Member postings for Bill Phinn

There are many reasons for tap breakage [here are just a few of them], but the most over-arching reason in hand-tapping is insensitivity on the part of the operator to what the tap is actually "going through" at all times during its use.

You have to develop a feel for the tap in the material and know whether the tap is liking or disliking what you are doing with it. Invaluable practice can be obtained without great expense by tapping many consecutive deep blind holes with small taps on a range of scrap pieces of material.

Being a person who has a brachial plexus root avulsion and permanent paralysis of major muscles groups in my right arm, I find that sort of language quite irritating, Michael.

It reminds me of the big sign over the Remploy HQ in Birmingham I visited a few years ago: "Remploy - Putting Ability First", it said.

If they were putting ability first then disabled people would not get a look in at Remploy.

If people mean what they say they should say what they mean.

The adequacy of the bench is certainly questionable, but the nipping press base will probably be nice and flat, as well as almost as heavy as the lathe.

It's difficult to know what the hero-arm site means by "below-elbow limb difference."

Does anyone know for sure?

I'm not sure how long the studding needs to be, but pictured is a six-inch long two-way* 1/4" BSW screw I cut on precision ground 1/4" stock using a woodturning lathe and a tailstock die holder. It is a replacement for an original screw that had been bent through careless usage and rendered the whole tool unuseable. The job was easy to do and the tool now works very well indeed.

*i.e. right-hand thread one side and left-hand thread the other.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 15/04/2022 00:38:25

The two Sievert Cyclone burners (I own the larger 3525 model) are much quieter than standard burners for the amount of heat they kick out.

That's a shame, Phil, though, from the look of it, it probably won't affect its accuracy.

I keep almost all precision steel tools in sealed plastic bags now and never in direct contact anywhere with paper or cardboard. Even oiled or waxed paper is not a good long-term wrapping material. Leave some of this paper out on a bench in high humidity and you will see why: it goes disturbingly limp with all the moisture it has absorbed.

To discourage storage corrosion as much as possible, things like 1-2-3 blocks, square and hex collet blocks et al. with precision reference surfaces should really get oiled before they are put away in plastic if the intention is not to use them again within the next week or so.

I'm sure if you live in Arizona or somewhere similar you can safely skip these precautions.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 11/04/2022 01:23:01

I'm sorry to see you misconstrued my point, which was that not just the exceptional cases but many other cases besides may well be ill served by a system that is unlikely in practice to be capable of making even gross distinctions between different households' circumstances.

Because of this I do not share your apparent conviction that no-one will find themselves unfairly targeted by the kind of policy you propose, and therefore I cannot endorse your suggestion as a sensible one.

In addition to Bob Unitt's valid objection to that, I'd say the difficulty would be deciding fairly who is heating excessively. A house-bound elderly couple with a range of health problems are going to need their home to be warmer and for longer than a young couple next door in an identical house who are out at work all day. Would allowance be made for these and other, sometimes much finer, distinctions before the conclusion is reached that the household is "obviously heating excessively"? Even if the official policy was that such distinctions were meant to be taken into account, in practice the criteria would almost certainly be inadequate for producing fair outcomes.

Evidence that this would be the case is apparent from the way the matter of grants touched on in Bob's post is handled in practice.

A family close to me was judged eligible for both boiler and insulation grants. Four different heating companies came to assess the present boiler situation, hoping no doubt that it would be a matter of a simple combi swap. However, when they discovered that there was a 40-year-old floor-standing conventional boiler on a one-pipe system (Worcester will issue no warranty on a combi fitted to a one-pipe system) they all fled, uttering transparently insincere promises that they would be in touch soon with a start-date.

None of them ever got back in touch. So a vulnerable household, arguably in greater need of a central heating upgrade than most, was summarily abandoned by a system that was conceived in the first place expressly to provide for such vulnerable persons' needs.

I've got personal and very recent experience of this parallelism.

We're in daily contact with people in China. A phone call to close family at the weekend reduced my other half literally to tears. The state-controlled news they're getting in China about Ukraine is clearly shockingly untruthful. [Actually, I know this because we watch that "news" ourselves].

But you try telling the older generations particularly that they're being fed a lie. That really is like "nailing jello to the wall".

Is there a reason the stock is so high in the vice? It looks like you were only intending to skim off about 1/8".

I would especially want stock as large as that is in relation to the vice to sit as low as possible to maximize the surface area doing the clamping and being clamped.

You could try welding blankets strategically set up as windbreaks.

In high winds I'd postpone to another day.

It depends really over how great a distance you're measuring and what the end user himself deems acceptable for his own purposes.

Some of the vices sold for hobby use quantify the level of precision you can expect them to meet.

Eta: I'm not sure what Neil and Dave mean by the funny gap/groove. Could we see a picture? We're not talking about the swarf gutter* beneath the fixed jaw, I take it?

*I'd always assumed it was primarily a swarf gutter and not a stress reliever. Maybe I'm wrong.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 05/04/2022 21:22:08

Whilst those in your image are certainly serial taps, the same markings can sometimes be found on a standard set of hand taps, as below on this set of M3 coarse.

Probably because, as in the case of Snowdonia, there's a well-established and more easily pronounceable exonym native English speakers have developed an attachment to.

How many of us, I wonder (Welsh people included), would be behind a campaign to persuade us to refer to Germany, in an English language context, as Deutschland?

Is it ever possible, I wonder, to restore a lathe in the condition this Myford was in without access to another functioning lathe to do some of the work required?

I suspect most restorers of neglected lathes are already well served by an existing lathe and motivated primarily by not wanting to see something with potential go to waste rather than by a pressing need for the services of the item they're restoring.

Can you possibly link to a brief video clip, Sam, showing us what's happening when you experience the first problem you describe?

My reading of the article tells me the chief reason for the engineered version is not vegan sensibilities but rising prices of the natural product and a supply that cannot keep up with demand.

Drill and tap the inside ends on both plugs and connect through the hollow axle with a piece of threaded rod.

Cross drill the round-side spike to take a small tommy bar to enable everything to be tightened down.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 29/03/2022 16:45:34

A problem with many of the freehand tapping guides I've seen is that you need two good arms to operate them: one to hold down the guide and another to turn the tap.

On iron and steel a guide like the Gator that had a very strong on/off magnet that left the actual work area unmagnetised might be a solution, but on brass and aluminium I'd still have to faff about with clamps of various kinds.

Because a magnetisable Gator-type guide doesn't exist, afaik, when tapping freehand on flat surfaces I nearly always have to resort to just eyeballing it.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 28/03/2022 02:18:21