Member postings for Chris Crew

I spent the day on the hacksaw chopping an 8" long piece from an 8" x 20mm steel bar and then making the resulting square approximately round as the basis for an interstitial plate between a Colchester L.0 lathe mounting and a cheap Chinese chuck. It took most of the day, off and on. I then spent the next hour rubbing Voltarol into my right shoulder!

Edited By Chris Crew on 26/03/2021 23:32:51

Personally I wouldn't bother with the expense of a Grip-tru. It is standard practise to do as much as possible on a work-piece in the lathe at one setting, and if possible finish it completely before removing it from the chuck or before parting off. I have removed chucks from the Myford with the work-piece still in situ and remounted the chuck on a Vertex dividing head on the mill for milling flats or key-ways etc. before putting the chuck back on the lathe for a final operation or parting off. It's been accurate enough for what I have ever needed to do in a back-shed workshop but it's only been possible because the Myford nose is replicated on the dividing head. This may not be the case with other combinations of lathe and attachments. There's a way round everything if you just stop and think for while. Just because you are a beginner doesn't make you stupid and your common sense and logic is just as good as anyone else's.

I would have thought that if you bought the magazine the contact details of a vendor would be in the classified ad.? Sellers don't usually hide from potential buyers or am I mis-understanding something?

The angle of the teeth will equal the helix angle of the thread. The imperial Student has a 6 TPI lead-screw, mine has anyway but I don't know about that on a metric lathe. You may have to vary the involute cutter number when cutting what is in actual fact a short slice of a spiral to mesh with the lead-screw because the helix angle makes the tooth slightly wider which changes the involute although I doubt if it matters in this instance as the gear is small and not transmitting any power. All this information is contained in Ivan Law's Gears & Gear Cutting book. Law recommends that you cut a tooth space in one pass rather than nibbling away at it, although you may have to gash it if your machine is not robust enough to take a tooth space out in one go. As you have the original gear to copy you are almost over halfway there, count the number of teeth, calculate the gear blank if you know the DP and set up an appropriate cutter over the blank in the dividing head. I don't know the included angle of the Student lead-screw thread but it will equal to a spiral rack so you may have to approximate the pressure angle of the gear, 14.5 or 20 deg. whichever is the closer.

I can't claim to be any expert on the subject or that I have cut a great number of gears and racks but those I have cut over the years seem to function well enough for the purpose they were intended to serve in a back shed workshop, although I have no way of measuring their final accuracy. If you wanted to cut the splines for the boss, you can do this in the lathe with either a slotting attachment or simply mounting a suitable tool in the tool-post and working the saddle back and forth, provided that you have a method of indexing the lathe spindle. Again, I have cut splines using both methods successfully enough for my amateur purposes.

Edited By Chris Crew on 24/03/2021 00:08:46

Edited By Chris Crew on 24/03/2021 00:14:11

Edited By Chris Crew on 24/03/2021 00:18:13

For my two-pennyworth, mild steel does for most jobs probably simply because I acquired a mountain of the stuff when my erstwhile employer closed its tool room and workshop a few years ago and it is very easy to work with. I have made most things out of it even where other materials have been specified. Of course, it would not do in industry or a professional environment, but in the home workshop where sliding or rotating parts are not in use eight hours a day, five days a week, it is very unlikely that it will ever wear beyond use. The only things that I use higher quality hardening steel on are, obviously, home-made cutting tools. The Colchester rear tool-post I copied is made out of mild steel and works fine for me.

I am sorry that you have suffered this failure, but please don't give up because (only speaking for myself) we all have disasters and learn from them. Also, you are not alone in having to make things fit, it's part of my workshop activities and consider myself lucky that I have the necessary equipment and a little bit of skill to be able to do this. If you are not prepared to splash out on a OEM Myford rear tool post I would suggest that, unless someone has another type to sell you or Ebay is not forthcoming, then your only alternative is to make one. I would copy the Myford myself because, although I am a great admirer of GHT as a mentor and guide, I am not so enamoured of his designs which always seem to me to be lightweight and lacking substance. And before anyone takes a shot, I am not setting myself up as knowing more than the great man himself. It is just that as he was such a superb craftsman I always imagine that his tools were always super sharp and so perfectly honed that they needed very little force to effect a cut. A state of perfection I have never been able, and never will be able, to achieve!

You can copy the the ML7 rear tool-post easily enough, I copied a Colchester rear tool-post out of noggins of mild steel and it works perfectly well for me. In fact if you are anywhere near the middle of Lincolnshire I have more than a lifetime's supply of suitable noggins and you are very welcome to collect one. One thing I would say, again only as a personal opinion through experience and not withstanding the crack in your tool-post, is that if something is going to hold and grip securely, it will do so with not much more than a 'nipping-up' and will not require any excessive heaving on a spanner or allen key. How many tee-slots will have been broken out by excessive tightening by people thinking that this will stop a work-piece or tool shifting? A soft card gasket usually cures a tendency to shift under most cutting forces but if it doesn't you should be looking at other ways to secure a tool or work-piece.

