly on 24/09/2022 02:35:11

Got the DRO install finished.

(Forum software rotates from vertical format on upload???)

Involved some more crude bracketry:

And cutting a glass scale on the bandsaw, as per the suggested approach in this thread,, which worked remarkably well all things considered.

The packing (I used cardboard rather than tissue but the process of getting it in real firmly round the glass is much the same) seems to constrain where the blade can put pressure on the glass, forcing it to fracture in there or thereabouts the correct place, definitely a brittle fracture though.

Now just to move the mill into final position and run a new length of SWA between the rotary phase converter and the isolator to get it running in *its* new position (it's all change to ensure the layout remains ergonomic).

I feel like that's a rare example of where paying for installation and removal of the old drier could be worth it.

It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for what it is, that price about what you'd pay for a similarly compendious volume in another sub-field of engineering like Perry's Chemical Engineer's Handbook (£236) or Machinery's Handbook (£146), and it's much cheaper than Lees' Loss Prevention (£407).

Serious reference books and textbooks have got very expensive in the last decade; I don't even think there's a serious expectation from publishers of individuals buying many of these books anymore, it's assumed that they will be bought by "institutional" purchasers with deep pockets (as many of my reference books were).

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On the articles front, Perry's and Machinery's Handbook are both written that way too. If you read the front-matter each chapter has its own editor, editorial board and contributor list.

I guess many hands make light work when you're trying to cover a field which is both broad and deep at the same time.

Got started with fitting the cheap and cheerful DRO I got to the equally inexpensive Harrison Mill I saved from the scrap man.

What my bracketry lacks in sophistication, it makes up for in being made from a scrap piece of 2.5mm steel plate (helpfully stored in a pile of "usable bits" under the drill press) using nothing more than a hammer, and bench vice

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In an ideal world I would have cleaned the mill up fully before getting started with fitting the DRO...

But I need to move it into final position as soon as possible to allow me to free up space to fit new curtains (subdividing the workshop into welding/grinding and machining), so the Z-Axis and Y-axis scales are going on now whilst i still have good access, and i'll get round to clearing the chip tray of rusty swarf and half-congealed coolant "eventually".

I learned when I made replacement workshop doors that it doesn't take too much storage of materials for a project which you're due to start next to turn everything into a quagmire of items which have to be moved to do simple tasks.

This is very much my take, they're effectively a curated version of AliExpress/Alibaba with a UK warehouse...

Whilst you often get more than what you paid for (in a good way) that is balanced out by getting rather less than what you paid for at times as well, but rarely so much less that it's irretrievable, just deeply irritating for the most part.

I've had some positive experiences (10T Toe Jack, Welding Extractor) and some less positive experiences (5T machine skates which needed quite a lot of fettling to work as smoothly as required)...

I bought the DRO & scales from them as they were very obviously Sino units just badge engineered with Vevor's name on them, and I trusted the "non-brand" behind the branding to be of reasonable quality.

Vevor have them currently (although certain sizes are already out of stock), extremely reasonable prices (I paid £50 for a 1000mm scale), and they work fine with Sino DRO's.

I have recently bought a set of Scales and DRO (which is a badge engineered Sino) from them, perfectly good stuff.

They seem to have operate on a "when it's gone it's gone" stocking policy and minimal support, but offer prices which are competitive with buying on AliExpress and importing yourself, oy with a much shorter delivery time.

There's a consideration of building experimental pressure vessels and process equipment (I'm actually a Chemical/Process Engineer by trade), which requires a certain amount of scale even at the test rig stage...

To that end I'm in the middle of completing a series of welding qualifications with a view to gaining BS EN 9606 and ASME IX certification to permit me to produce a wider range of equipment "in house" (subject to taking them out for.

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I also did a lot of "12 inch to the foot scale" steam loco work (in other people's workshops) when I was younger, and would like to be able to tackle more jobs in that world, as it's a great deal of fun.

Prices can indeed be very high!

I bought a mixed lot of insertable tooling in an auction some time ago... Everything else took more or less standard inserts, but I recently went to order a set of 10 inserts for the face mill (a Sandvik Coromill 360), and it's £274 per set!

