Member postings for Bill Phinn

I suspect Dave Halford realises that by now.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 12/04/2023 23:19:58

It can get confusing, certainly, but I think I'm right in saying that the government of the ROC/Taiwan [and most people from the ROC/Taiwan] would never refer to their country/territory* as "China" unqualified; the official title is the "Republic of China [Taiwan]". The handful of people I know personally from Taiwan say they are from Taiwan and are Taiwanese people.

This might be useful to you.

*The reason for the co-existence of the two terms in respect of Taiwan is controversial and best not discussed here.

Edited By Bill Phinn on 12/04/2023 16:19:39

As both a consumer and a private citizen, I for my part care immensely.

Dave, do you really mean the government of the ROC, i.e. Taiwan?

I've got a Picador, a Spiralux and a Reliance number 1 drill grinding jig.

Out of the three, the Reliance is my least favourite. Although it's of more robust build quality than the other two, in use I find there are several disadvantages to it:

• Because it grinds with a rocking rather than a sweeping motion, you can't pivot it out of the way of the wheel when you want to remove a drill to reinsert it to do the second lip; some disassembly is required, which is prejudicial to repeatability.
• Lining up the lip by eye with a crude groove in the casting is never going to result in repeatability as good as rotating the drill until its flute contacts a pointer; on the Picador, which is my go-to jig, I don't even need to use my eyes to know I've indexed it correctly. This is a bonus for those of us with presbyopia.
• The shaft that you rock to produce the grind on the Reliance is captive, up to a point, at its base on a pointed screw that acts as a dead centre, but free to rise off its seat at the top unless slight downward pressure is exerted at all times when grinding.
• There is no choice of grinding angles.

1/4" BSW?

Edited By Bill Phinn on 10/04/2023 16:29:21

Thanks for the information, C T.

I don't think you'll get them anywhere to that spec, Rowan. The nearest things are the square nuts DIN 562 and DIN 557, but M4 in these is 1.8mm thick and 3.2mm respectively, and, like standard M4 hex nuts, they are only 7mm across the flats.

Making them yourself should be very easy.

Yes, as Mick says, it's a soldering iron stand that typically comes with low cost irons. It's not fit for purpose in my experience.

I think you're right, Dave, though maybe that says more about the capabilities of some college lecturers than the capabilities of ChatGPT.

I would genuinely be interested in seeing an attempt by ChatGPT at this essay question. I think the answer could be superficially plausible, but, along with people like these, suspect that on closer analysis it would not pass muster.

That's not really a chat, though, is it? Asking a bot to regurgitate what it's sifted from trawling a website is more or less asking a bot to do the one thing it was primarily "born" to do.

On the other hand, I would be very interested to see an answer from ChatGPT to the essay question:

"In Flaubert's Madame Bovary Charles is largely to blame for Emma's death". Discuss. Refer closely to the text in your answer."

An update to this thread and another that I contributed to.

I ended up buying a 5 inch "diamond wheel" directly from a seller based in Shenzhen. I paid £25.

I have fitted it to one of my 6 inch grinders [courtesy of some Albanian builders who had thrown it in their skip].

I'm pleased to say that unlike the CBN wheel I bought from Axminster Tools and returned this wheel has scarcely any detectable lateral runout. I have sharpened around 20 drills on it so far [all 5/16" or under], and everything seems good.

The only thing I would change if I bought another of these wheels is I'd buy a coarser grit one; the one I bought is 320 grit. Buying a wheel with this fine a grit for tool grinding went against my instincts but I had read feedback suggesting the wheels were actually coarser than their grit rating suggested. I found this not to be the case.

I have not come close to overheating either the wheel or a drill yet.

Regarding levelling feet, Tony, if you can suggest a better way of quickly and easily making the bench level when the floor isn’t, I’d be interested to hear of it.

I need to put the bench against a wall, and envisage wanting to get to what’s on the far side of the bench occasionally without having to lift whatever’s on the bench off it first.

Which brings us on to the last consideration, which is that when the bench is in situ against the wall there wouldn’t be enough depth from the front of the bench to the wall to get the legs of my engine hoist under it far enough to deposit a lathe centrally [front to back] on the bench. Again, if you can suggest a way round this when lifting, say, a 200kg lathe on to a castorless bench [all other things being equal], I’d be genuinely interested to hear of it.

My 230kg milling machine sits against the wall on a 2m long wooden bench I made. The bench is supported on nine braked casters as well as levelling feet. It is rock solid. The castors came in very useful when I had to pull the whole bench away from the wall recently to fit a Z axis DRO and perspex screens over the lower part of the windows behind.

Thanks for everyone's replies. There's a lot to mull over there.

I've not yet decided whether to use the Sealey legs etc. with more bracing or build a base from scratch. I bought some 2mm thick angle braces and some flat steel bar for this purpose, but before posting this thread was pondering starting from scratch and sidelining the Sealey legs etc. for use on another less critical kind of bench.

Don't worry, Nick Wheeler: the link I provided was to show the bench I bought, not the price I paid for it.

The need for triangulation seems to be commonly agreed on. Statical determinacy is a new phrase for me. It strikes me that a structure can be both statically determinate and have no sway mechanisms and yet still be inherently weak; it depends on the materials used, and how they are used, to achieve statical determinacy etc. Ensuring there is statical determinacy and no sway mechanisms is clearly a useful starting point, nonetheless.

Two details I was planning to incorporate into any completed bench are castors and levelling feet. This is another reason why I started thinking the Sealey bench wouldn't be appropriate - because it would be too high off the ground once castors were installed.

Sonic Escape's recent metal workbench thread has persuaded me to ask for people's advice on how to go about creating a strong bolted metal bench around 150cm long, possibly to take a lathe weighing up to 250kg, that is dismantlable into manageable component parts and therefore doesn't involve welding, or, if it does, only a minimal amount.

I bought a bench of this kind recently, and though I was pleased with the work top, most of the rest is not impressive from a structural point of view: the box section wall thickness is too thin, for a start, the small amount of welding is terrible in places, and there is not nearly enough bracing, particularly if it is to be used, as intended, as a work bench.

Where would you start? What materials, and how would you go about bolting the pieces together? My only certainties are that box section should have a minimum wall thickness of 1/8", and steel angle be somewhat thicker.

That sounds easy enough to remove when the top is worn out and needs replacing.

Sonic Escape, just in case you've misunderstood the term, oil tempered hardboard is a wood fibre board, not a metal.

How would you suggest attaching that to the surface of the bench, David?

And surely all the posts from others that precede yours at 12.32 can only be interpreted as showing awareness that the video is an April Fool stunt.

The threshing machine looks like the kind Thomas Hardy referred disparagingly to in chapter 47 of Tess of the D'Urbervilles as the "red tyrant" :

"Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve – a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining – the threshing-machine, which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves."

Just to be clear for Steve: that end mill sharpening module at Arc is no longer available, only the grinding wheels to fit.