Edited By Chris Crew on 07/03/2021 18:45:17

Thank you all for your views. I am not really tempted to buy one of these machines as I have a Clarkson Mk 1 and I am over halfway through building a Quorn (if it ever gets finished!). It was just that I was not aware that this type of machine existed or whether it was available in the UK. But can I say just for the record that I do not 'adore' Chinese made products and I don't believe for one moment that the wiring would kill me simply because all imported products have to be of a certain standard. Before Brexit products were marked and tested to CE standards and now they will be marked and tested to UKCA standards. All I have stated in other posts regarding the majority of Chinese products is that I have found that they always work first time out of the box and do the job they are designed to do at the price point in the market they are intended to serve..

Every product is built to a price and market entry point including the Clarkson/March machine, and other no longer available British machine tools and accessories, which if viewed from a super-critical standpoint would all leave attributes to be desired. The Clarkson, for example, relies almost entirely on the judgement, estimation and skill of the operator to obtain satisfactory results. Maybe a lot of us would like to have a £1,000 Jones and Shipman rotary table or tilting/swivelling vice, which I doubt are even manufactured these days, but we have to either settle for the imported versions, which do exactly the same job, on the grounds of both availability and price or go without.

I know it rankles with some people that Britain is no longer a leading manufacturer of the products we need to buy and are looking for reasons to decry imported goods, often unfairly in my view. I can almost understand that because the British manufacturer that I worked for was put out of business by the Chinese competition in 2005 and I lost my job, so I too have every reason to feel aggrieved. But that doesn't make the standard of the Chinese product unacceptable per se, or the British product inferior. It just means that the customer declined to pay the price of the British product when offered an alternative which is what, I imagine, happened to Myford at Beeston, Tom Senior at Liversedge and other engineering manufacturers who either disappeared altogether or moved into other markets like Boxford or Denford where they stood a chance of survival.

Notwithstanding the above, I am very grateful to everyone who has taken the trouble to respond and offer their advice which is respected.

Edited By Chris Crew on 06/03/2021 00:02:19

I found this company and its products by chance. These look very interesting and useful machines. Does anybody have any knowledge of their price and availability in the UK? I suspect there will be those just waiting to condemn them as just more 'Chinese rubbish', but I would possibly be interested in acquiring one if it is within a reasonable price range, which most Chinese machines seem to be.

The video is in Chinese so I have no idea what the guy is saying or what advice as to use he is giving and no idea how the machine may work. Take a look and see what you think.

This is the company:-

https://grinder.business.page/pc/End-Mill-Grinder/endmillgrinder?hl=en&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIu-KXmK-X7wIVKKHtCh3uhQ2cEAEYASAAEgIHJ_D_BwE

This is the video:-

https://grinder.business.page/p/GD-313A-Drill-Mill-Cutter-Composite-Grinder/GD-313A?hl=en&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIu-KXmK-X7wIVKKHtCh3uhQ2cEAEYASAAEgIHJ_D_BwE

There will be other pages to find along these lines and it will be interesting to hear what others think. These machines are new to me but others may know about them already.

Edited By Chris Crew on 04/03/2021 19:50:08

It isn't junk and it should work fine by the look of it. Have confidence once it starts cutting and keep it cutting with a goodly amount of coolant/lubricant on steel. The speed should not be so slow that it 'grates' and not so fast as to make it 'scream'. Keep pulling the blade into the cut with a steady even pressure once you start. The cutting should 'hiss' just like on any other turning job. In my opinion the tip of the blade should be set a tad above centre height, but that's up to you as some people don't agree. Welcome to the Happy Parters' Club!

(PS. I use the cheapest soluble oil I can buy from the local oil merchant and dilute it 20:1 with the water added to the oil and a dash of Rocol anti-bacterial treatment. If you buy a 5L container of oil for about £20 you will almost have a lifetime's supply. It works for me, I can't speak for anyone else)

Edited By Chris Crew on 03/03/2021 02:49:45

I am dreading the lifting of the lock-down. It's going to mean meeting other people again and having to try to appear sociable and affable. Dammit!

