Member postings for old mart

In Weston Super Mare, cyclists are allowed on pavements and that works quite well, but you do see old fogies driving their electric buggies along the roads which is illegal if the buggy does not have numberplates.

That is a good way to use a smaller steady on a larger lathe without making it unusable on the original lathe. You do really need a mill to make the adaptor. I modified and made adaptors for 2 fixed steadies to fit the museum's Smart & Brown model A simply because the original ones were costing £150 plus on ebay. Both were intended for Chinese lathes, the small one can handle up to 2" diameter and is C shaped and the other is up to 3 1/2" and hinged. They both had their bases cut off and were milled to fit Aluminium adaptors. They can both be bolted to either side of the adaptors which helps when setting them up. To make them easier to fit to the lathe bed, the locking block underneath has a captive nylock nut which helps turn it into position when tightening or removing. The bigger one has a second set of fingers I made with little sealed ball races which are very good. I got lucky when a travelling steady for the model A came up on ebay cheaply because it was unidentified.

We had gas and electricity smart meters installed a couple of years ago, by a kid just out of school who had obviously only been trained to fit meters, he didn't seem to be a quailfied electrician or gas fitter from the ballshit he came up with regarding the running of them.

There are always new ways of doing something, I have a power hacksaw blade and had never thought of drilling extra holes in it to use it in a 12" hacksaw.

The picture is a poor example, as the cyclist is approaching the door from the easily seen direction. I always use both hands, as I have arthritis and cannot hold the door with one hand.

Its very sophisticated, I won't be showing anyone pics of my effort now! I tried going to the next page and there was a video of a car being turned round on a road, see what you think of it.

I have just noticed this new highway code rule in the news, and appologise now if it was mentioned recently in the forum.

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If you have the means to sharpen the tip of a masonary drill to use for a cheap alternative to solid carbide twist drills, then try it. Otherwise Bosch do sets of multipurpose drills, like these sets from Screwfix.

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Pipe cleaners

With vintage sewing machines, the threads were quite often proprietry, so you had to buy genuine spares, so matching thread pitches would be inexact. Of course a near match would probably be ok, after all sewing machines don't need airworthyness certificates. Some of the old Singer screws looked like they had been hand filed by an apprentice.

I noticed in your video that you were still thinking about a digital readout on the quill. The cheap and cheerful ones like I have on the museum's drill mill and TS vary in width, and the one I bought for the TS light vertical was too wide to fit without getting in the way of the quill lock. I was lucky to find that the one I had fitted to the drill mill was smaller. If you are thinking of getting one, the 40mm wide type can be fitted without too much difficulty, but the 48mm one was fitted to the drill mill which has more room.

Edited By old mart on 20/01/2022 21:05:05

Edited By old mart on 20/01/2022 21:07:43

Welcome to the forum, Nick.

A lathe with a leadscrew benefits from more than just threading operations, the finer thread pitch settings are useful for simple turning giving a power feed for the saddle (carriage) in both directions. The lathe that I use can cut threads down to 76tpi and 152tpi if the change gears are selected to halve the leadscrew speed. That is down to 0.013" and 0.007" per turn of the spindle. This particular lathe also has a feed screw which will allow power facing and turning down to 0.001" per turn, but that feature is normally confined to the more sophisticated and expensive types.

For your particular size of work, the Myford range would be ideal.

It might prove more economic to change some of the less demanding machines to single phase motors.

If you have a 2 hp motor and want to save money when buying a VFD, then get one that has a standard single phase 230V supply. The inverters which have a three phase input cost quite a lot more. As I said in my earlier post, look for the "IDS quick start guide" , not all of the VFD'S that the Inverter Drive Supermarket sell have it. Having remote controls is better than relying on the ones on the VFD, which are only intended for setting up a motor from scratch.

Thanks for all the help, but having looked at that video, it would be alright for experienced people to see the many undesirable work practices, but the novice might think they were ok and end up having an accident.

The ARC Eurotrade advert on this page is a very good place to look at machines and tooling. The owner, Ketan is also a member of this forum and has an excellent reputation for after sales service and advice.

The variety that I have encountered had the aluminium skins bonded securely to the substrate, it would not have been easy to peel it off.

They supplied the bearings, one metric SKF and one imperial Timken for the R8 spindle conversion that I did on the Tom Senior light vertical. I would use them again.

I would swap the incoming live and neutral wires from the mains lead, brown to A and blue to 7.

Today, I tried out the reversing lever. Without a chuck and in backgear. The lathe was in the fourth backgear speed at 102 rpm, it will go down to 39rpm. The instant reverse was painless, no strange noises which was encouraging. I noticed that just switching the lever to off from forward or reverse stopped the spindle in only 1 1/2 seconds. Having a chuck on would increase that slightly, but the extra drag from having the leadscrew engaged would probably compensate. It looks like that I will be using the lever to stop first and then change direction, this will give me plenty of time to back off the cut on the return run.