Member postings for Bill Phinn

Yes, Robin. I quote from Johnson Matthey's own blurb:

"The flux residues of this product are virtually insoluble in water. Immersion in a warm (>40 ̊C) 10% sodium hydroxide solution for 30 minutes followed by brushing in a stream of water is recommended. The residues are hard and will also respond well to mechanical removal methods such as grit blasting."

It's not called "Tenacity" for nothing.

Yorkshire, from the sound of it.

|Posted by Stuart Smith 5 on 06/10/2020 22:30:32:

Bill

Oldiron beat me to it. If you watch his video, you can see that he created his own worktop by his own efforts from an early age. No luck involved! Just hard work and a determination ( plus his parents encouragement and allowing him to make a workshop in their back yard).

Stuart

I don't dispute the hard work and determination, Stuart; on the contrary, I admire it.

A generous measure of luck, however, still seems to be involved; my three siblings would have sooner seen me hanged, drawn and quartered than allow me to permanently usurp communal space in the parental home, and that includes my shared bedroom.

Yes, talented and a good presenter, as well as singularly lucky to apparently have had access to a private workshop with a Bridgeport mill, Myford lathe, sets of gauge blocks, dividing heads and all sorts of sundry other paraphernalia at the age of seventeen.

In order to get a clearer idea of the savings to be made on secondhand machinery over new, I would need to factor in the cost to me of transporting it, as well as maybe the cost of going to see it before purchase on a separate trip [there's clearly much less of a need to view new machinery before purchase than there is to view secondhand].

What would the approximate going rate be to get a commercial machinery mover say fifty miles out from their base to the GH1322's location, another fifty miles to me with the machine, and then however many more miles they have to do to get back to base [if that's where they want to go]?

The most helpful and succint differentiation of the two I have seen is from 1 min 50s to 2 min 10s in the following vid.

The clockwise/anti-clockwise and internal/external basis for remembering the difference makes it much easier for me to orientate myself in the heat of an actual job.

Jon, if you have a smart phone or any phone that can take pictures, and enough space to insert it on the end of a selfie stick or similar under your floor in various places, you could try using that initially instead of getting an endoscope.

If there isn't enough room in certain areas to put your phone through, no crawl space to these areas from elsewhere, joists/brick pillars/pipes/cables etc. preventing the phone from getting a panoramic view from where you do manage to insert it, and you opt for an endoscope instead and put it down directly beneath your tiled floor and see a rat there, how are you going to get it out? Even a decomposed rat is fatter than an endoscope cable, isn't it? Even if it isn't, you'd still have to physically get hold of it.

One additional query: have you eliminated the cause of the rodent infestation yet?

Many thanks to everyone who has replied.

The replies have helped me to see what is critical and what isn't. There seems to be a consensus, starting with Rod, on a slight downwards tilt at the holding end. This is the practice I've always followed with the clamping kits I've got, so I suppose there's no reason for vice clamps to be any different.

Clive, I do have a paper gasket between my adjustable angle plate and the table, but I didn't put one in when I installed my vice; I will do so when it next gets moved. I didn't know aluminium was a preferable material for table clamps, though I see the logic of it. Presumably the ubiquitous clamp sets in the £40-£60 range would be prohibitively expensive if aluminium was used. I haven't got any aluminium of a suitable size at the moment but I do have a two foot long piece of inch square brass. I suppose using that would be extravagant, though.

John, your solution is very interesting. I might want to put a flat on the side of the rod in contact with the table, but your experience suggests that's not strictly necessary.

Phil, your base is very elegant and no doubt a big time saver when the vice needs to be re-installed. I note your point about hex head screws being preferable for not acting as swarf traps.

T.B., your end clamps are a great idea. Could you give me the dimensions? Having the dimensions would be very useful even if I ultimately make a different kind of clamp.

For several months my 90mm Arceurotrade Type 2 vice has been held down to my milling table with step+strap clamps and studding into T-nuts. The clamping has been perfectly satisfactory in most respects, the only objections being that the set-up isn’t very low profile and it permanently takes the clamping components out of service for other purposes.

My plan is to make four vice clamps of the double-step variety, probably held down with cap screws through counterbored holes into T-nuts. I’ve seen numerous videos online of people making vice clamps, but in none of those I’ve seen involving a vice like mine with a horizontal clamping slot does anyone actually discuss how you tailor the dimensions of your clamps to the dimensions of your vice so as to get optimal holding power in the slots.

In my case the slot is 10mm wide [or tall!] and 7.5mm deep, and the slot begins 10mm from the base of the vice. This tells me the tongue that goes into the slot should be at least 7.5mm long and a shade under 10mm thick, but the critical thing I’m unable to decide on is what thickness overall to make the clamp when measuring from the thickest point, i.e. the heel that contacts the table. Clearly an overall thickness of less than 20mm would mean the tongue would be angled upwards when entering the slot and a thickness of more than 20 mm would mean it would be angled downwards, in each case requiring some extra thinning of the tongue for full insertion.

But what will happen in the event that the max thickness is exactly 20mm [the overall length of the clamp being, say, 50-60mm]? Will the downwards pull on a tongue entering exactly horizontally make for a more secure fixing than either of the alternatives as long as the cap screw is closer to the tongue than the heel?

