Member postings for Peter Cook 6

To try and help - on the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words

As Jason & others have said you have the rod in the wrong hole in the top mount. The rod goes through the hole at the back ( as above) not the one you have it in.

The Dial test indicator comes with three possible mounts

A is a 4mm spigot - mounted on the indicator already ( loosening the screw in shaft will let you slide it off the dovetail).

B is an 8mm version - Dial gauges have this size spigot. Slide onto a dovetail and tighten up.

Either of these will be used with one of the holes in the top mount. B will go in the hole into which you currently have the rod, A would go in the one at 90 degrees to that

C are three sets of dovetails onto which you can mount either spigot, or possibly fit directly into the tightening bolt - I can't see from the pictures if the mount has a dovetail or not.

Which mounting point and spigot you use depends on what you are trying to reach!

Hope this helps

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 02/07/2022 17:53:15

Thank you for the idea. Drill blanks are something I did not know you could buy - filed for future use. However as Jason says, shaping HSS drill blanks (drilling holes in them and shaping them) may be more work than thinning down a bit of silver steel.

I am also not too sure about using HSS as a punch given my ability to chip the edges of HSS lathe tools!

A cheaper source of material may be to buy some old punches off Ebay and anneal and reshape the tips

Thanks again.

OK 3/16 and time on the lathe it is.

Phoenix only offered 3/16 not 4.70 special.

Raptor supplies wanted £16.70 each for the bars, £63.00 shipping and handling plus Vat so £115+ for two items totalling US$12.50 at McMaster-Carr.

They wouldn't want 12 SWG which is as you say 2.65mm diameter.

No 12 piano wire (AMWG - not AWG my mistake in the reply post) is 0.75mm

They would want #12 Stubbs steel wire guage an old and probably obsolete wire guage. Not to be confused with Stubbs Iron wire guage. The Stubbs #12 steel is 4.7mm. This from a K&D catalogue of staking tools dated 1910.

They seem to have been the instigator of such devices, and everyone copied their standard.

Edit - the metric to inch conversions presumably use the US inch rather than the UK inch - they were different at the time, only standardised to 25.40mm in the 1960's

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 29/06/2022 18:27:00

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 29/06/2022 18:28:42

Thanks for the feedback. McMaster-Carr has exactly what I need and at US$6.29 for a 3ft length! However they don't ship to Europe.

Bill, I have asked Phoenix for a quote for a couple of 1 Metre lengths, and have also asked an outfit called raptorsupplies who claim to supply any McMaster-Car part in UK. Hopefully their prices will not resemble their name!

Hopper - taking a bit of 3/16 down is my fall-back position, but if I could get the material for anything like McMaster-Carr's price I would do so in preference.

Jason, not sure 12g piano wire is the same wire guage - all the suppliers I can find make 12g = 0.75mm i.e. AWG rather than Stubbs.

Niko, there is a bit of a discussion about the reason behind the size used at

https://mb.nawcc.org/threads/identify-staking-punch-and-size.135442/post-1048863

Thanks again.

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 29/06/2022 15:18:44

Does anyone know where I might get some Stubb's #12 (4.70mm .01850) silver steel rod.

I have acquired a partial staking set and would like to make a few new punches.

The holder takes 4.70 diameter punches. 3/16 (4.7625) is too big. New Bergeron punches are 4.70mm, so it must be available.

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 28/06/2022 21:28:10

Random thought about ring capacitors. Some of the old ADSL filters (the ones fitted between phones and the line) contained their own ring capacitor. Newer ones (as far as I know) don't - on the assumption that modern phones only use two wires.

If you have an old ADSL filter in the junk box, try putting it between one of the phones that don't work and the Virgin adapter.

It sounds as if the line is not delivering enough voltage (70-90v RMS AC) to cause the phones to ring. The Decor phone may be more sensitive and operate at at a lower voltage than the other 3.

I don't know where the ring voltage is generated by Virgin. On BT lines it originates at the exchange. I have a VOIP adapter (ATA) in which the ring voltage, frequency and cadence can be adjusted. If I set the ring voltage too low, the phones won't ring.

I suspect your Virgin hub into which you plug the adapter is either faulty, or needs the programming adjusting.

If you can. hook a multimeter across the phone lines, in parallel with a phone, and call your own number - or use a ringback test - to see if you can measure the ring voltage

Also try the Maritime museum at Greenwich

They have a lot of records of ships chronometers - they used to test (Royal observatory) the Navy's chronometers and still have the records.

