Member postings for lee webster

I have just watched a video by a youtuber, "Artisan Makes" where he swaps out his electronics and motor as I suggested. So it can be done.

Nobody has ever produced a baked bean to beat Hienz.

30 odd years ago I used to buy Wolf electric drills over B&D, then I found the label on my new wolf said made in Japan. Sigh.

Dr, Who drives round in a British made police box.

If the lathe is in fair condition, why not remove all the electronics and wire the motor up to an on/off switch? Neither of the two old lathes I have owned had electronics, and some well known youtubers don't use a lathe with electronic controllers. If I saw a lathe like yours being advertised with dud electronics, I would buy it and do the conversion with a decent motor.

Perhaps I am easy to please,but I can't see anything wrong with the cover as shown. I buy a magazine not by what it looks like, but by what it contains. A few months back I bought a copy of MEW because it had a mention on the cover of electroplating 3D prints.

Lee

Hi Matt,

I too am in the South West, Illogan Cornwall. Welcome.

Dave, A very simple form of lube is pencil lead. Could be worth trying. Rub the business end of a large dia pencil on the areas that need lube. It works on door latches!

Lee

Steve, The Bromsgrove sand I got may have had bentonite in it as a natural ingredient, it just wasn't enough for me. I was given a bag of sand to try a couple of years ago by the engineer I made the name plate for. It needed sieving too, and I added some bentonite to it. My very fine sieve has holes at about half a mm. The ordinary sieve is about 1mm. I have coarser sieves when I need to speed things up.

If you find a supplier of ready to use greensand please let me know.

Noel, that is a great plaque! Did you 3D print the pattern?

Lee

Steve, I buy the Bromsgrove sand from them in a 25kg bag. I spread it out on a tarpauline in my conservatory to dry it for a few days, then use a flour sieve to remove all the bits bigger than fine sand. I loose about 2 to 3 kg of unwanted content. I then weigh the sand exactly, and seperate out one kilo. I add a small amount of water to the kilo, but not enough to make the sand wet. Very bad! This is why I do this with just one kilo, I am trying to determine how much natural clay is in the sand. With my last bag of sand I had to add 10% of bentonite before I felt happy. When I have the right mix, I can add bentonite and water to the rest of the sand which is then given a good whisking and is kept in a sealed container. If I haven't used the sand for a few weeks some of the water will have evaporated. I add a bit more water using a small spray bottle, give it a good mixing using something like a paint stirrer on a battery drill, and let it sit for several hours before using. If the sand is too wet I just leave the top off the container for half a day, stirring the sand now and then. If I have something like the name plate to cast, I will use a very fine sieve, finer than the flour sieve, to cover the surface with a thin layer of smaller grains of sand. Then I will use the flour sieve for put in 20-ishmm of sand, then just shovel it in to the top. I usually ram, not too hard, when the flask is about half full, then proper hard ramming when full. I allways pile the sand on high before ramming. I haven't got a muller for sand preparation, I just use the paint stirrer (home made) to fluff up the sand after each pour. Olfoundryman, Martin, and Swdweeb, Perry, on youtube are good people to watch. Martin is a proper pro, Perry is self taught and produces excellent results. Martin uses self prepared greensand and his surface finnish is second to none. His work makes my name plate look like it was made with a bag of boulders!

Lee

Edited By lee webster on 03/07/2022 08:41:14

I buy my sand, sodium silicate, bentonite and ingots from Artisan foundry supplies. They are based in Liverpool here in the UK. When I first started casting I was given some greensand and bentonite by a local engineer. Before that I bought fine sand from B&Q and used cat litter which in some cases is mostly bentonite. It was all a waste of time. This photo is of a small oval name plate I made for the engineer. I made it with his greensand/bentonite and cast it with a zinc/aluminium alloy. The letters are 8-ishmm in height and protrudes from the surface 2mm. You can see the layer lines from the 3D print.

