Member postings for Bill Phinn

Thanks to all for the ongoing responses.

Clive, a pusher in front of the screw with a face at the same angle as the gib makes a lot of sense, though I imagine some fairly drastic machining work would have to be done on the gib strips of this vice in order to incorporate such pushers.

One thing that did occur to me fairly early on after taking out the gib screws was why not do away with any dimple (or make it a groove) and make the taper angle of the screw tips correspond with the angle of the gib? In my case, the gibs are angled at 60 degrees, whilst the included angle of the screw tips is 75. Why not just make the included angle of the tip 120 degrees, so that all of the taper is in contact with the gib, not just a tiny portion of tip? I suspect I'm missing something very basic here.

FF, sorry, yes, I did read what you had said about getting your compound table from Warco, but it had slipped my mind by the time I came to write my last post. Co-incidentally, I was looking at a review only yesterday of the one you link to on Fleabay: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mof7xcZAEQeBay: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Mof7xcZAEQ

Even more co-incidentally, I notice that only a few days ago someone has left a negative review of this vice on the retailer's site, mentioning that it needs a slideway lock. It wasn't me who left the review, but of course I'd be tempted to say something very similar if I did leave one.

Thanks a lot for the further replies and suggestions.

I've now brazed wing nuts on to the ends of lengths of M6 rod and rounded the other ends as evenly as I can with basic tools. The carriages now seem to lock adequately for staying centred on a hole between operations.

Clive, I can't quite visualize what you mean by "a flat, angle ended, pusher between screw and gib GHT style". I suspect this may involve machining skills or machinery I don't currently have.

Any suggestions as to where to source suitable v jaws would be appreciated. I had a mind to use my v blocks for securing round stock of any appreciable thickness.

FF, I've really only got my previous (lamentable) bench drill to compare with, so my saying the set up is solid is admittedly only a relative term. For heavy work I'll definitely follow your suggestion to use support from below.

I'd be interested to know where you got your x-y table or where one of decent quality can be had.

Many thanks for everyone's further contributions.

Neil, I'll check what thread the gib screws are tomorrow and see if I have anything matching that can be fashioned into a temporary thumbscrew for the middle position.

Dave, Mick and Clive, there is a substantial guide rod for the moving jaw. I've uploaded a photo, which hopefully shows it.

Clive, special thanks for the photos!

I've bolted mine to a piece of wood and have it clamped to the drill table with hold-down clamps.

I did some experimental drilling and tapping on a piece of 1/4 inch mild steel bar. The set-up is solid and would, I think, be perfectly acceptable for the workaday kind of tapping my crude engineering skills currently limit me to doing - if only I could lock the slides!

As it is, virtually every time I changed over from drill bit to tap the whole plot had contrived to move a fractional amount meaning that the tap was not entering the drill hole perfectly centrally.

In desperation I decided to have a go locking the slides by tightening down the Nyloc nuts holding the handles on (pictured). This seemed to secure the two axes ok, but, however gently I wielded the spanner, by the time I had tightened the nuts the necessary two revolutions to lock things up I found that invariably one or both axes had shifted slightly out of position. Without an effective way of locking the slides I'm reduced to a lot of trial and error in order to get back exactly into the hole I'm working on.

I've not had a response from the retailer. I'm going to play around with the vice some more over the weekend and see how I feel about it in a couple of days.

Many thanks to everyone for the further suggestions, links and comments.

Bazyle, the only snag in the case of this vice is that not one of the six gib screws (3 for each axis) is a cap head; they are all standard gib screws with hollow hex heads and 10mm locknuts. The retailer though is claiming that all of the gib screws are for routine slideway locking, though clearly none of them, as they are, is actually designed for that. What's more, the item description leads the buyer to believe that on the one hand there are adjustable gibs and on the other there is some kind of independent slideway locking mechanism. This is clearly not the case.

