Member postings for Andy Stopford

I think they just assume that large account holders will pay because the person doing the ordering doesn't care what the price is.

A grammar school lab tech friend of mine often complains of teachers doing this sort of thing.

Seconded. The hours I wasted when I was on removals, driving up and down trying to spot the house name, each time having to turn round a 12 meter lorry, idiots in cars hooting at you and getting in the way, and all the time the clock ticking away towards the 1.00 pm deadline to be loaded and out of the house...

In so far as I can remember, there wasn't anything elaborate, just a thick rectangle of steel with a tapped hole in it for the locking bolt to pull it tight against the underside of the bed.

I had one of these - it was OK for the price but suffered the usual problems of jaw lift and general sloppiness.

I re-machined the working surfaces, squared off the jaw faces, and added an anti-lift plate under the jaw - the body casting was made in such a way as to suggest the designer had considered the possibility of having this feature.

It worked very well, including use on my Eliott 10" shaper - a duty far beyond anything it was intended for.

I've bodged brazed exhausts before and never noticed any problems with corrosion at the interface between the two metals - as Noel says, the HAZ alongside a weld is more likely to give trouble.

I have, and recommend, a Brother HL-3150CDW colour laser printer.

It works well, and Brother toner cartridges are easier than some (e.g. Epson) to refill, saving a considerable amount of money. These people do refill kits:

https://www.urefilltoner.co.uk/

Note that laser printers do not give good results when printing photos.

I use the insert type 95% of the time - they're good, but resist the temptation to use cheapo inserts from ebay (other sources of dodgy inserts are available). I bought some and they mostly worked fine, but sometimes would shatter for no apparent reason. They'd probably still be an OK deal compared with more durable but expensive, quality ones, but the break up often left a fragment of carbide embedded in the cut, ready to destroy the next insert or HSS blade you tried.

Just to add, the Italians are happy to use copper and its alloys in coffee machines - the piston of my La Pavoni P67 is made of brass (or possibly bronze), as are various of the pipe fittings, gauge glass mountings, etc. The boiler is copper, with a bronze end plate and the heater elements are copper sheathed with bronze mounting plates.

I usually use the quill - easier to take a few spring cuts using the lever

Well, I've got to disagree with the 4-way enthusiasts here.

I think a QCTP transforms using a lathe. Yes, the holders a fairly expensive, but you don't have to buy loads at once, you don't have to fool around with shims, just a simple screw height adjustment to set each tool up, you can take a toolholder out, noting the setting on your dials, put in another one and use that, then swap back to the original and know that the dial setting is still good (yes, I know that a 4-way should index properly, but on a cheap lathe it probably won't, and the indexing mechanism only works with the toolpost and topslide aligned - no setting the topslide round to clear the tailstock)

Also, it takes up less room than one of those four way abominations with its tools sprouting out in inconvenient directions ready to take a chunk out of your hand when you're trying to mic the workpiece (and you can hardly ever use all four positions with a sensible combination of tools).

I have one of these:

https://www.arceurotrade.co.uk/Catalogue/Machines-Accessories/Lathe-Accessories/Tool-Posts/Model-000-Quick-Change-Tool-Post-Set

It would have probably been better to have the next size up, but I re-used it from another lathe and I don't have any problems with the rigidity of it - parting off diameter is only limited by the lack of low speed torque of the brush motor on my lathe, and the maximum depth (15mm) of the carbide insert toolholder I usually use - I have gone considerably deeper in stainless steel with a blade type holder, but I worry about cooking the motor with such antics. Of course you have to have the holder set accurately to centre height, but that's easy with a Quick Change toolholder...

How odd. It works for me on the desktop computer, in the thread, in my album, and typing in the address from your screenshot.

Not so with the tablet, except when I navigate from the "35 photos" link under my name (It's in the "Misc" album).

Absolutely. (though malted wheat can be a totally acceptable equivalent - in its own way)

For a start, gluten is not a necessary, or indeed particularly desirable ingredient in beer - its presence is a consequence of using gluten bearing grains like barley or wheat to make brewing malt.