Unless anyone has a set of ten 360L-1906M-MH or 360L-2807M-MH inserts they have no use for kicking about, I think I'll have to go part-ex the face mill for something more affordable.

I'm right at the far south of the city, used to live in Crookes when I first moved to Sheffield as it happens, small world!

I will try to get some better framed pictures of my chuck to add to that album when I have a moment, fairly sure you haven't captured one in there so far.

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I must say I've found Sheffield remarkably convenient for any kind of metalworking hobby, side-line or business, despite the relative decline in manufacturing, there's still just about every kind of supplier and subcontractor you might ever need spread across the east and south of the city...

It's much easier to wire a new plug or, or break into the wiring to replace a component (say an isolator switch that has failed) if all the power supply wiring in a machine is using one of the standard colour codes; doesn't really matter if its:

• the old Red-Yellow-Blue,
• the new Brown-Black-Grey, or even
• the American Black-Red-Blue and Brown-Orange-Yellow...

But in terms of making life easy down the line, it matters that they're clearly distinguishable, and the phases remain consistent with their colour code (e.g. there isn't a hidden point in the circuit where an L2 coloured wire swaps to being a L3 colour, even if the wires are changing from old to new colour codes).

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At a push, wiring them all in a single colour, but tagging each wire with a number referencing back to a wiring diagram, as per panel-wiring practice can be OK...

But I for one would much prefer it if people reserved this for final drive wiring which goes through a reverse switch only, and maintained as much of the power transmission wiring in machines as is practical following one of the standard colour schemes.

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I have developed strong opinions on the matter after repeatedly having to unpick the design choices of long since retired electricians and instrument techs who chose to repeatedly deviate from both standard practice and the original designs without ever thinking to update the wiring diagrams (even crudely annotating them with red pen or a pencil would have been be better than nothing).

Your experience is very similar to mine when i picked Solid Edge back up after a decade or so of not using it (they changed from "Ordered" only to "Synchronous" being preferred in that time).

Initially it was like wading through treacle, but I kept pushing through and suddenly after a couple of tutorials and modeling some simpler parts of my own, it just clicked and it was all upward from there.

It probably doesn't help that Solid Edge has been rapidly gaining feature-sets all the time and is growing from its user friendly roots to be more and more of a full-featured professional CAD package aimed at medium sized organisations who don't need the complexity of Siemens NX, Catia or Pro/E, but do have a dedicated in-house design engineering office.

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My experience is that the Siemens help is extremely comprehensive, and reasonably easy to search, but not always clear (my most frequent frustration is learning that there's a button to do exactly what I want, but not being given any indication as to where i would find this in the +10 ribbon menus that form the UI).

You should expect to have a similarly infuriating experience when you start using the assembly, sheet metal and weldment environments but that each of those will suddenly get much easier one day with some use.

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With respect to not being able to manage something like John's gearbox assembly, there's a (not very) secret...

When I've modeled similar things in Solid Edge, using the engineering reference feature in the edge-bar for assembly mode to auto-generate parts (like gears) to established standards based on either dimensional (I want a Mod 4 gear with a PCD of "x"mm) or functional (I want a DP gear to give me a 2:1 ration at 1500 rpm and 2hp) inputs is usually my first step.

This makes it a lot easier to make those complex assemblies as you can start by generating and aligning the business end of the mechanism so it will work as required, then use that model of the functional parts as a reference to model the shafts, frames, bearing seats, bearings, etc. which will hold it all together.

In my experience you don't have to hold quite as much in your head all at once that way because you're getting the functional design decisions done quickly, then moving on to a new set of decisions about how you will manufacture a given assembly rather than juggling lots of competing decisions.

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As a thought Nigel, If you find yourself getting stuck with something repeatedly and would welcome a second pair of eyes to help you get past a particular obstacle, drop me a private message and I'd be only too happy to arrange to go through a problem you're having on Teams/Zoom/[Insert Video-Conferencing Software of Choice Here].

I'm not about to claim to be an expert draftsperson or CAD modeller, but I have used SE for a long time now, to do some relatively complex design work for various research projects and am pretty confident with it.

Edited By Jelly on 20/09/2022 11:23:35

Edited By Jelly on 20/09/2022 11:24:11