Member postings for Bill Phinn

John, I'd have to see exactly what you're doing to know what adhesive I'd use, but the EVA/paste mix from Shepherds is a good general choice for cloth on board in giving a generous "open" time before the glue starts to go off and in having archival qualities.

There are alternative sources for good quality bookbinding adhesives to Shepherds, namely J Hewit and Sons, Ratchfords, Conservation Resources, and Conservation by Design.

If you want a strong [and archival] board, forget any type of greyboard; choose millboard instead.

Martyn, among other circumstances in which I use paste, I too use it [or sometimes gelatine] as the first adhesive on back folds of spines on antiquarian books, and do so not just for reasons of reversibility; Evacon and some PVA's are reversible and supposedly PH neutral, but I'd be surprised if their long term effects on paper and leather are as benign as a simple starch paste.

For bookbinding - none of those.

There are many [e.g. PVA's, PVA/paste mixes, hide glues, hot melts, something from the Planatol range] or no glues at all that might fit the bill, depending on what your exact requirements are. Your number 3 requirement especially is hard to be certain of; how much flex are you talking about? It's worth pointing out that card, paper and even cloth are not very tolerant of repeated flexion when the angle of flexion becomes quite small, even if the glue is.

What you describe there is a basic procedure in bookbinding "forwarding". Success in it has a lot to do with your current bench skills, specifically how dexterously you can handle glued-out paper and cloth without making a mess and getting glue where it's not supposed to go. It's not a skill that comes over night, particularly if you are having to handle large sheets.

I take it you have a grounding in the sorts of things that, besides choice of adhesive, are critical to obtaining neat and effective adhesion of bookbinding materials, e.g. grain direction, the porosity, penetrability and gsm of the paper or card, what is being stuck to what, the likely pull different quantities/concentrations of your chosen adhesive will exert when the work is dry...

Edited By Bill Phinn on 29/04/2021 19:07:38

It's intrusive, yes, but presumably designed to reassure the care home that a potential resident will have the means to fund their care for the whole duration of their projected stay.

If, some time after admission, the self-funder's savings dry up, am I right in thinking the local authority will generally pay the care home less money per week than it was getting under the previous self-funding arrangement? If so, I should imagine it's a situation most care homes will want to avoid, and it's presumably why not all care homes will accept local authority-funded residents.

Are you definitely no longer in a position to continue providing care for your mother in her own home, Peter?

I don't often need to cut narrow/thin strips, but if I do then yes, I would expect a certain amount of curling of the strip, even if the grain direction of the board is parallel, as it ordinarily should be, with the long edge of the piece being cut; if the grain direction is at 90 degrees to the cut, the curling will be much more pronounced.

The curling can, however, be reversed quite effectively if the strip is very lightly damped and placed under a weight between pressing boards until it's completely dry.

One of the best features of the boardcutter, apart from the fact that it will cut through the full width of a 3mm sheet of millboard in one pass, is the foot operated clamp, which guarantees the board will not move while the considerable cutting force of the blade is doing its work.

I buy my millboard [branded Gemini] from John Purcell Paper.

Besides the boardcutter, I also have a fairly old Avery P640 rotary trimmer, which is very useful for paper and card as long as you don't try to cut through too much material at once. If you do, you will not only get a rough finish, but the material will tend to want to move during the cut.

If I was buying one of these kinds of table-top rotary cutters again, I'd probably opt for one of the Rotatrim Professional series of rotary cutters, which I've tried and which seem to be more robust than my Avery.

Yes, Swann Morton 10A for card and paper.

I don't use much greyboard these days, but do use the much denser [and archival] millboard.

Since I can't realistically cut either type of board by hand, I use the Victorian boardcutter in the photo for doing so.

Its blade cuts with a shearing action, so thankfully it has a very different profile from the crazily sharp edge a guillotine blade has to have.

Michael is right about the bayonet.

As for the rest, my understanding is that if you're working on your own gas installations in your own home, the crucial requirement is that you be "competent". Whether this means that [to do gas work in your own home] you have to be currently Gas Safe registered is something there appears not to be absolute clarity on.

The rub is that even if "competent" is enough, there's always the chance that you might be called on at a later date to demonstrate to certain authorities that you are/were competent.

Just out of interest, Buffer, is it your belief that none of the drills Drill Service sell are made in China?

