Member postings for Robin

Well done India and China, hopefully, this means we aren't signing up for zero coal either.

Why would anyone want to ban something vital to their economy before a credible substitute has been found?

Ground up American forest is not a credible substitute for UK coal.

OTOH, fracking our own gas reserves is a very credible substitute for Russian gas. A few beardy weirdy, anorak tree huggers having a hissy fit and glueing themselves to the road is not an insurmountable obstacle.

I renewed Fusion360 for another 2 years but I think that will be it. I bought Alibre Pro many years ago at a bargain-basement price. I watch out for cheap updates and snatch them up.

Very disappointed when Fusion 360 decided they had to charge extra for the machine interface.

I have CamBam but never quite got the hang of it.

A true dinosaur I tend to write my own software and firmware.

I don't like CAM that makes a series of parallel passes with all the dicky stuff happening in the Z axis. There is a big difference between machining and making pretties.

I have seen a couple of YouTube movies where people have taken ordinary 3 jaw chucks and converted them to "GripTru" by moving the backplate screws out to the front face, turning down the backplate for a sloppy fit and adding four grub screws, in from the sides, to take up the slack with perfect alignment.

Do we have an opinion on such reckless behaviour?

It's when it goes down you have to worry

Silicon grease got a bad press from the airgunners who found it promoted, rather than prevented, galling. Probably fine for a rolling contact but you might want to be careful what you do with the rest of the pot.

I have snapped it with the jolly old Nikon and stuck it on my web thingy

http://www.robinhewitt.net/LIN.png

Hope it works

There is a lovely Illustrated London News article on making the Enfield barrel from strips of Marshall's iron. The Time Team excavated Marshall's B'ham factory to reveal the super hot furnaces where he melted the crucible steel

Looks like the Enfield rifle tool to me, would it fit a .577" bore?

Think of all the new things I might not have permission to do. Windows is like having a dominatrix without the spanking. Lurvely

Blimey, if I didn't know better I might start to think you lot are not entirely convinced we are heading for a toasty thermageddon

That's a relief, I shall do the sides next.

Methylated spirit seems to dissolve the green colour of my Scotch-Brite so I will switch to Regina Blitz.

I just bought my first surface plate in black granite.

At least I thought it was black until I looked at the bottom which appears speckled grey bordering on white.

Knowing the Chinese proclivity for making something nice then destroying it at the last moment, I cleaned off a layer of paint using acetone, methylated spirit and Scotch-Brite.

It is still dark grey but a lot smoother. My height gauge slides around like Torville and Deane after a few bevvies.

Have I destroyed it?

I thought this was a wrinkle for spindles running in bronze bushings.

Normal wear on the bushing is at the top.

By putting the parting off tool at the back upside down you could use the unworn bottom of the bushing.

If you have tapered roller bearings then it is for fun only.

I like fun.

I could be completely wrong about this, but not about the fun part

For the first part of this millenium I was haemorrhaging tap wrenches. I like the Eclipse ones but they are usually a bit pricey.

Suddenly the price on Amazon has collapsed. I popped a 240, a 241 and a 242 in my basket then had to add another 241 to push it over £20 and qualify for free shipping.

They are now arriving and look like the real McCoy.

I expect everyone else gets them free with cornflakes, I am usually the last to know, but thought I should mention it just in case

I think mine is much prettier but it's running off a Z80 so no points for processing power.

I have one suggestion: Put a pulley on the handle and hang weights off it until you know how much torque you need to break it free.

It is very hard to guess and you don't have to.

Me too I discovered that I could buy the standard car engine hoist ram for not a lot.

It has a 19.5" stroke for broaches and supposedly delivers 8 tons.

Take that with a pinch of salt, but as my personal taste in broaches are all rated <2 tons it matters not.

I very nearly finished it but then I blew my CNC software and everything stopped

Can they switch Drax back to coal or is it stuck burning wood? I hear that Chris Huhne, liberal energy loon in the Cameron Clegg partnership, has made a fortune converting American forest into wood pellets.

Pre-1880 pre-dates Phileas Fogg so the error bars widen

I don't quite understand how CO2 can affect the climate without warming it???

"Overall the globe has cooled substantially since the last El Nino ended in 2016, and it now appears the cooling trend will persist another year as the CFSv2 is forecasting a La Niña to continue into spring 2022".

A bit of a cheat there because there was a spike in the 2016 temperature, but with the global warming freaks getting the screaming ab dabs about anywhere on the globe having warm weather, you can't really blame them.

The extra CO2 continues to have a dramatic effect on my garden where the plants are on a binge and are growing quite out of control. My lawn has tussocks.

Lots of ways to draw an arc, the problem comes when you want to extract that arc in to your CNC to cut it.

AutoCAD gives you a dxf or drawing exchange file from which you can extract the drawing entities.

Lines have start and end co-ordinates.

Arcs have a centre coordinate, a radius, a start angle and an end angle.

I actually use the more affordabe ProgeCAD but sadly they rather lost the plot drawing tangential lines and arc with version 2019