Member postings for Mick B1

Finished and delivered some lubricator pipe unions to the railway.

The non-return valve is a bought-out item with a 7/8"x14 UNF internal thread both ends. They wanted me to make the LG2 cone to be soldered onto 3/8" dia pipe, plus an adaptor threaded M20 x 1,5 to fit lubricator nuts. The adaptor was made from 1" AF hex EN1A.

So the end that takes the cone is the M20 fine, and t'other is 7/8 UNF to screw into the non-return valve. I made the cones with a 14° taper per side, and the female taper in the adaptor 15° per side, so that tightening the nut will compress the pointy end of the cone and improve the seal at the tip.

There were only 10 to do - carbon steel dies cut smoothly and well, and remained sharp by the finish.

I do this stuff as a volunteer simply because I enjoy the work.

Thank you for the link, John! It certainly enhanced my limited understanding considerably.

The one comment I'd make is that its language is pretty judgemental, and judgement of the company's management perhaps deserves a similar level of multiple qualified formal validation as the pressure vessel should've had.

I drilled the bore in my 1/10 scale 24 pounder Naval gun with the cascabel in the chuck and the 3-point steady behind the muzzle-swell astragal. It probably would have been better to bore it before turning the outer profile, but it's certainly good enough as is.

I centre drilled to start, then drilled 1/2" or 13mm as deep as a standard jobber drill would go, then finished with a 9/16" slot drill of which I'd turned and threaded the shank (they're softish, machinable HSS behind the cutting lips), with two (or maybe three - it was 20 years ago and I can't remember now) silver steel extension rods threaded to fit together, because the quill travel on the Myford Speed 10 I then had was only about 2 1/2". Because the slot drill cuts on the full length of the land, the hole was effectively bored at the start, and went to scale length.

Last time I had a stick of 9/16" silver steel it fit neatly down the bore with very little slop, so the result was clearly as round, straight, parallel and to size as could reasonably be expected.

To avoid any legal issues, I didn't drill the touchhole.

Edited By Mick B1 on 07/07/2023 17:59:05

Haven't really got a scooby. The point angle looks too small for screwcutting - except maybe BA?

That's why I generally buy square-section HSS blanks and grind 'em to whatever form I like.

Utter madness.

I've usually found holes drilled in acetal seem to pull in, as if the material deformed elastically as the drill went through, then contracted on withdrawal.

I'd go for the 0,1mm increments too. Could try using a larger centre drill first, to leave a lead-in taper, though it might be a bit late to be suggesting that now.

As others've said, unless you've measured the leads carefully, you might not know whether they're as round, straight, parallel and to size as the hole is.

It stops you using one of those cuboid socket-doublers where there's one socket on top and another on the rear face.

You can't use the top one as the cord fouls the wall, and if you use the rear one, the top one becomes unusable.

Perhaps that's the idea.

My understanding (such as it is!) of a carbon fibre hull implosion is that it'd be an everywhere-all-at-once event with very large numbers of fractures developing practically simultaneously - hence no description of finding the hull or large fragments of it.

An O-ring seal failure would have an equally fatal, though rather different outcome wouldn't it?

Well, I like to say something positive where appropriate (if that's the word...)

You're obviously not a member of the glowing-chip/cubic-inches-per-minute-metal-removal group...

There's something in your inferences but they're my personal beliefs as to what I think's right for me. I'm happy to express them for others to see but wouldn't seek to enforce them.

My missus and I actually did visit the Somme battlefields twenty years ago or so. After looking at the crater at La Bosselle (?), and High Wood, and chatting to a collector delighted with the shrapnel balls he'd picked up, we both began to feel there was something parasitic about wallowing in imagined emotions of those caught up in lethal events over which they'd had little if any control. We felt creeped out, and shortened the time on the Somme in favour of visiting relatives in the Vendee.

So yes, I do wonder why people dwell so much on the crimes, follies and misfortunes of humankind, especially spending sums that most will never have as disposable on doing so. But that's me - you can think what you like, as will I.

All of those things are within the scope of most people of moderate means who may have knowledge of the lives of relatives who were affected. I didn't lose anybody at the death camps so I don't think I've any business there.

Spending ostentatiously grotesque amounts of wealth visiting somebody else's disaster isn't something I'd feel comfortable about.

Edited By Mick B1 on 22/06/2023 17:04:54

Graves where somebody's remains have been laid to rest with due process and ceremony aren't the same as chaotic sites of multiple deaths.

I haven't heard of house-priced visits for the extremely well-heeled being available to the wreck sites of Hood, Bismarck or any of the other myriad ships sunk in war.

Even the Lusitania wreck, relatively accessible though now bizarrely privately-owned, is a protected site requiring permission to visit.

I wouldn't wish the potential catastrophe of Titan on anyone, but I do think there's something ghoulish about such obsession on the fate of Titanic.

Early geckoids probably hadda eata lotta spiders...

Having owned both a Unimat 3 and a Sieg C0, I suspect the top slides may be identical in most significant respects.

ARC and Axminster don't seem to sell them for Sieg C0 any more, but there are a couple on the Bay for £40- odd.

Aye, an' if yer've 'eard 'ow 'e managed to pay nobbut fivepence fer three to old Ted in 'Runcorn Ferry' ...

Holloway Runcorn Ferry

... yer might recognise a relationship 'tween complexity of a solution an' its value.

Meks yer wunder...

There was a lot of overlap between the ages. I think some individual's supposed to've had an iron pot in the Trojan war, which was certainly Bronze-, rather than Iron Age. Plus communication was sporadic and uncertain, and those with what passed for metalurgical knowledge would often have been disinclined to share it, so the Iron Age probably came to northern Europe later than the Mediterranean.

Cornish tin was being traded to the Phoenicians in the late Bronze Age, and that argues that they had worked out how to make decent tin bronze of reasonably consistent quality. The variety of copper alloys we might call bronze today makes me wonder if maybe they had a more definitive idea of what they thought of as bronze than we do!

Even the pre-Columbian Meso- and South American civilisation turned up occasional copper tools (not heard of any tin ones) but as SOD said, the metals weren't game-changing enough to be generally adopted or spark any assiduous development there.

But Volvo distributed it more widely.

Edited By Mick B1 on 06/06/2023 13:56:31

I've put the question to Hemingway, with a pictorially corrected drawing as a pdf.

I'll see what they say.

Edited By Mick B1 on 03/06/2023 20:31:13

Hmm... Thanks, it hadn't occurred to me there'd be any particular limit to the depth, except if the taper on the broach caused it to become too thin to take the side-stress, unlikely in this case AFAICS.

I'll take another look at it. Looks like I might be able to try asking them the question on their enquiry form.

Edited By Mick B1 on 03/06/2023 17:14:33

Yeah, but most drafting sheet blanks have 'Do Not Scale' pre-printed on 'em, so the dimensions and conventions are supposed to take precedence over mere appearance!

Perhaps I should've put an 'NTS' by the rad dimension, because it clearly is. But hey, I'm a volunteer, and I do these drawings so I don't have to keep measuring every part the railway ask me to copy.

And I'm no nearer an answer about whether to try rotary broaching.

Edited By Mick B1 on 03/06/2023 16:43:36