As someone has already stated the Myford OEM rear tool-post only has one tee-bolt although it is keyed into the tee-slot. You should be able make a suitable tee-bolt in about 10 minutes flat at the most, with the end properly screw-cut too if you are properly prepared beforehand. I always set a rear parting blade a fraction above centre-height, using a bit of common sense when it comes to judging how much. My reasoning being that if the tool has a tendency to dig-in it will be forced out of the cut rather than be dragged in by the rotation of the work. I always use lashings of coolant on any parting-off, say above 0.75", and I have very little trouble. Obviously not in a Myford, but I have easily parted 6" gear-blanks in a Colchester. In cases like this I let the Eclipse type blade out of a J&S type tool-holder in stages of about 0.5".

One thing some people don't realise is that a properly designed lathe's cross-slide is not set at precisely 90deg. and this most certainly applies to the Myford because, when it was the true Myford at Beeston, their technical manager told me so before anybody questions my assertion. This is so shaft ends are always faced very slightly concave so that they will sit square in the bottom of a hole. This slight skewing of the cross-slide is the reason why a slight lateral flexing in a parting blade is no bad thing and helps to alleviate jamming. It is also the reason I personally much prefer the 'eclipse' type of blade and holder with its overhang providing the necessary lateral flexibility. As I said, I have very, very little difficulty in parting-off most diameters, so I must be doing something right?

Edited By Chris Crew on 02/03/2021 08:12:48

The type of 'electric' barrow that has the facility to climb stairs that some have mentioned is called simply a 'stair-lifter'.

Having had some experience of using these items when handling large and heavy pieces of telecommunications equipment, unless different types are available specifically designed for moving machine tools, I would emphatically advise against trying to use one of these devices.

The reason being is that the item you are moving has to be inclined to the angle of the stairs beyond the point of no return, although obviously the device is designed with stabilisers which arrest complete toppling. It does not lift the load vertically from step to step. We always tried to use at least four trained men when moving kit in this way, which weighed anything up to a ton, with two above and two below. Even with a team of this size it was always a struggle without its inherent dangers and every precaution, industrial PPE etc., was always taken. It was always a great 'heave' both to get the kit up the stairs, even with powered assistance, and also to stand it upright again once it had reached the top of the stair or its final destination. It was a task nobody looked forward to having to do.

Without actually seeing the obstacles you face, or the room for manoeuvre you have, I can only describe my own situation (which doesn't include steps) and how I overcame the problems I faced. If you can take some ideas from from my methods that would be the most assistance I could offer. (For the steps I can only suggest jacking the machine up level on blocks and barring it forward to the next step in stages).

My property sits at the top of a fairly steep drive. It plateaus out across the front of the house but the parking area is still on the cant. The workshop is a further 25 metres away at the back of the garden/lawn which is on an incline all the way up. For the smaller machines I have, i.e. a Boxford shaper and a Q&S hacksaw, I had lifted them out of a van with the aid of a light portable A-frame and chain block at the top of the drive but lowered them on to a pallet. I had acquired an old pallet truck in a local auction for £35 with the idea this would be useful for shifting machines By putting two old sheets of plywood on the grass I was able to drag each machine up to the workshop by dropping the pallet to stop it rolling back and placing the previous sheet of plywood in front for the next drag. When at the workshop, I was able to lift and lower the machines on to 1" round stock rollers and lever them into position.

But the main problem came when faced with moving a Colchester Student and J&S 540 surface grinder up there after delivery to the bottom of the drive by the machine moving haulage company whose Hiabb wagon wouldn't fit up the drive. As the drive and grass are contiguous and quite wide, I had to pay a local farmer to bring his Teleporter over to move the heavier machines up to the workshop by slinging the machines under the tines and driving up to the workshop. Again rollers and pallet truck got them into their final resting place.

This was all over twenty years ago now and time has taken its toll on my physical abilities since, sadly, so I have been given the most sternest of warnings by my wife that I must not shuffle off this mortal coil before her, at least not before shifting those 'damned machines' out and leaving her with the problem!

May I add this word of caution, but you probably know anyway, that machines on the move are notoriously unstable and can easily topple being mostly top heavy with a relatively narrow base. That is the reason I strapped them to a pallet to broaden the footprint rather than having the pallet truck directly under them. I learnt the hard way at a previous property with a Tom Senior M1. It was stood directly on to a then borrowed pallet truck and seemed to be stable enough on a level concrete path when myself and couple of assistants stepped away from it to accept some tea the wife had just made. As we were looking at it and discussing the next move it just sort of fell over side-wards tipping the pallet truck with it. Fortunately, it hit a wooden panel fence on its way down, breaking a couple of fence posts, so it was sort of reasonably gently lowered to the ground and landed on the neighbour's flowerbed, preventing any bent screws or cracked castings but which prompted profuse apologies and offers of compensation and repairs from myself to keep the peace. We had to haul it upright again with the A-frame and chain block.

