Member postings for Bill Phinn

Iain, if you want to get your drawers more level next time, there are two things that will help:

1. use spacers to set out the positions for the slides up the inside of the carcase.

2. use drawer fronts that go over the basic drawers you have created. Screw these on (from the inside!) once you have got the drawers in situ, and even if you haven't got the slides perfectly level and evenly spaced the drawer fronts can compensate for this and completely disguise the discrepancies. Again, spacers (e.g. washers) will be needed to position the drawer fronts evenly. With a simple router, or just a block plane, and some sandpaper and varnish you can create very attractive drawer fronts that will give your cabinet a finished look.

You can get a die to match.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 27/01/2022 17:46:17

Whatever material you opt for, and especially if it is a chipboard-based material like many 38mm kitchen worktops, make sure that your 3m is well supported from below along its length to prevent sagging.

My 2m long bench with my mill on has a 38mm kitchen worktop top but this rests on six 4x4 legs with lots of further support underneath from intermediate 4x2 studding. The whole bench sits on nine 4 inch diameter nylon castors.

Finally, unless you can read the future and you know you're never going to want to re-size or dismantle your bench, do not use glue to hold things together, but screws and bolts only; made properly it will still be plenty strong enough for several hundred kgs of mill and lathe.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 26/01/2022 17:11:05

In order to get the shape and size I've wanted for specific purposes, I've made my own folders for bookbinding out of PTFE sheet, Delrin, and bone. As Peak4 suggested earlier, you can buy PTFE sheet in a big range of thicknesses at reasonable cost, so you could easily make your own spatulas out of that. Just don't inhale the PTFE dust when you cut the stuff up.

I'm not sure why you'd need to use a PTFE spatula to spread glue, mind you. I've certainly had a need for non-stick folders and sheets [e.g. silicone release paper, when drying things under pressure], but I've never felt the need for the thing I'm applying glue with to be 100% non-stick, or even just highly non-stick.

Perhaps you'd be good enough to be as thorough in explaining why your requirements are what they are as some members have been in trying to assist you.

Sorry to hear that, Dave.

Sadly, it doesn't surprise me.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 23/01/2022 14:27:01

Andrew, for when small parts are being clamped, besides extending the vice jaw[s], as others have suggested, you can add a jaw stop on the far side of the fixed jaw to keep the moveable jaw parallel at all times.

My jaw stop is M8, and both the cap that bears aganst the moveable jaw and the brass thumb wheel are removeable for when I don't need the stop or when I want to fit a longer M8 rod.

The price of wood, as well as other construction materials, is going up at a ridiculous rate, Iain. And yet, all around me, people are having their houses extended with seemingly unprecedented enthusiasm.

Maybe the apparent stalling I'm seeing mid-way through some of these extension projects is down to builders having to increase their original quotes and householders finding they can't meet the increased costs.

Disconnection may be unlikely but forcible installation by energy companies of pre-paid meters has become disturbingly common, not least because the overburdened courts system grants warrants far too readily and uncritically to energy companies.

My own very disabled parents were threatened with a warrant and a pre-paid meter when British Gas inadvertently stopped billing them for six months. In spite of my parents subsequently receiving a written guarantee [obtained by me] from BG that, since the admin error was entirely BG's fault, my parents could continue to pay in manageable monthly installments until the balance was cleared, and in spite of us afterwards paying on the button every month the amount agreed, BG suddenly turned nasty one day, reneged on their written promise, and demanded full payment of the outstanding amount in one hit or a warrant would be obtained for the installation of a pre-paid meter.

We could have afforded to pay the outstanding amount off in one go, but there was a principle at stake, and BG did not have the moral high ground. We took the matter to the energy ombudsman, who found in our favour, but this outcome was no help to us whatever since nothing changed at BG's end and they continued to threaten court action etc.

