Member postings for Bill Phinn

Mine is 5L too. I've never needed a bigger one, but then I've not done any big projects yet.

If you want a 10L one, it might be worth giving Tuffnell Glass a call. They're advertising new 10L ones (at over a grand!), but they say they have reconditioned ones as well in 5L, 8L and 10L, though only the 5L reconditioned ones seem to be viewable on their site at the moment.

Brian, I have an oxy-propane set-up that uses an oxygen concentrator in place of bottled gas. I believe the oxygen produced is not quite as pure as that out of a bottle but most users say it is considerably cheaper in the long run to use a concentrator. Many also say it is safer. All oxygen concentrators, afaik, have a dial on them to regulate the flow of gas.

Well said.

I see Davy as not giving due credit there to Faraday's employer, the bookbinder George Riebau, who was the one who supplied his apprentice with tickets to attend Davy's lectures at the Royal Institution. Davy was actually discouraging at first towards Faraday's scientific experimentation; on meeting him for the first time he urged him to stick to his day job of bookbinding.

There's an interesting monograph on Faraday written by one of his descendants in this year's Society of Bookbinders' journal that sheds light on this and other matters.

Sorry for so many edits; that's what comes from typing when you're not wearing your glasses.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/12/2018 17:08:11

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/12/2018 17:08:45

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/12/2018 17:10:45

+1 for using a piercing saw. For 0.6mm sheet you would ideally use a 6/0 blade or finer.

You seem to have mixed up two separate things.

You get "caller display" free of charge, so if the caller has not withheld their number you get to see the number the caller is (purportedly) ringing from. "Call Minder" blocks those kinds of "frequent calls" you speak of, which only distract you from more worthwhile activities.

I have BT "call-minder" (or whatever it's called) on my home phone, which seems to weed out a lot of nuisance calls.

An even better way of weeding out calls is never to answer the phone unless you know who's calling. If the caller really needs to contact you they'll leave a message, email or write a letter. If it's really urgent, they can ring 999.

Operating this policy now for many years I'm glad to say it's never caused me any headaches whilst probably saving me many.

Things may have changed since I last looked, but I believe accepting a Paypal payment and then allowing the buyer to collect can leave a seller in a situation where the buyer does collect and then files an "item not received" claim with Paypal. Paypal (in the absence of any proof that the item was handed over to the buyer) sides with the buyer and the seller loses both the item and his money.

Caveat vendor!

Edited By Bill Phinn on 03/12/2018 16:52:28

I think if you've asked for the kind of help that definitely requires potential respondents to know at least more or less where you live in order to give useful answers then it's a little foolish not to state in the relevant post where you are in the world. On the other hand, if you're not asking for location-dependent advice then I don't really see the need to publicize where you are.

恭喜您是第100位客户，询问UKPL的含义是什么？你赢了£1,000,000美元。请将您的银行详情发送给我们。

It's not come out quite right, Neil. Among other infelicities, "£1,000,000美元" reads "£1000 American dollars".

I asked a question:

and I have an answer:

亲爱的顾客您好
通过询问我们产品的开发人员，我们确认了UKPL没有任何意义。由于我们的失误使得我们产品的标题出现了错误，谢谢您为我们指正，非常感谢。

UK Product Line, possibly.

I've searched for these items on Ebay.cn in both English and Chinese but so far without success.

Posted by thaiguzzi on 16/11/2018 02:41:17:

 

then a further 500k, so a full million kms, before being sold off to the private market.

 

Edited By thaiguzzi on 16/11/2018 02:42:10

Some of these sold-off taxis ended up in Beirut, among other places, where their working life started in earnest.

"Beirut Merc" is a proverbial expression in my household for an old car that seems like it will go on forever.

Eta: Apologies for giving the impression that the image of the Beirut Merc was supplied by thaiguzzi.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/11/2018 03:23:59

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/11/2018 03:25:05

Edited By Bill Phinn on 16/11/2018 03:32:21

Yes, I wouldn't want to have to try and remove wheel nuts that have been anywhere near the average highstreet or backstreet garage with either a 3/8 drive or the wrench supplied with the car. The wheelnuts on my Toyota Corolla are meant to be tightened to 104 N of torque, but the last time (four years ago) that my car had to go into a garage (after someone ran into the back of me) I couldn't budge any of my wheelnuts afterwards even with a 1/2" drive 16" long breaker bar. I suspect the impact wrenches garages now typically use are putting considerably more than 100N torque on most cars' wheel nuts.

I now carry a 900mm long breaker bar for roadside wheel changes.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 11/11/2018 22:57:56

Thanks for your suggestion, Mike.

Here's a modestly-priced set minus the 3/8 socket, which I'm sure you could supply for very little money:

https://www.machinemart.co.uk/p/clarke-pro365-10-piece--drive-af-socket-set/

No I haven't, Michael, though perhaps I should have done since co-incidentally I inset 4 neodymium magnets yesterday into depressions I milled in the backs of those aluminium vice inserts you can see in one of my images in order to supplement the holding power of the rather weak magnets already there. Thanks for your suggestion.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 09/11/2018 23:27:02

Thanks for your reply, Howard.

I think I probably could drill the pin out with a bit of effort. The more difficult bit might be replacing it with a ball-bearing that functions as I want it to. I suspect choosing the size of the ball is critical: too big and I risk damaging the hole as I drive it in; too small and I may not be able to move enough material in from the lip to hold the ball in place, and once I've started to move material it may be difficult to go back. The good news is the ratchet as it is functions quite well with most of my 3/4 sockets (i.e. it still holds most of the sockets on the drive, albeit a little tenuously).

Incidentally, one of the two countersunk slotted screws you can see holding the cover plate in place is an impostor. One of the screws was missing when I got the ratchet out. I rifled through my boxes of misc. machine screws to try and find a replacement, which needed to be a 24tpi 3/16. The only 24tpi 3/16 screws I found had hex heads on them and were 1cm too short for the job.

The solution (I don't have a lathe): cut the hex head off the screw that is too short; cut the head and a bit more off a slotted screw of the same diameter but a different pitch, and bronze-braze this head and a bit more on to the decapitated replacement.

It works fine, though having a lathe would have been nice. I mean to fix my lack of one soon.

Many thanks, Hopper and Mike, for your replies.

I think you're absolutely right about the ball-bearing actually being a cylindrical pin. I've added another couple of photos to try and better show what I'm dealing with. I forgot to mention that the pin isn't seized and the ratchet is quite useable as it is; it's just that heavy sockets (which 3/4 sockets generally are) tend to drop off the drive if you're not careful.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 07/11/2018 20:48:51

Edited By Bill Phinn on 07/11/2018 20:54:59

I was going through some rarely disturbed old tools underneath my bench and one thing I decided it would be nice to give a little TLC to was a 3/4 inch drive ratchet that had seen hard usage at some point under a previous owner.

It still works more or less as it should, the only real defect being the ball-bearing in the square drive. As you can see, it has flattened off, and as a consequence no longer holds sockets in place. Can anyone suggest how I might best go about extracting the worn bearing and, more crucially, inserting a new one?

Many thanks for any help.