Member postings for Nick Clarke 3

In an unheated engine shed pressure gauges are uncoupled to avoid the chance of water in the syphon expanding on freezing and causing damage

We had a couple of Renaults that came with heat reflecting windscreens - normal (light) tinted but UV reflective - if you see one coming towards you in the sunshine the screen will look bright blue.

Glass like this would answer the questions about heat build up without a dark tint perhaps??

It looks like a small firewire connector

I bow to others' knowledge of soldering iron manufacture bur should you still require Weller bits I usually go to Rapid Electronics

While a student I had a summer job at a campsite/caravan park and to clean the urinals and toilets we used strong Hydrochloric Acid which came in a bottle with its own mop that sat in a cup on the side of the bottle. You poured a bit of the acid into the cup and than dipped the mop into it. A single wipe along the top of the urinal or round the rim of the toilet bowl leaving just an indiscernable amount of acid was sufficient to remove any limescale or staining as it ran down.

Just before I retired I had to co into the cleaner's cupboard at work for some rubbish bags (the amount of rubbish collected in over 40 years teaching and over 11 at that school!!!) and there appeared to be something very similar on the shelf clearly still in use.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 08/12/2022 11:23:38

For occasional use the laser cut BA/Metric sets from Blackgates are great value but separating them from the sprue (they are laser cut as one and look like bits of an Airfix model) can be a bit long.

At under a tenner for something rarely used can't be beaten.

I have had a Sieg SC3 for a few years bought from Arc.

I have been very satisfied from the start - but I have never used a lathe from Amadeal - and that's the rub - few of us have extended experience of more than one version of the minilathe.

From what I have read and heard - a lathe from Amadeal will do everything it ought to do - but my recommendation from personal experience can only be to buy the SC3 from Arc.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 03/12/2022 21:54:48

As an aside - when reconditioning film cameras a grease that stays put but is able to lubricate and take up play in focussing mechanisms is needed and I have always used a white lithium grease for this, but of course these are the opposite properties to those needed in this case.

Agfa cameras from the 1950s and probably before used to use a pale green lubricant that sets over the years to the consistency of bakelite and is the very devil to remove from the threads of the lens.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 25/11/2022 08:29:08

The Clarke CL300 is sold by Machine Mart, not ArcEurotrade and you will need to check with them if their boards are the same - otherwise order from Machine Mart.

There ae several different controller boards I believe and they may not all be interchangeable.

As a pedant myself can I point out that according to one online dictionary to tease means to make fun of or attempt to provoke (a person or animal) in a playful way or to gently pull or comb (tangled wool, hair, etc.) into separate strands - and to drag a pedant from its lair is not provoking exactly, while close I must admit, nor is it being combed into separate strands

One inflation calculator (the first of many that came up in Google) gives £100 in 1947 when the ML7 became available at £47 is now £4624.31 - so call it £2200 but of course that did not include a motor or stand - mind you most 3 1/2" lathes today come with a motor but do not include a stand however you do normally get a 3 jaw chuck which you didn't with a Myford.

Please don't come back with a Myford v. Chinese argument - I am only quoting from Google

A mini lathe can be 3" shorter in the bed but the same centre height as a ML7 and so at £799 10x seems about right.

I would suggest a basic filament printer that is affordable so you can get to grips with originating designs for 3D printing.

You may then decide or not to upgrade to another filament printer or then choose to switch to resin should you, on the basis of hard experience, to changeover (but you may well decide to keep the filament printer anyway).

Many people - myself included - find the learning curve into 3D CAD best approached with crampons and an ice axe, so don't invest a fortune until you have mastered the basics.

If it is not working for you there are many designs available online you can use or adapt.

Struggling to remember from the mists of time, but I seem to think that some mains soldering irons had isolated ceramic shafts for the bit to fit over???

As you are intending to build a loco are you going to join a club with a track to run it on? If so many clubs have workshops where jobs too large to do at home could be machined.

Possibly an indication of your location (but definitely NOT your address) might bring forward some club suggestions

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 11/11/2022 15:10:42

I bought the sc3 a few years ago and can recommend it as a first lathe. The only drawback is supposed to be power at low speed as it has no back gear - but it has never proved to be a problem for me.

Basically I felt the advantages of buying new with a guarantee far outweighed the suggestion to buy a second hand unknown quantity that I would not only not know if was any good and would not know how to rectify if it wasn't.

The only issue with asking this question is that there are people like me who own a mini lathe (although I have used many different types over the years) and those who have bought second hand lathes - not many of us do both.

Talking to a retired TV engineer - it was frequently the case for TV repairmen to leave the earth wire disconnected on their soldering irons when working on live chassis TVs - especially important when working in a workshop with others apparently.

Teaching at a large College the first and second generations of computers for student use were IBM machines. The keyboards on these were clattery devices where the key tops were made like this - basically like sticks of rock where the black letter went right the way through.

It was the custom when these became dirty for the technician to wipe them over with alcohol and they came up a treat!

When Amstrad PCs came out at a far more reasonable price these were bought in quantity and everything was fine until the first one became dirty. The keyboards on these machines had silk screened letters and with a couple of wipes of the alcohol the letters disappeared leaving a clean and fully working keyboard where all the keys were blank!

And at least in those days one would have been spared bits of a slide twirling in from the sides in an incomprehensible manner!

A few years back I lectured to a number of different photographic collecting societies on the history of photographic processes so it is certainly of interest!

What few may realise is that all full colour reproduction processes ever used are based on the principle of the combination of two or more coloured monochrome images. This includes colour printing, colour computer printing, colour TV (inc computer screens and monitors) and both film (silver based) and digital photography.

The only exception to this I am aware of is the Lippmann process which while expensive, dangerous and impractical today due to the mercury involved does record light of different wavelengths directly.

I don't know if this is the correct tool or whether it is going to be pretty, but it IS a proper tool, particularly if you fit a through bolt either side to clamp the bars to the sheet - it is called a pair of tinsmith's slips!