Member postings for William Hepburn

Problem was it was a full 7 pages about a small shed roof that could have been covered with 50 words (or probably much less) and a single photo in the "letters" page.

No point whatsoever having the 2 pages wasted on "car customisation" that had zero content - quite obviously filler material.

Science Museum is a brilliant resource but much more information is available elsewhere - and more comprehensively with better images.

The editorial team seem to have been struggling for relevant content the past year (I also could not believe the "tidy up a trailer" article) but the fact remains that subscribers want "model engineering" articles and items made by "model engineers".

I have now done away with the plastic gears altogether in my WM16 and installed the "belt conversion" designed for the G704.

Benefits are twofold - cooling is now not a problem as the motor is now left exposed (instead of cooped up in the cover) and if anything jams, the gears are not stripped. However, the underpowered 750w motor of the WM16 stalls long before the belt can slip. There is a 1100w motor available that can be substituted so when the 750w goes, so I'll be looking at that as a replacement.

The only slight niggles are that the drawbar is no longer self-releasing (due to the new belt drive spindle) and as the problematic hi/lo gear is no longer used, the speed change is now by changing the belt between two different sized pulleys. Not major hassles by any means.

Expensive conversion though (£600ish) and if I hadn't already spent time and money upgrading the WM16 I would probably have just bought an alternative mill.

Edited By William Hepburn on 30/07/2022 14:05:09

Edited By William Hepburn on 30/07/2022 14:06:07

The nylon gears are still sacrificial gears and are still the "weakest link" in the drive train.

As many users of these machines will testify, it doesn't take much to strip the stock plastic gears. Like Iain, I was stripping gears regularly until I "upgraded" to nylon - usually during flycutting operations.

These Warco (and all the other variations of this machine) mills have a plastic hi/lo gear as well as a plastic drive gear, meaning that there are two "weak links" in the drive train - which is overkill and more to do with cost cutting than protection.

There's no need for the hi/lo gear to be plastic (or even nylon) and I use a brass hi/lo gear as the nylon drive gear will still "fail" first if required.

The nylon gears are used by a great number of users of these machines and they still allow more "sacrificial" safety than is necessary, as although stronger (and less likely to melt) than the soft grey delrin (or similar) gears installed in the machine, they will still "fail" when necessary.