Member postings for Nick Clarke 3

At school I am responsible for 17 printers and there are 4 in use here.

Basically infrequent use kills inkjet printers and using them regularly causes the heads to dry out or wear out, waste ink tanks get full and there are occasional physical breakages, mainly paper trays. If you can't hit the happy medium in between you are going to be replacing printers.

If you only need colour prints occasionally then the only real choice is an inkjet, but if not a cheap mono laser is the best choice if you want it to last - I am resigned to regular inkjet replacements, but at not much more expensive than a couple for sets of cartridges I live with it.

Colour laser printers are expensive to buy and the refills, though better value per sheet - the unit cost of refills is high - and the photographic quality is still not there yet.

Old Mart - Sadly, depending on when you buy, you can sometimes shorten your ten year timescale by more than 9 years!

That sound like the mag i was reading by chance the other day - He mentioned the Petrolea reference to his original articles and that he had drawn up his own design in the 1970's but he had not yet traced it and had prints produced and readers were not to write in for them yet. It may never have happened.

In the re-run of the series in the 1970's W J Hughes noted that the original injector was taken from LBSC's 3 1/2" loco Petrolea - if that gives you any idea of the capacity required??

Perhaps look at a graph of half life or capacitor discharge?

I don't get it right every time!!!

BUT

• I accept any information from someone else who has direct experience should be respected - but there may be another way as well
• Any information from someone else with allied, but not exactly analogous experience may be of interest.
• Comments that say 'it can't be done' or 'do it this way or you are wrong' should be treated with caution.
• Contradicting someone from your experience is OK but knocking them isn't
• Thread drift can often be interesting and fun

And finally anyone who hasn't exactly the same sense of humour as me should be taken out and shot now (That was another joke, by the way!)

A couple of thoughts - firstly the spring material you have bought will, according to some supplier websites, need to be heat treated and secondly you can perhaps work out the loading on each of the six springs on a best guess principle for a maximum water coal and driver load plus sprung weight of the completed tender.

Alternately input Martin Evan's spring design into one of the leaf spring desing formulas on the internet. These springs are of a relatively simple desigh with only one full length top leaf and single leaves of the other lengths so you should be able to obtain an approximation of their deflection under load to compare yours with.

Unfortunately your proposed springs with multiple leaves of each length are a harder problem to calculate (at least to someone who last looked at spring design at Uni nearly fifty years ago and never since!) so doing the same for yours may not be an option.

Martin Evans (not the current editor of ME, the one before) came and gave a talk to the society I was a member of then and showed us a crankaxle for his Princess of Wales design built up and Loctited.

This generated a load of discussion and correspondence in the club newsletter with some saying 'Its not engineering, its a bodge' etc etc

This was 1971 ………………. !

Conventionally, when making leaf springs to scale they are far too stiff, so the solutions are either to slot the leaves, replace some or all of them with Tufnol or similar or to replace each leaf with a number of thinner ones, so I suspect your springs, if each leaf is made up of a number of thinner ones will be softer not harder than as drawn.

As a 7 1/4" locomotive the driver sits on the tender so it has to be able to take a reasonable amount of weight (particularly in my own case!!)

The club Highlander is off the rails at present awaiting a new boiler and repairs, but I can have a look at/take photos of the tender next weekend if it helps.

Nick

I asked a police civilian investigating officer about this a bit back and he said that while a clip from a dashcam can be useful in the case of an accident, the ease with which videos can be edited today makes any video evidence without a timecode track to show where it has been edited (or not) of little use if a case comes to court.

Thinking about it, I think it would be perfectly possible to superimpose a time of your choice on the footage and say it was recorded then for example.

I am quite the reverse - If I need it, it is not silly bad value and I can afford it, it gets bought - and after that the price is forgotten - especially in the case of things bought to do one job - any use after that is a bonus!

The only problem is when 'if I need it' morphs into 'I want it'

Arc Euro do some, but just the same as those from wds above they are metric thread - look under machine spares

What is the drawing of?

If it is a traction engine or an engineering model then 1" scale is used - but if it is a locomotive then 5" gauge is not always 1" to the foot - as Wikipedia says -

For standard gauge prototypes at 5 inch, the "official" scale is 1​¹⁄₁₆ inch per foot or approximately 1:11.3. Alternatively 1.1/8 inch per foot is adopted, allowing a scale of 3/32 inch per full size inch.

Attach the flywheel to a faceplate as you suggest but turn the teeth off with a trepanning cut so no intermittent cut. In effect you are cutting off what amounts to a thin 'ring gear'.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 19/01/2020 14:31:37

My Francis Barnett hardly moved at all!

Totally agree with the comment on gasless wire, but horses for courses - if you are lying on the drive trying to repair a rusty car the shield gas can disappear with the slightest breeze while a gasless weld, although far more grotty to look at, will have welded OK.

Its what angle grinders were invented for

The issue with cheap gasless welders is that they are often gasless because you don't pay for a regulator or a bottle of gas in the box and that all helps to make them that few quid cheaper.

I agree - Slimbridge is not too far from here so I shall make a point of going there with my lathe hanging around my neck

Indexes for the magazines used to be available printed on paper for a nominal sum plus SAE from the publishers - references in the online ME index to indexes appear to be exclusively to announcements of their availability, not an index as an article in the magazine. The online index at **LINK** suggests that indexes exist for many years from volume 4 onwards.

Bound volumes usually, but not always have the printed indexes included - that is what they were produced for so the easiest way is to find a bound volume and look for the index in there. Some ME clubs have complete sets of bound volumes.

My local library used to be able to get loan volumes from the Library for Science and Technology at Boston Spa in the UK, but I don't know if this even exists anymore. A local university might be another option.

Looking at the index to Model Engineer at **LINK**

There are two references to 'Steam Operated Draincocks' but that doesn't mean there are not others under references to particular model designs.

Model Engineer 2007 Volume 198 Issue 4292 Page 143
Model Engineer 1985 Volume 155 Issue 3758 Page 165

Have you had the drill from new?? Although not the same brand, it was not uncommon to add the variable speed switch to B&D drills that were originally single or two speed - I have done several myself.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 16/01/2020 21:50:57

Buying porn????? - I have a hard enough job avoiding the stuff falling into my inbox as spam without going out and actually wanting to pay for it.