I didn't think of it, to give credit it was Clive Hartland's suggestion (post 2).

The replacement spring is definitely "stiff", however I have used an online beam calculator as a check. Treating the circlip and the original as simple cantilever beams where the length is the arc length of the thin parts in both cases, and using the true cross sections, it transpires that the circlip ( thicker but longer) has about 15% more deflection than the original for the same force.

That said, in answer to ega's comment about the relative strengths, the mainspring is big. The barrel is 42mm wide and 62mm in diameter. I haven't had it out (yet!), but it's probably .45mm thick and about 3 metres long! It scares the living daylights out of me to think about the forces involved when fully wound.

Just to report back, and in particular to thank Clive for the idea.

44mm nominal circlip arrived and has been fitted with the pins to make a replacement spring.

Seems fine, fits the inside of the wheel perfectly. Some quick math using an online beam calculator suggests it is not far off the original in stiffness. It will be tested when I get the clock back together.

Another vote for an Ender 3 Pro. I use mine just as it came, out of the box. A bit of care assembling to make sure it was all square, and regular bed levelling keeps it working fine. Cosmetically what I produce is not brilliant, but as I use it for functional items (boxes, racks, covers, mounts for bits of electronics and even a pulley set for my watchmakers lathe) it meets my needs well.

typo

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 16/06/2022 23:13:43

Thanks Clive, I had not considered a circlip as the basis. A 45mm circlip has an external (unsprung) diameter of 48.5mm which is close. I will go and see if the hole alignment can be made to work.

I am still working on my Congreve. Having disassembled the fusee for cleaning, I discovered the maintaining power spring, has broken. It's a very strong spring!

My chances of sourcing a replacement are probably vanishingly small and I don't think any repair I could manage would be sufficiently strong. It appears to be steel (its magnetic), 1.8mm thick. The spring section is 2.75mm wide and the recess in the great wheel is 48mm in diameter and 2.5mm deep.

The spring does not appear to be hardened - I can mark it with a file. Is it likely to be mild steel, or more likely to be some sort of spring steel? How can I tell?

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to make it, and suggestions as to what from. One idea being to cut it out of a steel disk on the mill. Will mild steel be a problem? The spring only gets flexed once a week when the clock is wound.

Credit card acceptance fees are not allowed in the UK. However over here you would have been hit with $120 worth of the dreaded VAT.

My understanding is that although the underlying technology Virgin uses is VOIP, they do not make available the necessary SIP usernames etc that will allow customers to connect third party VOIP phones to the Virgin home phone system. See

Solved: Configuring a Grandstream VOIP Phone - Virgin Media Community - 4599513

The virgin router provides an (RJ11) telephone socket to which you connect a standard analogue phone. The router does the conversion to VOIP, presumably with the appropriate configuration built in. Without the SIP etc. data you can't use a standard VOIP phone to access your Virgin home phone. A VOIP phone will work over the broadband to other providers.

New home analogue phones should work, typical DECT ones for example, if you plug the base station into the Virgin router.

My quote went up this year - a bit! But this is the first year in living memory that the cheapest quotes on the meerkat were more expensive than the renewal quote.

Every year in the past I have used the meerkat quotes to either negotiate the renewal offer down to something sensible, or swapped to a new policy.

I have no idea what you get for that sort of money, but I have several (in a couple of sizes) of the £20-30 ones which look the same and are available from amazon and the auction sites. They work well for my purposes.

I keep the arm from one mounted on a tool post on top of my Taig lathe headstock with a DTI attached. It works extremely well for centring in the four jaw.

Edited for typo!

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 12/06/2022 17:53:59

Openreach lines use 17070 to access the test facility. Reads your number back to you, then option 1 is ringback, 2 is quiet line 3 is fast test and 4 is fast cleanse - see the website below for what the last two do.

This site Useful shortcodes when diagnosing UK phone line issues - BeachyUK suggests 17070 should also work on other networks, but I can't test that.

One comment on here (#14)

https://www.mig-welding.co.uk/forum/threads/aldi-special-ferex-belt-sander-any-good-for-deburring-steel.103376/post-1621157

suggests that the dust extraction is via the body of the machine wherein in the motor. That may be why the y preclude its use for ferrous materials.