John, though highlighting such points of equivalence is always laudable, I think we should be careful to remember the dissimilarities too.

What is crucial is not merely the level of surveillance a country's citizens are exposed to but the consequences for them of that surveillance - specifically whether legal protections are in place against injustice, particularly state injustice, arising from that surveillance. It essentially boils down to how free or how repressive the society you live in is.

There may not be that much difference between the amount of surveillance different countries expose their citizens to, but there is a world of difference between the sort of life that surveillance allows people of different countries to lead.

For anyone who is interested, a useful working comparison can be had by looking here and here:

It depends where in the world you happen to be.

I've never experienced this problem as I don't own a smart phone and never intend to own one, but if you have any social media accounts, Steve, [e.g. Facebook, Instagram] is there a "use my microphone" option on these accounts you can turn off? This may help.

Then again...

Thanks, Jason. I'll practise my burning-in technique. Doing it that way may save some mither in the long run.

Thanks, Michael. I've ordered some of the standard colour and will give it a go.

That would be a bit risky, Jason, as the tang is silver-soldered to the type chamber, and the joint between the two is milled perfectly square on one side to accept a stepped screw-on mounting boss for a central adjusting screw. Any movement at the joint at this stage would be pretty disastrous. Burning in for me is also a bit more unforgiving with regard to getting a handle perfectly straight, but I accept that others may be much more adept at this method than I am.

It's apparent from the dozen or so secondhand typeholders I own that the handles very often do work loose. I think this is almost always due to users leaving their typeholders on the stove for too long and scorching out the hole in the handle. I say this because in my own case typeholders with wooden handles I bought new twenty-five years ago show no loosening of the handle, and I assume this is because I never leave them on the stove longer than is necessary. Asbestos handles have been tried over the years instead of wood, but they've never been popular.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 25/03/2021 13:19:15

I want to fill the gap that remains after fitting between the tapered rectangular-section brass tang of a tool and the round hole it is inserted into in a wooden handle. The tool in question is a bookbinder's hand typeholder.

I've made several of these and have used several different fillers, none of which completely meets my needs.

The primary requirements of the filler are that it:

• is temperature tolerant [up to around 150 degrees Celsius]
• bonds well to brass and wood
• won't crumble/disintegrate in use and fall out
• is a wood [or a brass] colour

Standard JB Weld meets the temp. tolerance requirement but is the wrong colour.

JB Weld Wood Weld is the right colour but not remotely temp. tolerant.

Ronseal two-part epoxy wood filler is a good colour, gives a very firm bond, but is also not sufficiently temp. tolerant.

Everbuild wood filler is a good colour but a little too crumbly once dry and yet again not sufficiently temp. tolerant.

If anyone has a suggestion for a filler, whether commercially available or home made, I'd be grateful to hear of it.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 24/03/2021 21:08:47

Am I the only one whose monitor shows Ramon's mixed JB Weld as a brownish mud colour? The standard stuff I've used has always been grey.

I've had it from the lips of more than one Axminster Tools employee that demand [for merchandise and training] from woodworkers has traditionally been much higher than demand from metal workers.

Maybe it's that firstly there are higher entry barriers to taking up metalworking than woodworking, and secondly most routine home DIY work involves little metalworking but quite a bit of woodworking. Even professional house bashers don't show much need for metalworking equipment.

In case it's not already been mentioned, the reason has to do with what's termed hypocyclic fretting precession.

It looks like you may have radically misconstrued my contribution to this thread, Steve.

It says only the word "Germany" in big letters on my box. In much smaller letters it says "made in China".

Many thanks for your replies, Nigel G., Nigel B. and Dave.

Nigel B., I've spent some time looking at both the manuals in your links, and also a pdf from Chronos, which covers a different kind of DRO from mine but discusses the use of the REF button for retrieving an origin after power off in some depth [starting at 3.9]. Sadly, none of this has so far assisted me in replicating finding an origin as set out in the short video I linked to in my post of yesterday.

Dave, I'm not sure I've understood your post properly, but the video I linked to ["DRO PROS demos Power Off Memory"] is showing you how to recover a zero that is effectively lost after a power off during which the table was moved; as far as I understand it, no onboard battery or other alternative power source is required to enable a recovery of this kind; you simply access a reference datum point built in to the DRO scale. My inability to access a ref. datum point on my own DRO appears to be where I'm coming unstuck.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 12/03/2021 18:56:47