Member postings for Bill Phinn

My first ever set of calipers were a set similar to the ones in petro1head's link. Even if they gobbled batteries they were fine while they lasted. The trouble was they only lasted about three years before they went haywire.

I subsequently bought a Mitutoyo digital caliper, which has been great, except I hardly ever use it, preferring instead my Kennedy dial caliper, which was bought at the same time as the Mitutoyo. Even though its resolution is not as fine as the Mitutoyo, for some reason I prefer seeing a needle going round a dial to digits coming up on a screen - on some things at least.

I've regularly used Tipp-Ex when soldering. Yes, it emits a green smoke when heated and an unpleasant smell, but I can live with that, or at least I have done so far.

Massimo's suggestion is probably the best one from a safety standpoint. It just requires a bit more work to keep some mixed up and ready for use.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 07/12/2021 15:49:33

You saw him, though, Mike, didn't you?

I agree that the light should not have been in flashing mode, but the reason why cyclists increasingly have these sorts of very bright lights is not to antagonize motorists, but in order not to fall victim to a SMIDSY incident.

Every clubmate of mine in my cycling club has had a SMIDSY at some point, most of us more than once. I've been to court twice over separate incidents where I was injured, my bike damaged, and the motorist found guilty of driving without due care and failing to stop.

A friend currently has three personal injury cases in the hands of solicitors after separate SMIDSYs over the last four years, and a fellow club mate who represented GB early in his career was killed in July by a motorist who didn't see him and pulled out on him from a side road.

In answer to the general complaint that cyclists' lights nowadays are too bright, my response is that maybe this is because too many motorists are a bit dim.

This sounds, Jon, like a situation where Nord-Lock washers may help.

Just be cautious about buying them from Zoro.

EtA: I'm not sure they work on left-hand threads, though. Theoretically they shouldn't, but Nord-Lock doesn't seem to even mention the matter.

EtA 2: A bare "The standard assortment is for right-hand thread" is the only reference I've seen in Nord-Lock's promotional material.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 06/12/2021 13:31:47

Most of my (admittedly limited at present) night driving is urban so I don't suffer too much from being dazzled by other drivers' headlights.

What I do find increasingly troublesome is having to sit behind drivers when stationary who, contrary to what I was taught, keep their foot on the brake pedal; the dazzle from permanently lit brake lights at close quarters can be very hard to ignore.

Sad anorak that I am, when stationary in queues I have taken to counting the number of drivers who have and don't have their foot on the brake pedal. The number of the former now generally outweighs the latter by a big margin. I'm sure this wasn't always the case. Can anyone tell me why this change has occurred?

I've used one of those in an institutional bindery; it's ok for thin board, but not really up to the job of board over about 2mm.

You'd be better off with a guillotine of the kind Iain suggests (like him, I can't endorse any particular product) or better still a powered one. Bear in mind that a guillotine blade has a very sharp edge and will need sharpening much more frequently than a board chopper's blade, which is very different in its geometry.

Being the owner of several Proxxon items, including an MF70, I'd go one step further than John and say, even without seeing it in action, that their 200W two- to three-inch-diameter-bladed table saw will almost certainly produce an inferior result when cutting 3mm grey board to what can be achieved with a common-or-garden 1500W 10-inch-bladed sliding mitre saw like mine.

There is no small or cheap solution to cutting thick grey board or mill board cleanly, unfortunately, though substantial cast iron board choppers are sometimes still available second hand, often for significantly less money than the Proxxon saw's list price.

Of the two pieces of 3mm board in the images below one was cut with a (fine-toothed) mitre saw and the other with a cast iron board chopper.

The pieces in the image showing short edges were cut with the grain, and the right hand piece was the one cut with the mitre saw. The image with long edges shows against-the-grain cuts, and the furry-edged board in contact with the aerosol is the one cut with the mitre saw. The same furry edge can be seen from a different angle in the with-the-grain image.

The best cutting tool for binding boards in my experience is a powered guillotine, though a cast iron board chopper comes a reasonably close second.

Regardless of what kind of blade you use, if you're going to use a table/circular/mitre saw to cut grey board, you need to be prepared for the cut edges to be quite rough. These will require sanding smooth or cutting again in a rotary or mat cutter if you want to use the pieces to make neat boxes out of.

I've made plenty of Solander and drop-back boxes from grey and mill board, but rarely needed to bevel the edges of boards. When bevelling of binding board is required I happily make do with a sanding block or block plane.

I don't know about unusual thread size; this is certainly an unusual thread in that a Robin Graham asked practically this same question yesterday under "General Questions", where it received several interesting and helpful replies.