Sorry for my footlingly elementary question, and thanks in advance for any help.

In order to get the help you want from this forum, you're going to need to go into far more detail about what you're measuring and how you're measuring it. Photos will be necessary, and you will only be able to post these once your post count has reached a certain minimum.

A number of things you say are puzzling, only one example of which is the following contradiction:

"the table was flat to only 0.05mm"

"I need a machine which is at least 0.05mm accurate".

Having no central heating ourselves, and having only backyard privies at both sets of grandparents'.

Many more people with bandy legs [effect of rickets] than you see today, and many more limbless and sightless men.

Scrap yards [I used to go to with my father] where you could climb up great big stacks of semi-flattened cars and scavenge yourself for the bits you wanted.

Standing in a crowd of grown-ups in car auction rooms and being acutely aware, through an almost impenetrable fug of ciggy smoke, that lots of adults didn't bathe or wash their clothes very often.

My grandmother's neighbour, whose brothers were too old to serve in the Great War; the photos she had of them on her mantelpiece dated from the Boer War era.

Lots more horses, and their poop, on the roads.

Fogs and smogs.

Snow, and real winters.

No low fat or low sugar alternatives to full fat or full sugar foods and drinks.

Wearing my leather school shoes for all outdoor leisure activities; trainers hadn't been invented, and my thin canvas P.E. plimsolls wouldn't have stood the daily abuse of outdoor football, running, cycling, scrapping, and general running amok carried on with my co-evals.

Seeing my mother off at the airport and being able to sit in the departure lounge with her until she boarded, then being allowed to go out onto the roof of a single-storey building that looked down on to the tarmac the passengers walked across to board and chucking down an item to my mother that she had forgotten to take with her. No security staff batted an eyelid - not that there even were any security staff as such in those days.

Mike, I contacted Sievert last year about the function/use of their HFVs. I got the following reply:

"Thank you for the enquiry. Whilst the HFV are not regulators in the truest sense they give some regulation due to the way they operate. If you wanted to be certain of the pressure and have the safety benefit of an HFV I would recommend using the 306311. This will enable you to adjust the pressure between 1 and 4bar and have the HFV function.

**LINK**"

Ian, I operated a very big powered guillotine in an institutional bindery for a time. It had very good safety features as well as incredible holding and cutting power.

One thing it was badly lacking, though, was some way of identifying the nature of the material it was about to cut. Not once but twice I managed in the nick of time to stop another operator from performing a cut when he had carelessly left a steel rule across the cut line before placing his stack of paper on top.

Does the Polar Mohr you mention have a metal detector for the cut line? If not, do any guillotines have one?

Or as on the original head-cutting ones.

John, I used to have an old manual guillotine for bookbinding, but gave it away. I didn't like the idea of it in the home.

I now only have a Victorian cast iron board chopper with a 3ft long, scissor-style blade. It won't cut paper stacks, of course, but it's indispensable for cutting hard mill board.

Like your friend, I live in Manchester. I've had my board chopper blade sharpened once - about fifteen years ago at Easicut Precision Grinding in Sharston, M22. They did a decent job. I don't know how good they are today, but your friend might try them if he hasn't already found someone else.

Bookbinders in Manchester aren't numerous. Give your friend my good wishes for success in his chosen pursuit.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 15/09/2020 18:08:56

Many thanks, Michael! Very useful.

Since I've no first-hand experience of spanners and sockets made under a later Whitworth sizing standard than the one that prevailed at the time my pictured spanner [and other Whitworth spanners and sockets I own] was made, and therefore have no firm idea of how the current sizing works, would someone be good enough to tell me, just as an example, what the actual jaw openings [in metric or imperial] of the 5/8 and 11/16 spanners are likely to be in the following case.

Thank you.

Right.

What might we expect it to say on it? 1 3/32"?

Pictured is the spanner that at the moment I probably use most of all the spanners I possess [for the flats on my ER25 collet chuck]. It is a very good fit, partly because the jaws of the spanner are exactly the same thickness as the width of the chuck's flats.

ETA: It is the 5/8-11/16 end I use.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 12/09/2020 13:29:02

Since it's impossible to know the intimate details of the life each lathe has led to date, I think to be really fair they both need to be new machines [and having several examples of each model, not just one, to compare would make the results more meaningful]. Rebuilding the lathes simply adds another layer of unequivalence.

A bit like Jason, I'm puzzled how rebuilding with the biggest possible spindle can be the basis for a comparison, and left questioning whether a bigger spindle will necessarily always be better than a lathe's standard one.

Bear in mind that lining the underside of the deck with anything will have some impact on the flow characteristics of the cut grass around the deck on its way into the box/bag or down onto your lawn. I would weld, personally, or patch, or use a car body filler/JB Weld.

My two Honda HRB 425 mowers are nearly twenty years old and are still going strong. They have polypropylene decks, I believe. These don't corrode, but they can develop full thickness cracks. I repaired a three inch crack of this kind on one of them some time ago with JB Weld. It seems to have done the trick.