Howard, With the greatest respect we can take this no further, it has run its course as I am obviously incapable of explaining my opinion in a form of words that acceptably encompasses both the practicality and essence of the points I was trying to make on the 'modus operandi' that can be adopted in home workshops, in mine at least. I rather think you may be confusing industrial standards with amateur workshop techniques and practicalities but lets not go there!

Sadly, not being a railway 'anorak' myself, it was a monumental irrelevance to me what the workshop practices were of two railway companies that both disappeared in 1948 and were then integrated within the then BREL. I just got on with the practical education being offered to me at the time which stood me in good stead for most of my life even though I didn't eventually make a career in the railway industry.

Each to their own, as they say, and I am certain that we both succeed to our own individual satisfactions in what we do by whatever means.

No, Howard, I don't want to mislead anybody. You have actually made my point for me because we don't work for Rolls-Royce etc. in our back shed workshops, do we? So standard engineering practice doesn't apply. and I very much doubt if fiddling with bits of paper between the change-wheels of a 'toy' lathe is standard engineering practice anyway. It certainly wasn't when I was in the apprentice training school at BREL in Doncaster in the 1960's. The point I was trying to get across was that all you have to do is apply common sense to anything you are learning to do and applying the standards that you might think are applicable at Rolls-Royce in your back shed with necessarily limited equipment is just ridiculous and could put off a newcomer.

As I have said before, several times, there is no right way or wrong way of doing anything in the privacy of your own workshop, there is only your way! By all means use standard engineering practice, whatever that may mean to you, as a guide and starting point but if it fails, or you don't yet have the equipment to apply it, use your noddle and try something else. Nobody is going to send round Inspector Meticulous to sack you and you will eventually find ways of working that succeed for you and probably for you alone, because we all learn from our mistakes, don't we?

Tony, if you want email me at [email protected] I can send you pictures of my machine with a replacement gear shift knob and what I believe to be an original winding handle, or at least it came with the machine and fits. I have never had any need to shift the gear or change the belt on the pulleys as it does everything I want of out of it on one speed. I just adjust the length of stroke and ram position occasionally to encompass the job in hand.

"What I would say to you Chris, is that if you have never come up against 'Chinese crap' then you have indeed been very lucky so far! The Chinese are a very pragmatic people who will go on making crap for as long as merchants in the west go on buying it,...which they will if people go on buying from said merchants. it's that simple really!"

Bob, absolutely, I agree with that. If I could quote myself "but it does not alter the fact that you have to be very unlucky indeed for a Chinese product not to work perfectly well for the purpose and level of performance it was intended to serve."

Your words put it so much more succinctly. Thank you!

Peter, not my experience I can assure you, and I would hazard that is not most other people's experience either if they were being open and objective. Maybe I have just been very lucky but 80% of the electrical, electronic and mechanical products in my household are made in China, and those that are not will be bolted together using Chinese parts. I would suggest it may be the same for you and with your car whatever else the branding may suggest. So Chinese products, whatever they may be, are not 'just crap'. They are so good and reliable they are making China the biggest economy in the world. I can understand, and possibly agree with, the political fall-out from that, but it does not alter the fact that you have to be very unlucky indeed for a Chinese product not to work perfectly well for the purpose and level of performance it was intended to serve.

Edited By Chris Crew on 26/02/2021 00:00:24

Jeez! You are in a back-shed workshop, beginner or no, not setting up a super precision gear train in the tool-room at Rolls-Royce. You will not notice any difference in noise levels, loading or wear with any common-sense meshing of involute gears. That is the great advantage of involute gears and why they are so universally used. And as for Chinese gears not being concentric they will be as concentric or not as any other hobbed gear, in fact the hobbing process tends to correct any slight eccentricity in the blank. Can we start getting over this xenophobia about Chinese products, everything that I have bought that is made in China from the dash-cam, the computer I typing on to the industrial products I own have all worked first time, every time and worked well. I would suggest this is most people's experience the world over if they actually use the goods or materials in a manner that they were designed or specified for.

I know it hurts some people that Britain is no longer the workshop of the world, and I feel their pain, but I don't feel the need to pick non-existent fault with Chinese products because the fact it is the world, and amateur workshops, couldn't now function without them and haven't been able to for very many years now.

Sometimes I think good old common sense died with the rest of British-owned manufacturing!

Edited By Chris Crew on 25/02/2021 23:38:12

Dear me, I never knew about putting a strip of paper between change-wheels to set the backlash. After over forty years of cutting every thread, external and internal, that has been practically possible on a non-gearbox Myford the change-wheels are in as good a condition now as when I bought the lathe. It's just a piece of pedantic nonsense, IMO.

Edited By Chris Crew on 25/02/2021 22:49:14