Dave, the vice is actually surprisingly well made. Yes, there is a lot of backlash in the screws (one of the reasons a slideway lock is important on this vice - the handles turn a worrying amount of their own accord in response to vibration from drilling), but the build quality is in a different league from the cheaper cross vices I eyed up in a certain high-street machinery chainstore. They were truly wretched.

The main reason I wanted a cross vice is that I only have a bench drill and a tiny Proxxon MF70 mill, and I wanted the convenience of being able to drill sequential holes on larger stuff (i.e. with the bench drill) without having to reposition and re-secure the workpiece for every hole; (even if I wanted to, I can't hold work down with one hand whilst operating anything with the other because of injuries sustained in a road accident.)

Fowlers Fury, yes I did consider an x-y table and I may still go that route. My drill is certainly big enough. The only thing that tipped me towards this vice instead was that I would need a good vice to go on top of the x-y table anyway, and I don't own any machine vice except the tiny Proxxon one on the MF70, so I thought I might as well kill two birds with one stone and get this vice.

The retailer has still not replied. Ringing up just results in being told I need to speak to a technical adviser, all of whom seem perpetually to be otherwise engaged.

Many thanks, Michael and Mike.

Mike, I emailed the retailer yesterday afternoon and said exactly what you suggest: that if I keep the vice I would probably want to drill and tap for two locking screws. I also said I wasn't too happy at the somewhat misleading description.

I haven't had a reply yet.

ETA: Many thanks, Clive.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 17/01/2019 19:09:02

I recently bought a cross slide vice for my bench drill from a certain Devon-based tool retailer.

One of the selling points was that in addition to having “adjustable gibs” it had “lockable slides” (these two features were individually highlighted in separate bullet points in the item’s description).

I was disappointed when the vice arrived to see that it didn’t have lockable slides though it did have adjustable gibs. When I queried the absence of lockable slides with the retailer, I was told “in order to lock the slides you tighten down the gibs”.

It had taken me some time to do the adjustment of the six gib screws in order to end up with both an absence of any slop and very smooth travel along the full length of both axes. Do I really want to be messing with the spot-on adjustment of even one or two gib screws virtually every time I use the drill?

I’d be interested to know what others make of the retailer suggesting that gib screws are a routine way of locking slideways, and also the retailer’s apparent claim that, in spite of “adjustable gibs” and “lockable slides” being mentioned in separate bullet points, what the buyer should understand this to mean is that firstly the gib screws can be adjusted, and secondly they can be adjusted all the way down on to the gib strip!

Edited By Bill Phinn on 17/01/2019 19:14:41

Mick and Martin, VPNs do actually provide important safeguards for people in certain countries. We are lucky that our need for them in the UK is not so acute:

Link

My apologies! I accept that my post was a clumsy change of trajectory from the humorous one taken in your own.

In defence of my logic, "he is heading that way" did leave open the possibility that at the time of writing he was not there yet and that he might have seen David Standing's remarks but not yet necessarily had the time or inclination to respond to them.

Ultimately, my post was intended to suggest that, humour aside, there are very real obstacles to information exchange in China, the existence of which your own later reference to Ketan's remarks about WhatsApp serves to corroborate.

They do have the Internet in China, Jason. At least they did when I was last there. I'm assuming, of course, this forum is not on the proscribed list of domain names, which would render it inaccessible without a VPN.

A not insignificant part of Australian wealth today, though, is Chinese in origin:

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/society/article/2163540/why-chinas-richest-flock-australia-even-if-theyre-not-always

Wealthy Chinese people, conscious that they're living in an economic system that is still largely government-controlled, and anxious about the long-term security of their wealth within an authoritarian political system that can asset-strip you on a whim, have been driving capital flight from the PRC for years.

For "grinding" drill bits and small spindle gouges (for woodturning) up to and including HSS hardness I like to use 2.35 mm-shank sander rolls powered by a micromotor. I do the work under magnification.

Yes, I too find the quoting facility unusually inconvenient. On the rare occasions I've wanted to multiquote, I've opened new edit boxes in new windows, copied the quoted text from them, closed these boxes, then pasted the new material into the original edit box. If someone can suggest a quicker solution, I'd be grateful.