On the other hand, gluten is a necessary ingredient in traditional bread making to give the correct texture to the bread.

A quick enquiry of Mr. Google suggests that chestnuts are an ingredient in some Italian beers, and there also is a reference to a gluten-free beer here:

https://www.homebrewersassociation.org/homebrew-recipe/gluten-free-chestnut-beer/

It would seem that chestnuts contain plenty of starch, but low quantities of the enzymes necessary to convert the starch to sugar, so the above recipe uses amylase to artificially provide this starch conversion. I would imagine the traditional Italian chestnut beers use an addition of normal barley malt to supply saccharification enzymes.

Thanks Michael. I don't know why one image is on strike. My Samsung tablet says it can't find the page, but this is pure laziness as It appears as expected on my desktop (both using Firefox).

As for the redoubtable Mr. Green's squiggles, they're all Greek to me...

In 3d computer graphics objects exist in a space defined by the cartesian coordinates X, Y, and Z.

If you want to map a texture* onto an object you generally won't get satisfactory results if you use XYZ coordinates - imagine you want a chequer board effect on a cylinder, simply projecting a chequer board pattern in the XY plane (say) will work OK-ish if viewing from XY, but the texture will be all smeared out round the sides.

So what you do is 'unwrap' the surface of the object and lay it flat (simple for a cylinder), then you can project your texture onto it onto the flattened surface. The coordinate system used for these texture projections is defined as UVW (to distinguish it from XYZ). In practice, W isn't usually used and you use the UV space which is a square, 1.0 units in each direction:

Unwrapping a cylinder is easy, and the 3D program can do this automatically; more complex shapes, for example a human head, require a lot of hand work to unwrap and sort out into a pattern which can be painted. It may appear to bear little relationship to the 3D object.

This is a texture map for a head. You can see it's been cut up into bits like a dressmakers pattern:

And this is the head it was painted for:

* A texture being an image whether photographic, painted by an artist or generated by some semi-random programmatic process

I believe you can get nitrile or similar type gloves which are guaranteed to split rather than get wound into machinery - I don't fancy the idea myself, but I guess if you suffered from some sort of severe skin condition they might be worth looking into.

I agree, brass splinters are horrible. I do find though that using a tool with no top rake (side or back, i.e flat) produces less aggressive chips - and it isn't prone to digging in, and gives a good finish

Edited By Andy Stopford on 14/07/2023 20:32:27

Commercial espresso machines have a pressurestat to cut the electricity or gas supply when the boiler reaches working pressure. When the machine is switched on from cold, the pressure will rise fairly rapidly until the pressure reaches the cut off point, however it won't be at working temperature, it's just the air trapped in the boiler causing the pressure rise, and opening the steam valve will give a brief and disappointing hiss and the pressure gauge will fall back to zero.

It's thus necessary to bleed the air off by opening the steam valve a few times to allow the water to heat up to whatever temperature it is that gives the working pressure (1 bar -ish).

Strangely, if you leave it for long enough without doing the air bleeding, it will sort itself out and come up to working temperature and pressure. I'm not sure what happens to the air in this case.

Published in 1949, probably started during the 2nd World War, but mostly written after the war when Orwell was convalescing from tuberculosis on the island of Jura.

One thing to be careful of, after reading all the (entirely justified) warnings above about old lathes, is assuming that there is some fault with the machine if it doesn't do what you're expecting. Not turning parallel is probably number one for this. It may be that the bed is worn, but it may also be lack of experience on the operator's part. I certainly spent much time fooling around making test bars and the like before realising the machine was fine, it was me not appreciating how the workpiece can deflect under load, etc.

So, read books (I'd second getting Sparey), and also check out some of the stuff on YouTube - there is of course much nonsense there, but also genuinely useful advice from real experts. Joe Pie's channel is particularly good.

I didn't really see the point of a lathe DRO until I had one!

The saddle reading is the most useful for working to a value, the cross slide one I mainly use as a reminder - hit the zero button before winding the cross slide back out of the way for taking a measurement or whatever, then you can wind it back and know you haven't accidentally overshot to the next major graduation.