Member postings for Nick Clarke 3

Although the roundbed was originally introduced in 1908, the long bed version of the Drummond was announced in 1925 so the document was after that at least, and before 1943 when production finished, probably before WW2.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 24/11/2018 22:35:52

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 24/11/2018 22:43:04

Possibly a court appearance and a custodial sentence?

Although they would fit I am not of course suggesting it would be the most suitable design to make on lathes of this size!!!!

If you are looking for lathe chucks you can buy backplates and machine them to accept commonly available chucks - but if you are looking for tailstock drill chucks looking at lathes.co.uk they appear to be 0MT which are harder to locate.

As a simply built lathe it is possibly easier to renovate than some designs, but are these skills available to you? because paying someone else to do so could be expensive.

A fully equipped Flexispeed Meteor 2 sold on eBay earlier this year for £835. This for a machine at least 40 years old is probably about the same as it would cost to buy and equip a modern mini lathe - except you will have to search for and perhaps modify or make parts and accessories instead of walking in off the street and buying them.

As to whether it is suitable for the task you have suggested - probably, depending on the prototype you choose. Just checked the drawings for the 7 1/4" Tich and you could fit the wheels and cylinders on either lathe!

The mini lathe may have a larger capacity, but if the flexispeed is backgear equipped it may be more suitable for turning wheel castings if they fit on the machine. 

Go figure!

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 24/11/2018 22:01:03

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 24/11/2018 22:09:40

There is no motor or countershaft with the lathe at present, so I was exploring all options.

As to the value of the task - of course it is not going to be the equivalent of a more modern machine, but then again I just like to see things put back into a position where they can do what they were originally intended to do. Plain stubbornness on my part I suppose, which probably explains why there is so much half working junk about the place!

Thanks

The lathe already has 3 step v pully so is no longer original anyway.

Thanks

The long term project (along with a respectable garden and a tidy garage!) is restoring to active use an early Drummond round bed lathe.

One of the shortcomings of the design is a lack of back gear - so does a 3 phase motor and invertor/vfd enable this to be worked round?

As Manuel in Fawlty Towers said 'I know nothing' so any info or suggestions greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Nick

This is the one I bought from T***station - almost 5 minutes drive from here - I said quick. Works fine.

eBay sell el Cheapo ratchet tap wrenches that I have never found much use for tapping as you can't back the tap off to break the chips, but for small reaming jobs they do work OK (but don't expect them to last forever!)

Quick and dirty tap and small reamer holder - blank end arbour to fit your tailstock bored to fit the shank of an SDS drill chuck.(Nominal 10mm but may be slightly under)

Looking at a boiler drawing (7 1/4 Tich) I was wondering why model loco boilers have a hollow stay for the blower. Is this a feature of full size boilers? as a simple pipe from the turret seems a far simpler solution.

or am I missing something vital??

Nick

Like many other people here my experience with desktop computers goes back to the very early 1980s and mainframes for 10 years before that. As someone who has been involved with computer/IT education for most of that time I have come to the conclusion that Windows PCs will work well when regularly updated running programs that are similarly kept up to date. Windows 10, as pointed out by a previous poster, works best when kept online so updates are downloaded when they become available. Yes things go wrong with updates and things get broken - but it is usually the up to date ones that get fixed first. What it is not easy to do reliably is to maintain a Windows PC in the past with an old operating system or one not updated to run old software. Things like antivirus or drivers can very quickly become issues.

My experience with macs is that they are far more able to be preserved in the past with a previous version of hardware, running a previous version of the operating system with previous software than a Windows PC. I have here a totally reliable PPC mac mini with Microsoft Office that runs well - and my Macintosh SE/30 would be similar if I powered it up more often. Modern iMacs at work are similar running their own software reliably, but having issues with updated versions as Apple updates can cause problems that are very difficult to resolve as they can make demands on hardware that cannot be met.

As a Linux user since 1995 (Slackware on 23 floppy disks!) It seems to be the most reliable system but it is very definitely not quite a consumer level one yet, and if your program is not available for it then you may be out of luck, although some of the emulators like WINE are quite reliable. I have a Linux based webserver at work that has been running fro more than three years, updated and upgraded when I remember to do it. It just keeps going.

My suggestion based on experience with many many computers is that if you run Windows keep it and your programs updated - it will break from time to time but be fixed quite quickly. If you take the Mac route you cam preserve your machine as it was when you bought it, but if you do update it, it can be broken beyond repair and that Linux works the most reliably - if it works for you at all.

Incidentally my abacus has never given a moments trouble and will still add up accurately and the drawing board that I used at university in the 1973 still works - is there a moral there? 

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 06/11/2018 22:23:42

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 06/11/2018 22:32:00

Try here http://www.winline.com/evalpen.html they seem to support most HP plotters, but not tried it myself - my last plotter is still in the attic gathering dust!

This is a quite expensive paid driver, but I have been told that it works well - there are other free drivers on the web, but these all seem to come with 'update all your drives in one go' software that I don't want on any of my systems.

The HP site still lists a driver but for Windows XP only.

Nick

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 02/11/2018 08:28:54

Two other sources are LBSC 'Live Steam Book' - an idiosyncratic description as you might expect, but early LBSC so less so than later perhaps and also Lawrie Lawrence produced a series on articles in ME in 1975 if you have access to the back issues.

Lawrie said he always had to open up LBSC's cones to get them to feed - but he doubted that Surrey water was thicker than Purley Oaks water, so that may influence your choice of reading!

Nick

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 20/10/2018 21:10:55

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 20/10/2018 21:12:09

What about http://www.custombellows.co.uk in Birmingham UK??

Or even four feet to spring out of the bottom of the chest !

I think that should probably be C. R. (Roy) Amesbury but apart from that LBSC mentioned 1/8" x 60 ME Taps & Dies as being available in the early 1930's in an article about building a Weir Pump.

Only guessing but perhaps a manometer to help balance carbs on a car or bike??

While CAT6 junction boxes are easily available, best practice frowns upon joins, especially in CAT6 Gigabit links.

Your tester only tests continuity not attenuation.

I suspect that too much signal attenuation may well be the reason because, as the specification says, the maximum connection length is 90m of solid core cable with an additional 5m of flexible patch lead at each end. Pairs should not be untwisted and no more than 12.7mm (1/2" taken out of the overall cover to make a connection. If this has not been complied with, and some of the connection boxes I have seen will not allow it to be, or alternately excessive bends are present, then the signal may be attenuated too much to work.

If you are trying to make a 10Gb connection the maximum cable length of 55m may have already been exceeded.

I have even seen long cable runs done in flexible cable that did not work because they could not be punched down in the connectors properly.

I would be asking your sparks why he made the join and try to ask him to re do it in one length as it is not to CAT6 specification.

Assuming all of the above is complied with check terminations at each end as if the ground potential at the barn end is different to that at the home end (the largest I have seen is 70V!) a current can flow along the CAT6 cable further degrading the link.

While I also wince at the spares prices charged today - but about 40 odd years ago I was caught in the opposite direction.

I was working at a motor factors that sold everything except engine parts - an independent firm with branches in Nottingham and Derby that had been taken over by a big group. Overnight we changed from being the place everyone in the trade went to to a world of budgets and targets.

Our stock budget was fixed and we could only spend on new stock what was left after the current stock value was subtracted from our notional budget.

Every year we had our existing stock revalued upwards (eg multiple jeep track rod ends, Ford Consul exhausts, whitworth tooling etc - in the seventies???) and so we could purchase less and less new stock that sold.

Eventually we had too little new stock to function and not long after I left the business it closed.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 02/10/2018 20:16:15