Member postings for Bill Phinn

It depends to some extent what you're finding the centre of, but for me the most commonly useful centre finder is the DRO 1/2 button. Jason has already hinted at its usefulness.

If it's a small hole and I'm trying to relocate the centre of it in a part that has been out of the vice and gone back in in a slightly different place, I'd use a drill bit identical in diameter to the drilled hole to feel my way into it using the quill. Feeling for the centre in this way using a reamer in an already reamed hole would be a little more accurate.

The generally higher price of spot drills may have something to do with it.

I'm sorry to see this, Iain. It does look like something is seriously awry. I'm sure I'm not alone in being keen to know what is causing the problem and see you get it swiftly resolved.

On the possibility of a bearing problem, when you were rotating the spindle and getting the rough feeling, was the machine in gear or in neutral? I'm assuming you have high/low/neutral gear settings like on my similar mill.

Ian, cutting does require a lot of oxygen - more than a 5 litre oxy-con like mine can deliver, so it's likely you would have to have an oxygen cylinder as well as or instead of an oxy-con if you wanted to cut that chassis. As you say, hard to justify economically unless you're cutting regularly.

If my soldering/brazing activities had started out in an engineering/model-making field rather than a jewellery-making one, it's unlikely I'd have spent on oxy-propane set-ups in addition to the several propane-only torches and assorted burners I've got.

It's really for purposes like the following [see the soldering task starting at 3.56] that I bought the Smith's torch; it allows you to give very localised heat [so reducing the risk of desoldering previously soldered joints nearby] but also heat that is intense enough to quickly overcome the effects of unavoidable heat sinks such as the special collet-to-shank-holding tweezers the demonstrator is using in the video.

Expanding on what Keith says, my perception is that many users of brazing torches don't initially appreciate that a relatively low flame temperature [e.g. with propane only] isn't the primary limiting factor in the kind of brazing work they can do; volume of heat is likely to be the more important factor, and this can easily be solved with a Sievert or Bullfinch system if you have a choice of burners on hand. I know I failed to fully appreciate the importance of volume [as opposed to temperature] myself initially when I moved up from jewellery soldering to bigger work.

It's hard to know whether you're giving us good news or bad overall, Iain.

4 microns of runout up your spindle taper sounds excellent to me, as does a keyed chuck that only has 0.03mm. Haas, in one of their videos, tell you to expect "four to five thou" for a keyed chuck. Incidentally, I'm not sure it's diagnostically sound to measure for runout on the exterior of the chuck, as you have done; locking a test bar in its jaws and measuring the bar as close as possible to where it protrudes from the jaw tips seems like a fairer test of concentricity to me.

How far down the test bar(s) are you measuring in the photos you've posted? 100mm down on all of them?

Edited By Bill Phinn on 21/04/2020 21:55:01

That's my region too, John.

John, that's definitely not a bookbinding tool, at least not one that's ever been marketed as such.

I'd be interested to know what your wife bought at the auction. I was notified of it through the S.O.B. [been a member for 23 years], but couldn't attend.

Ian, most oxy-con users I know bought their machine as a reconditioned one [with 12 month guarantee] from this source.

I've got the Smith's Little Torch, and also the heavy duty oxy-propane torch sold by The Welders Warehouse [and available elsewhere in different guises].

Oxy-propane any better for you? No rental costs.

You can also cut down on safety concerns if you use an oxygen concentrator, which can provide more than enough oxygen for most work except cutting and large-capacity heating.

Thanks, Tony and Nick. I really like reading the old catalogues.

I'm pleased to report that the seller has already issued a full no quibble refund for the defective wrench, so 10 out of 10 to him for customer service.

You can judge for yourself.

Updating this thread, I've just bought a new Eclipse 142 tap wrench off an Ebay seller. It's going straight back, I'm afraid.

There are two problems with it. Firstly, the flats on the set screw that holds the tommy bar captive are already rounded off after one tightening and loosening. If the tommy bar hadn't been such a loose fit in the hole it might have helped; as it is, the set screw has to be tightened down particularly hard to eliminate unacceptable wobble in the tommy bar. I've plenty of better-quality set screws to replace it with, but the second fault makes that not worthwhile.

The second fault is that taps will not sit straight when the jaws are tightened up, whether you use the outer jaws or the inner ones.

My older Eclipse 143 has none of these faults. Sadly, like a good many other established brands, it looks like Eclipse is in eclipse.

A D, I wouldn't want to be trying to brass braze with a flux designed for silver solder personally; the likely lower temperature tolerance of the silver solder flux may render it useless by the time your brass solder is ready to flow.

Also, do you have a compelling reason to want to brass braze here rather than silver braze?

It's hard to tell if your torch is too small. The job doesn't sound a particularly big one.The standard burner with the 404 is, I believe, 4.76 kW, which is a relative tiddler in the propane torch world. Reassuringly, you do say the steel is getting red hot easily. But do you know that to successfully brass braze, the steel has to get considerably hotter and redder than when silver brazing with typical silver solders?

Even if you do know this, we come back to your present flux and its probable inadequacy for brass brazing.

Thanks for your answers.

I've asked BSS for a quote and will take things from there.

I'm after a few metres of the spring steel given in the thread title in the following dimension: 0.6mm thick by 12.7mm wide.

I've seen it for sale on German sites via Ebay in 5 metre coils but I'm unable to tell whether when unwound it will have a permanent bend to it to some extent or will lie flat; I need it to lie flat when unwound.

If anyone knows a UK source I'd be very glad to year of it. I've looked at the BSS site but they only seem to sell it in sheet, not strip.

Thanks for posting the video, Steve. Noble of you to give us such an unguarded look at your early attempts at milling, and very useful ultimately to people like me who are also still in the early stages of learning how to use a mill.

Am looking forward to reading further comments from experienced members on what you've shown us.

Why not post a video replicating Jason's cuts on your machine to win over the sceptics?

...and, in liberal democracies, challenging these instructions and sometimes not following them where they are found to be unlawful or unjust.

I knew Mancunians were bad, but didn't think they were this bad:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-52221688

Some strange ratiocination going on there, Steve. You speak as if you assumed I lived in Scarborough. Do you assume everyone on the forum lives in Scarborough until you see evidence suggesting otherwise? Perhaps I need to check the place out again after all these years to see what I'm missing.

Where is "obviously a very secret location"? Apart from Area 51 and Lord Lucan's hiding place, I mean.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 08/04/2020 02:46:01