Member postings for Mick B1

I have seen it specified as material on a drawing for a revolver cylinder in .38 Special/.357 Magnum calibre. I think it was EN58M or AM, and there my have been alternative specs also listed. This was probably 40+ years ago.

I can remember feeling rather surprised at the time.

Edited By Mick B1 on 01/10/2023 17:53:06

I bought one today and think it's a decent tool, fit for use within its limitations. As it came, using the thimble ratchet closed it about half a line-thickness below zero, but the supplied C-spanner resolved that with a bit of careful fidgeting.

When I used it on a bit of ground 10mm silver steel it showed an estimated 1.3 divisions below nominal, while my 47-year-old Mitutoyo Imperial tenths mic showed 0.3933", so maybe a tenth discrepancy there - but I think the friction thimble of the Mitutoyo slips at slightly less torque than the Parkside ratchet. But we're in quite tricky territory here for non-metrology-lab stuff.

I'm sure the thing is good enough for the huge majority of rational engineering work, model or otherwise.

Unfortunately posh English schools were configured to turn out military and civil officers to administer an empire that was disintegrating even 60 years ago. They made a point of propagating formal linguistic skills and avoiding any practical skills involving the manipulation of materials.

It took a lot of time and effort to reverse that with the autodidaction bit.

You could try trepanning it out of a piece of flat bar - that's what I did with the traverse truck for a model carronade I was making:-

But the radius was far smaller than the one you're trying to do.

I'd reckon you'd gotta work on the biggest lathe, and do some o' the baddest things...

The metal lacquer works fine, so long as your brass is very clean and dry when you apply it.

Bills Of Materials predate CAD by a decade or so. They were used from the mid-1970s as the structural elements of Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) systems, later Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II) systems. These latter would include Bills Of Resource with routing details for capacity planning.

Full explsions would be represented by Indented Bills, opening up each in-house-made component or subassembly progressively until the lowest-level bought-in raw materials or piece-parts were reached.

In 35 years working on these systems, I never saw a comprehensively good one - though I was involved in some useful improvements to a couple of 'em.

I've also found it worth buying a dedicated (bagged) cylinder vacuum cleaner for cleaning off fine swarf. Mine was 40-odd quid from Argos, model no. VCB43B1-70, and it's powerful enough to pull oily swarf out of the crossslide T-slots and all the screw socket heads.

I give the lathe a going-over every time I become disgusted with the state of it...

I don't disagree, and I know of the conduit application, but I can screw the M20 x 1,5 thread in 6 turns before it sticks, and the drain's position and its welded-on strainer make it practically impossible to tell whether the thread runs out or gets jammed with paint or crud at that point.

The only standard BSP thread that's *anywhere near* the same OD is 1/2", nearly 38 thou bigger and 14 TPI or ~1,8143 mm pitch. Can't see an M20 x 1,5 male thread fitting that even for 1 turn.

I've seen some evidence of variation in some parts used in lathes believed to be from the same factory. I don't know whether these are properly-documented Engineering Changes in these factories, or casual pragmatism to use up whatever they happen to have at the time.

No, putting in a sump, pump and plumbing is too much faffing for the work I do at home. If I ever need a metal removal rate that would justify it, I do it on machines in another workshop, where it's already installed.

In my home shop if dry cutting gets rough or too hot, I use a squirt or three of WD40, or some 'MultiSpec' cutting/tapping lube I got from Macc Models. Neither lubricant is perfect, but they're generally good enough to deliver a decent job.

Duh!

I never thought of a tray!

I use an old wooden ruler to scrape the swarf to where I can get it into a dustpan.

I can screw an M20 x 1.5 thread several turns into the tray drain on my WM250V. If it was anything different I don't think I could do that.

There are many opportunities for finger-wagging zealotry and imperious statements beginning "Never" and "Always".

Plus there are sometimes instructors or authoritarian deputies who take advantage of excuses to injure or humiliate learners.

The important thing is to get the learner to cultivate imagination of possible unintended consequences of actions or neglect.

The worst injury I ever suffered in my younger days was from finishing a part-off with a hacksaw when I'd left a knife tool in facing position in the toolpost. That took a few stitches and is the only time I've seen my own bone.

I wouldn't normally expect to see a hammer in close proximity to a proper surface plate - they don't generally have any business together - but there are far too many worse things to list.

That's always been my rule-of-thumb, more-or-less irrespective of nominal size up to maybe an inch or so. Don't have much experience of larger.

Try Wikipedia with 'thermobaric weapon'. It's clear that this subject has been well understood by weapons engineers for a long while. Some have suggested it was a coaldust explosion, subsequent to the torpedo, that sank the Lusitania so disastrously in 1915.

I don't think custard powder is a preferred fuel.

In the early '70s I was labouring in the cutting room at Players' factory, moving bins of shredded tobacco leaf to the driers. There was usually a haze of tobacco dust hanging in the air. Dry tobacco burning as readily as it does, how it never blew up I don't know. Nor how I escaped any of the various lung diseases.

When we moved in in 2021, I put an offcut of the same heavy domestic we had fitted in the rest of the house by the garage wall and asked the removers to put the WM250V down on it.

Not a big lathe, and I generally cut light and slow, but I do a bit of milling, knurling and interrupted cutting on it, and the carpet works well enough to damp out such noise as there is.

It is indeed!!

You could go Victorian and have red instead of black. Then make the red pieces from phosphor-bronze and the white from alli.

OK, but there must be a lot of 'em about, to need a factory like that - and they obviously shop in our Morrisons.

The weaker torque at low speeds in the fast range on the WM250V has saved me a few broken tools that the Myford Speed 10 I used to have would've cheerfully crunched. The Warco just stalled, I retracted the tool, and carefully carried on.

In about 8 1/2 years, I've had no electric or electronic problems of any description.

All the facts defining the changes inherent in the title of this thread are political, and were made in pursuit of political goals - and whatever we might think of them, we all know that.

I'd best say no more.