Member postings for Roger Best

Hi folks

I had reason to radius a sturdy piece of bar so I exhumed a rotary table that my brother gave me 10 years ago. It was surplus to his requirements, he had another and this was missing a drive gear and handle.

Its a monster, 300 mm diameter; I could only just lift it and I am sure I did myself a mischief loading it on.

The bar was stainless, about 50 years old and work-hardened like **** so after breaking a 7.5mm drill I decided to preserve my end mills and use an angle grinder and file for finishing the ends.

Anyhow the milling machine coped well with the weight, the handles needing little more effort than normal.

The turntable has a skirt on its base that needs to go to get the spindle over its centre but that is not the end of the world and I won't be flood cooling, so the loss of the lip isn't a big deal either.

What I do like is the graduations on the periphery, with such a huge circumference they are 2.6mm apart so its easy to position by hand for most simple applications.

All this fuss to keep the dogs in.

Cheers, Rog

Battery locos have been a great success at Basingstoke &DMES. the club has two of their own and at least one member brings one regularly. All are 5" gauge and can pull a rake of three laden bogie coaches laden.

The performance of each is excellent with very impressive traction.

The member-owned loco appears to be of narrow-gauge outline, it has two bogies with minimal gap between, each axle is driven. It has a simple but very responsive electronic control. It strips down in five minutes with no part weighing more than 15kg, so its very easy to move, no need to queue for the loading rig. I think it is brilliant. If I were not such a lover of steam and if there were not two club locos in the shed I would be building one already.

The other thing worth considering is that you can use Plummer blocks and other simple bearings, or off-the shelf power units so you can be up and running very quickly. No parts going rusty if you only take a couple of weeks.

Its always better to get the ratio right for the characteristics of the motors. Less likely to burn them out.

The weathering looks great on the video.

Its not entirely true to say that Mamods don't get dezinc, compromised boilers turn up on occasion, usually the stationary engines, however compared to the numbers produced and the age of the toys concerned its a low proportion so Mamod's suppliers should be proud.

Some other manufacturers have a dreadful reputation.

Correction:

I found some newer posts on the blog site:

glue-it.com/tag/traction-engine

Thanks guys.

I can follow Nigel's wonderful work now.

I hope he wasn't too put off by this forum.

The format of the page isn't what I remember so it could be something going on there.

Fortunately there was a video hosted by YouTube and that lead me to a number of newer videos.

Nigel Taylor's YouTube home page

(edited after finding new posts on the blog site)

Edited By Roger Best on 16/10/2021 13:57:08

Do you want to run the engine or just admire it on the shelf John?

From a performance point of view I think that it will be OK, copper is a good conductor and although there will be more to warm up it will still heat up the water.

The practical issues are that you will need to make new ends, so its not an insignificant amount of work. On the other hand it is an opportunity to make improvements, like raising the operating pressure, or fitting hedgehog pins or pipes to raise more steam. If you go that way I suggest you use gas to fire it.

However most dents can be removed from a toy boiler, lots of annealing and careful beating can do a great job and filling it with water and putting it in a freezer can stretch out badly crumpled boilers, so please post some pictures and we can assess what is needed.

There are plenty of stories about dents on the Unofficial Mamod Forum

Here is a typical example: Dented MM1

Just noticed this thread in my "favourites".

Looks like I saved the wrong page. Can anyone point me to the blog??

ta

R

That looks to be good quality.

That is a lot of carpentry.

Great discussion.

I have painted brick walls in my workshop and it makes a huge difference. I used masonry paint.

I also have six double 4-foot luminaires and still like some local lighting. You can't have enough when doing fine work in my book, CIBSE says similar but they do have numbers.

Generally you can throw a new fluorescent lamp away, replace it with LED and still be in profit in a few years, the same was true of compact fluorescent over old filament bulbs. LED are also getting cheaper now and come in most sizes, even 2D which amazed me when I bought one.

Cool

What's the best way to preheat a big copper boiler without oxidising it as a gas torch would ? An oven?

Awesome. Great job.

I know most readers will be more interested in steam engines but having driven a similar-sized battery electric engine at Basingstoke &DMES I can fully appreciate both the modelling and the fun of operation that this model offers.

I hate it when people design systems that can't remember what sort of system they are using.

My landline is not a mobile with texting. Neither is it a fax.

My mobile is not a computer, well it is, but doing computer stuff on it is not easy because its pants at it so I don't have it set up for that. So only calls and texts with sensible information please.

My computer is good at internet and e-mail. It is good at managing large amounts of information. It does links to internet pages, so send me an e-mail.

A wonderful piece of art and engineering.

For the record i am going to stick with steam engines.

Simple ones!

Only "many"?

All would be better, surely there are very few men barely worth considering in the same league and 3.5 billion not worth considering.

IMHO 2nd hand but serviceable is worth only half the price of new at best.

This is older, and not a collectors item so far less.

I can't say I read every word.

I did see some very good imitations of severely worn traction engine gears. Modelling to such realistic detail is wonderful.

I look forward to seeing other worn and weathered models.

Car bits are fine.

Static load is 1/2 tonne loaded, dynamic load is a lot more than that - 5X ?

It would help not to build a lever to ruin that, keep the bearing on the centroid of the drag.

I am seriously conflicted about my ZX81 and Sir Clive.

After my O-levels I worked for my Father and Grandfather all summer, a great time to learn and appreciate them, their wit, labour and skill.

I was well paid too and put all of my hard-earned cash into a ZX81 with 16k RAM, heat-sensitive printer and a cassette tape recorder

The damn thing was a disaster, over the next year I probably had a working set for about two weeks, Sinclair was unbelievably slow at delivery, repair and communication.

I was in the first year to do A-level computer studies at my school but 1600 boys had ONE PC, so having your own at home was very useful and mine was dud.

So on the one side its a fantastic product, so far ahead of what came before, (yet not what was to come so soon afterwards) on the other hand the crook took money off children with no intent or means of satisfying consumer law.

Amazingly I still have it, maybe it still works, maybe prices will rise like the price of paintings after the master's death. I do know I need to retrieve that old CRT telly from my mothers loft.