I'm glad "likes" are not a part of this forum. They can certainly be useful in signalling helpful or interesting comments, but too often they are simply a way of expressing personal loyalties or disloyalties, as the case may be, and as a result can create even wider discord and divisions than may exist already.

I think only Apple themselves know beyond all doubt the answer to that question, Michael.

Posted by Michael Gilligan on 04/01/2019 19:07:28:
To be fair ... it's simply a statement of fact, to say that the performance of rechargeable batteries diminishes over time.
If you can supply a rechargeable battery that lasts forever ... The world will beat a path to your door !!
MichaelG.

Yes, it would certainly be very unfair to castigate a company purely on the strength of its rechargeable batteries having undergone a reduction in performance over time.

In Apple's case, however, the crux of the complaint was not that their batteries underwent a scarcely avoidable reduction in performance over time but that the company incorporated in their phones an automatic CPU slowdown in response to reduced battery performance yet did not communicate the fact that they had done this to users. The deliberate and unexplained slowing down by Apple of CPUs will inevitably have led some users to think, “my phone is slow so I should replace it” not, “my phone is slow so I should replace its battery”.

Not a few critics, including myself, feel that Apple could have been a lot more transparent* about the "fix" they built into phones to compensate for reduced battery performance, and feel additionally that their lack of transparency on this issue casts a shadow over their business ethics.

*e.g. programmed a message to appear on the screen telling the user that the phone had gone into "low-power mode" or such like.

If Smartphones count as computers, the fact that in October Italy fined Samsung and Apple five and ten million Euros respectively expressly for incorporating planned obsolescence into their phones does at least suggest that computer manufacturers have been guilty of this. Apple themselves have confirmed that they deliberately slowed down older iPhone models because "their batteries diminished over time".

On a serious note, I suspect this forum's members typically have a much higher number of items that need to be kept track of than the average person not engaged in a tool-rich avocation of some kind.

A second point: beware of the well-intentioned impulse to "rationalise" your workshop and move things from where they've been for a long time into more logical or more convenient places. I've lost count of the number of times I've moved a couple of items from their accustomed places during a tidy-up and the items have from that point on effectively disappeared from the face of the earth. There is such a thing as being too organised.

I can't help seeing whoever is responsible for flying these drones so close to Gatwick as reckless and deeply stupid people, but there is another side to all of this that few people, least of all our government, seem willing to discuss. This other side is well articulated in a recent newspaper article:

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/gatwick-drone-flights-delay-environmental-activists-a8694836.html

The people caught up in the rampage of Khalid Masood might disagree, as, respectfully, do I.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 21/12/2018 20:58:36

As well as compulsory licensing for all users and a tripling of the current cost (£1079) - annually.

It's not as if such an astronomical increase in yet another avenue of taxation would be regarded by most people as anything other than business as usual for whichever side happens to govern us these days.

One of the other acknowledged obstacles at the moment to the widespread use of electric vehicles is the difficulty many users have charging their vehicles.

Yes, many people have a driveway or garage where they can charge overnight, many work at a location that can provide staff parking and charging points, but many people do not fall into either category, so where/how are they going to charge their vehicles with dependable regularity?

Having charging points on the street outside people's homes is the usual suggested solution, but what happens when you have people with electric vehicles and conventional vehicles both competing for limited parking spaces on the same street? If the driver of a conventional vehicle is excluded all of a sudden from parking in any vacant space equipped with a charger, will drivers of electric vehicles be similarly excluded from parking in spaces that don't have chargers, or will they get preferential treatment? Either way, how do we fairly apportion the availability of spaces of each kind?

I accept there are worse problems in the world needing a solution, but I can see a certain amount of injustice on the horizon, and, on the principle that nothing tends to stand in the way of "progress", I suspect it will be drivers of conventional cars, not the drivers of electric/autonomous cars, who will find themselves on the receiving end of it.