Member postings for old mart

In the winter, the heat that passes the kettle is not wasted, but helps to keep the room warm. I would think that a plastic bodied electric kettle would be most energy efficient, though.

You could try very small increments in depth at each pass, that would reduce the strain on your available machinery. It would mean having the patience and assembling a good stock of shims first.

Unfortunately, the alternatives all have their shortcomings, for instance, owners of electric cars use up mostly fossil methane, which is increasingly in short supply thanks to VP, wheras petrol and diesel vehicle users have better supplies. Hydrogen gas, touted by the enviromentalists still has to be produced by electricity from some source.

Every one shows the tilt of the table, with varying degrees of sensitivity. I have a Moore and Wright 6" level with adjustability and a secondary bubble at rightangles, and have never known what its sensivity is. I should check it with slips and a sine bar one day.

I fully agree about the reliability being more important than sheer speed. That said, when I had 200Mbits, it only took about 4 minutes to download an ISO of Windows 10 pro 64 bit, wheras before it took about an hour.

The main reason that I left SKY was that the phone line was unreliable. The cable to the house was forever giving trouble and was about 7 Mbits when it was working. Three years ago, Virgin dug up the street and I was one of their first customers for tv, phone and internet. The internet was 200/20 Mbits and slowly got more expensive. When I threatened to leave, I got a huge discount and changed the internet speed to 100/10 Mbits which is more than I need. I could have gigabit speed, but as I don't have an office block with 200 computers, I thought it rather wasteful. Now the streets are being dug up by City Fibre promising gigabit speeds which are already available if wanted, they are making more mess than Virgin fibre and British Gas new mains put together.

The bores of old bearings do make useful practice pieces for measuring as they are made very close to the exact size. I have a collection of mostly new bearing races up to 6" bore which can also be used for milling parallels. Not only testing telescopic gauges, but also to see how close the inside ears of calipers are. My Mitutoyo's and Tesa can measure inside to 0.001" reliably, but I would have to try out the cheap digitals before trusting them.

I believe that the picture is showing the inside face of the end cap, so the seal is the right way round. The rubber surface type can usually be fitted with just thumb pressure working round bit by bit.

When I modified the Tom Senior spindle from MT2 to R8, I factored in an oil seal at the bottom and had no end of trouble. The lower end got rapidly hot and I removed the quill several times to re adjust the bearing preloads until I twigged that the heat was caused by the seal. It was a double lip with garter spring and removing the spring only helped slightly. Cutting away the entire lip and relying only on the outer lip, which works fairly well on its own as it is not to retain the grease but to keep swarf out. Even now with moly grease on the lip, the bottom of the spindle gets to about 50C after ten minutes at 3000rpm.

It would be an interesting project, I used to carry out deadweight testing when I was an instrument mechanic, from 10 psi to 25000 psi, not using the same tester. And oxygen gauges which needed a barrier between the oil in the tester and the gauge which was run with trichloroethane iii. The lowest pressure gauges had their own special needs, as the weight of any fluid in the borden tube was enough to affect the readings. They were coupled to the deadweight tester with a low pressure air source. At that time we also had quantities of gauges to refurbish which had the "tru-lume" dials and pointers, radium, that is. The radioactive bits were removed in controlled conditions and after cleaning the dials and pointers were replaced with flourescent modern types. These work in the dark cockpits of aircraft with UV backlighting.

The difficulty of making one with home facilities is that the piston and bore are superfinished with about 0.0003" clearance, the piston usually hard chromed.

Got an old 1/4" wood chisel? Round off the square tip and tap it in behind the seal at the shallowest angle you can manage. Do this in several places and the seal should slowly come out. As the gap gets bigger, something blunter will be needed.

I favor the LEDS, we have a 16 x 9 kitchen and I put two 6 foot LEDS batten type in years ago and we rarely need more than one on. They are low profile, projecting only 1 inch from the ceiling and are also much safer than a glass tube.

Welcome Barrie, with your equipment, you will be able to give the rest of us advice as well as benifitting from it.

It is not uncommon for saw blades to have variable pitch which could complicate things.

Assuming it is tightening the collet you are talking about, rather than the collet holder into the spindle, there are usually spanner flats next to the collet nut. The first er25 holder that I bought didn't have the flats and required a solid carbide endmill to produce them, and just by luck, the size I chose exactly matched a later holders standard flats.

Modern top brands like SKF, Timken and Toyo are so good that specially hand selected mega expensive bearings are hardly any better. I used a top Timken and bottom SKF ordinary grade bearings in the Tom Senior MT2 to R8 conversion and the spindle taper has 0.0001" tir or better which is plenty good enough for me, actually, I was delighted.

I have noticed complete spindles with bearings for Bridgeports available for under £200, does anybody know what they are like?

Edited By old mart on 28/08/2022 15:23:56

I find they are fairly accurate, +-0.001" mostly, but they vary in quality which can affect their "feel". If I can, I use the Moore & Wright ones, they are smoother than my cheap set. They can be dismantled and the 45 degree ends made smoother, many people have done this mod.

My standard method is to compress and lock the gauge before putting it in the hole. Then unlock with the gauge handle tilted relative to the axis of the bore and then lock just enough to hold the setting. Then rock the gauge (I prefer having the ends in a vertical plane if possible) past the tightest point and remove. Careful measuring without changing the size last. Repeat for critical measurements to prove matching figures.

Practice on known bore sizes if possible, I have a ring gauge, but with care a locked micrometer can be used, but you need to be square each time with parallel faces.

I found a link, it may be us**LINK**eful.

Welcome, Martyn, you can check out how to post photos of your lathe by using the "keyword" at the top of this thread.

I was very lucky and picked up a travelling steady on ebay for a price I could afford, it wasn't fully described and I took a chance and got away with it. It has been used once helping extend the thread on the X axis leadscrew for the Tom Senior mill.