Edited By lee webster on 02/07/2022 22:53:52

All items have now been delivered. I have installed the Anycubic slicing software and A copy of Lychee slicer on my non-cad computer. Lychee wants to register itself and my cad computer is not on the internet. If I get on with Lychee I will have to bite the bullet and connect the computer to register. I haven't printed anything yet as I have to get to grips with at least one of the slicers.

Maybe I haven't got the settings right, but the printer does seem to want a lot of resin for the 1/3rd scale A7 crankcase. Two halves at 130mm long, 70mm high, 30mm wide, and it will take 371ml of resin. Thats a third of a bottle that costs £30. I hope to learn a bit more on saving resin before I do a trial print.

Lee

Fred, I am looking forward to trying this process.

Lee

That is a lot of useful information, Thanks Fred!

Lee

I am surprised that the liquid nails withstands the heat of the pour. Do you use water based or spirit based?

If I can't make a greensand mould, the pattern has some small details that might not survive the extraction of the pettern from the mould, I have some epoxy resin bought from a local boat chandler.

A new resin 3D printer is on it's way. I hope to get prints from it that need less preparation than those from my Ender3. A good printer, but it has its limitations.

Lee

Thanks Cabinet,

I ordered a bottle of water washable resin with my printer. When I have tried it out I might try different resins. I might try one of the "tough" resins, it stand up to the pounding of sand casting! The items you recommend will be added to my shopping list.

Lee

Thanks for the information Fred. I see that you are in Australia. I wonder if what you call "liquid nails" is what we here in the UK use to stick timber and panels to walls etc?

I have a long way to go with the A7 engine. It's my first attempt at anything like this.

Lee

Hi Fred,

This is the first time I have seen this thread, so I hope I am not asking questions you might have already answered.

1) What sand system did you make the cores and mould with? It looks like some kind of bound sand, resin?

2) What metal did you use for the pour?

3) Not a question, fantastic job! Such a nice casting.

I am nearly ready to produce the moulds for my, what started out as half scale but is now third scale, Austin Seven engine. I have 3D printed the crankcase just to have a look at in the flesh and decide the best way to produce the patterns. I started to realise that a two piece pattern might not do it, I might need a four piece. I didn't think I could do that with green sand, it would have to be a resin bound sand. And then I come across this thread with a four piece mould. Talk about perfect timing!

Lee

I took the plunge today and ordered a 3D printer, an Anycubic mono 4K and a Creality wash and cure station. Hopefully they will be with me soon. Thanks for all the advice and comments. I printed the two halves of my Austin 7 crankcase on my Ender3 a few days ago. I had no intention of doing anything with it, I just wanted to what it looked like in the flesh. I have also changed the scale of the model A7 engine from 1/2 scale to 1/3 scale. My 3d prints were in 1/3 scale at 0.28 layer height to speed up the printing. It took 10 hours. If I had printed them at 1/2 scale it would have taken one and a half days at 0.2 layer height, and more than two days at 0.16. It was these printing times, and the countless hours filling and sanding that prompted me into buying the resin printer. When I saw those tiny crankcase pieces, I had to prepare one of them to try casting it. I will only cast one half, I can't face getting the other half done! I will post pictures when I can.

Lee

I don't know if this applies to your question but, the stub axle on an Austin Seven front axle has a hardened steel thrust washer between the stub axle and main axle beam. This washer is kept lubricated by grease from the kingpin. In many cases, the washer rotates with the stub axle wearing out the top face of the axle. To get over this I ground a small half round into the edge of the washer and drilled a small hole that lined up with the half round into the top face of the axle. A small pin was then Loctited in place that didn,t protrude above the bearing face of the washer. Which, I think, is a long winded way of saying glue the washer to the PLA!

Lee

I am not suggesting you do this, but, after watching several youtube videos that suggested the built in Windows ani-virus worked just fine, I let my paid for anti-virus prog expire and let Windows take over. I have had no problems so far.

The culprit in my garden was,and still is, badgers. I am not sure how to deter them.