If my parents' condition had not been become so labour-intensive we might have continued to battle BG, but we became tired of doing so in the face of their bovine intransigence and the near impossibility of even getting hold of a rational human being on the other end of the phone, so the amount was paid off by us in one hit after all.

The message is the probability of an energy company actually cutting you off is probably very low, even when you have a smart meter, but energy companies can and do nevertheless behave very high-handedly at times, and the law is failing to protect many genuinely vulnerable people who find themselves on the receiving end of mistreatment by bully-boy corporations.

In these cases, perhaps the householder should charge the energy company for doing the work the new device was meant to be doing for him.

It may or not be in this edition of the company's catalogue.

Dave, on the choice of welding or brazing for car repairs, the MOT rules apparently allow MIG brazing but not gas brazing (Appendix A, sections 10 and 11). For highly stressed components, even "welding isn't normally acceptable, other than where the component is made up of sections that are welded together" (App. A, section 6).

Edited By Bill Phinn on 24/12/2021 13:41:16

Thanks, Diogenes and Jason.

I haven't got a copy of Harold Hall's book unfortunately. A link or image would be appreciated if possible. My only angle plate at the mo is one of the adjustable ones with T-slots (rather than holes).

Is there a reason why HH suggests this method to cut parallels (i.e. rather than using your usual milling vice)? Is the method aimed at people who as yet don't actually own any parallels?

I've made parallels using my milling vice and, as far as my measuring can establish, they are as close a pair as the shop-bought ones I have.

Sorry for overlooking your post, Baz.

DiogenesII, (you're a cynic?), could you say how you recommend clamping pieces of ground stock to the angle plate? I'm assuming they're like yours, i.e. without holes.

There is a 100mm-long twenty-pair set floating around out there. Arceurotrade and Amadeal among others sell, or at least sold, them. They may not necessarily be of the same quality at different suppliers.

They were the only set I used for a while, and often I obtained the height I wanted by doubling up parallels. As long as you seat the parallels and work carefully, I can't see any reason why placing parallels on top of one another to obtain a target height should be regarded as bad practice. One good feature of the set is the variation in thickness - something that, inexplicably, isn't very common with sets of parallels.

The spec. of the 20 pair set is as follows:

For common thread sizes I use tapped lengths of square and hex bar held in the milling vice I have fixed at right angles to my jig-mounted 5-inch angle grinder.

The screw to be shortened is held captive inside the bar with a hex nut, which acts as both a guide/stop for where the cut is to be made and as a heat sink to reduce the chance of the screw being overheated during the cut.

It's a quick and accurate method requiring no lathe or special chuck.

Thanks for the information, Martin.

I'm a bit sceptical whether the lion and letter D alone mean it was made or marketed by Dryad, at least if we're talking about Dryad Handicrafts of Leicester, established by Harry Hardy Peach, which is the company whose name is on the 20th century school-orientated bookbinding equipment I'm familiar with.

We could really do with consulting the standard reference work on these sorts of presses, namely:

Rhodes, B. and Wells Streeter, W. - Before Photocopying: The Art and History of Mechanical Copying, Oak Knoll Press, 1999.

Sadly, I don't have a copy.

An example of a press similar to the one you're working on (with the lion and the D) is shown being restored here.

Thanks for the confirmation, Bob.

0.020mm would be very acceptable, John; 0.2mm wouldn't.

I'd be interested to have visual confirmation that this press was made by a company called Dryad. All the book presses I've ever seen marked Dryad have been wooden or part wooden.

The press you have there isn't a book press strictly speaking, as I've said before.

It's what's correctly referred to as a copy (or copying) press.

A better discussion than in the last link can be found here.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 11/12/2021 16:33:57

Unless you're using terminology in a way I'm unfamiliar with, I'm mystified by that claim.

Can you explain further?

They're probably the same colour but photographed in different lighting.

The first says it comes with five batteries (though the review section tells a different tale), the second with one battery (though again some reviews say differently).

Edited By Bill Phinn on 09/12/2021 23:35:38