Is there, improbably, more than one Robin Graham with a Stanley 78 rebate plane on our forum, or is our one Robin Graham experiencing a version of Groundhog Day?

Even worse for the postie than the brushed rat-traps you describe are the brushed rat-traps with an angry hound waiting on the other side of it to sample the warm sausages that are pushing the letter through the hole.

Thanks for the clarification, Jason.

So choosing across-the-flats BSW-sized die nuts presupposes you will have at least a few BSW spanners to fit, though I can't imagine many people who choose die nuts (as opposed to round dies) as their first or only metric outside threading tools already having a selection of Whitworth spanners in their armoury. I'd imagine the majority of buyers in this case buy without giving the a.f. sizes of the nuts much thought and, on discovering the "weird" sizing, simply use an adjustable spanner to drive them.

Apologies for widening the topic even further, but can anyone tell me whether there are standard a.f. measurements for hexagon dies/die nuts?

What I've seen here amazes me; the first three a.f. measurements listed there for coarse metric die nuts appear to be 0.71", 0.82", and 0.92", which are exactly the a.f. size of BSW 3/8", 7/16", and 1/2" respectively.

Why is that? Is the cutting diameter of a hex die smaller than that of a solid round die? If so, why?

Edited By Bill Phinn on 29/11/2021 15:20:30

I've read this many times, but never seen a satisfactory explanation for the distinction. All the hex dies I've seen have a lead-in taper, and, whilst all I've seen have been solid, solid round threading dies appear to be as common as split round ones. In either case, if you prefer a split die and your die is solid it's usually easy enough to make it into a split die. Obviously, in the case of hex dies you have split yourself you would have to use the die in some kind of die holder to make use of the split.

Did the distinction arise, I wonder, not because hex dies can't be used perfectly successfully for cutting new threads, but simply because the intended market for hex dies was originally for areas of industry (such as the automotive trade) where the need for threading tools was mostly for rethreading purposes rather than for cutting new threads and the workers wouldn't necessarily have access to die stocks but they would of course have sockets and spanners?

I note that Machinery's Handbook isn't completely rigid about it, saying hex dies "are intended for repair work".

Edited By Bill Phinn on 29/11/2021 13:04:16

To trust the pronouncements of Herbert Diess, the CEO who disingenuously claimed never to have heard of the Uighur detention camps in Xinjiang, where Volkswagen's factories had been operating for over thirty years, requires a suspension of disbelief I'm not always capable of.

As for Electrek, their disclosures section is telling:

"Disclosures. Some writers of Electrek maintain long positions in $TSLA, $SEDG, $NIU, $QS, $VWAGY and other green energy stocks."

Two tee bolts of exactly this kind came with the tool kit supplied with my Warco milling machine. They don't seem to be available separately on Warco's site.

I have a type 2 and a type 3.

Not an exhaustive list, but things that come to mind:

Type 2 pros: rapid jaw opening/closing over big distances, minimal jaw lift.

Type 2 cons: engagement of cam in locking notches sometimes a faff requiring adjustment of locking screw. Not getting this right can result in part not being properly secured and/or end of locking screw making contact with worktable. Surfaces on which work and parallels sit is a little on the narrow side for the size of vice.

Type 3 pros: probably firmer hold on parts is possible and there is a broader base to seat parts and parallels on.

Type 3 cons: marginally greater tendency for moveable jaw to lift. Opening and closing across big distances slightly more time consuming.

Engineering tools really aren't what burglars want round my way; they want digital devices, jewellery, cash and vehicles - things they understand and they can easily take off with. Three of my four closest neighbours have been burgled during the daytime in the last ten years, and my immediate neighbour with an Audi was car-jacked twice on his driveway.

Burglars also tend to target houses where the security is visibly less good than that of neighbouring houses - keys left in lock inside back door, no alarm, no bars on windows or spikes on side gate/fences, windows left open, iPads left charging on kitchen worktops etc. Bewilderingly, nearly all my neighbours have exterior lights but turn these off when they go to bed. This is when the lights should be going on.

On top of good security, the two best things you can do are to never go out and never go to sleep. Sounds silly, but at ours there is practically always someone in and always someone awake with lights on in living areas, i.e. not just the hallway or landing. It's one of the dubious benefits of living in a dementia-dominated household. I've probably saved my neighbours more than one night-time burglary.

Thanks to Steve, John, and Jason for showing us their workshops.

Since I never get to see anyone else's workshop in the flesh and no-one in my family ever had a workshop before me, it's helpful to see the things forum members have and how they organise them.