Member postings for Peter Cook 6

I have an Evolution chop saw with a TCT blade. I have successfully cut steel bar and angle with it.

BUT there are a lot of red hot chips flying everywhere. So much so that I invested in a small bandsaw which is a far more civilised way to cut metal.

Those may not be webs for catching prey, they may be the remains of the trails spiders leave behind, either as a road map so that they can find their way home, or as safety nets to catch them if they fall.

The Wonders of Webs I - Spider Silk - Field Station (uwm.edu)

Your workshop inhabitants may be mainly feeding on wood lice - mine do. Small piles of carcases in dark corners when I move things!

I took a look as suggested at the pedal steel guitar undercarriage on Google. I can see nothing here that would need the grunt of a Bridgeport or clone. In fact I would be fairly happy making most of those bits (albeit more slowly) on my tiny Sieg SX1LP.

While a good Bridgeport or clone is (I presume) very nice and very capable if you have the budget and space for one (they weigh upwards of 1 ton and take up a lot of space), I would have thought it was serious overkill for the sort of work you are planning.

In your position and with that sort of budget ( remember you need to spend about as much as the mill costs on tooling etc) I would be thinking hard about a Seig SX3.5 with a DRO.

For small (M4-M6) tapped holes in PLA I find printing the thread inside the hole and then cleaning up with a tap more successful than printing or drilling to tapping size and tapping. Metal approaches tends to crack the surrounding material unless you are careful to thicken the walls around the holes when slicing.

I create the threads by drawing a threaded bolt of the appropriate size, insert it into the material at the relevant place, then doing a difference operation. A tap then "finds" the printed thread and cleans up the thread without applying too much outwards pressure.

Napier Deltic? 1940's -1960's.

On the subject of "practical men" vs professional engineers I have just finished an interesting book - The Rainhill Trials by Christopher McGowan - which discusses the relationships and behaviours of the main protagonists as well as some of the technology issues they faced and covers the early development of railways in the UK.

Have you tried moving the clock to a different position in the workshop?

Quartz clocks with analogue hands have two bits. The quartz controlled oscillator that generates 1 second pulses, and an electromagnetic stepper that drives the hands.

Can you identify if the problem is the quartz oscillator running slow when the battery goes down, or whether the hands are missing steps when the step pulse gets weak.

Most quartz clocks stop when the battery gets two weak to drive the stepper - but that is usually an all or nothing fail. If the clock is subject to a significant magnetic field from a machine or power wiring being close by, then a fresh battery may have enough grunt to still drive the steps, but once the battery gets low the stepper may start to miss pulses.

PS a quartz clock with an LCD display  may be more reliable.

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 05/07/2023 15:32:11

Thanks for the replies. The 16mm was turned down from 18mm, and then down to 10 for the spigot, so I am fairly sure they are concentric. They are still on the stock, so I can clock them in the 4 jaw and just check.

The 10mm hole was drilled through the baseplate, and then bored out to 16mm without moving the mill table. My little SX1LP will not drill 16mm in steel, so I had to use the boring head.

Next time I will do as Jason suggests and bore out both holes. I will see if I can get the holes measured with the DTI on the mill, but I will need to centre (one of) the holes as a starting point. I was hoping someone had a neat trick before I start doing that.

It's not actually an issue as the 16mm is the location fit, but I would just like to see where I went wrong - this time!

Thanks again - the finger plate actually seems very useful.

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 02/07/2023 11:12:04

I am making Clickspring's finger plate. I have drilled the 10mm hole in the base, and bored the 16mm hole concentric with it. I then made the bushing holder on the lathe with a 16mm OD, and a 10mm spigot.

The 16mm bushing holder is a good close fit in the 16mm hole. the 10mm spigot fits well in the 10mm hole (from the underside). However the two pieces don't fit. The two holes, or the two diameters of the bushing holder are not concentric.

Taking 0.1mm off the 10mm spigot makes it fit, but I would like to work out whether the issue is lack of concentricity of the holes or the spigot.

Suggestions as to how to measure the concentricity of holes and spigots would be gratefully received

typo

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 01/07/2023 22:01:55

Random thought. Have you looked at the thrust bearings on the handwheels. I have an SX1LP and when new I couldn't get the feel right, either too stiff or too much slop/backlash.

I replaced the plain thrust bearings with ball thrust bearings and it made a huge difference.

I don't know if your SX2 has thrust races or plain bearings - but either way it might be worth a check.

Unless you are going into the demolition business full time have you considered hiring one. My impression is that most builders hire that sort of kit, and the local hire firm probably has a decent range at <£100 for a week.

John types faster than me!

Edited By Peter Cook 6 on 28/06/2023 13:01:55

More likely to be one of the chains of hydrophones the US has deployed in the Atlantic. It used to be called SOSUS (some detail in Wikipedia), but that (now declassified) technology will have ben superseded by something else.

I suspect it will depend on what you plan to do with the mill.

R8 ( and MT) collets are designed to hold specific diameters of material, so If you only ever use a small number of sizes of cutters then R8 ( self releasing) would be better. If however you will be using lots of smaller cutters, then you might want to consider an ER collet system where the collets hold a range of sizes ( and are cheaper than R8 or MT collets).

If you go the ER route, then once the MT3 shanked ER collet holder is installed, you will only rarely need to get it out, and probably will not really notice the difference.

On my small (MT2) mill I usually hold drills in the ER collets unless I am planning a significant drilling session with multiple sizes.

Click spring does exactly that about 2 minutes into this video. Finger Plate Clamping Tool (clickspringprojects.com)

JA, no I don't, but at this time of year it can feel like it. I have a small river running through the garden, We get lots of wild(?) mallards and many families of ducklings. This particular bunch are very unafraid. However the cat is terrified of the ducks.

Problems in the workshop today. Too hot to work with the doors closed, but leaving them open attracts this load of cheeky visitors.

Chase them out and two minutes later they are back. Very noisy and persistent they are too.

The secret is lots of notes and photographs as you take it apart. Then reassembly is just a case of going backwards through the notes.

Probably a good call. With that amount of wear on the escape wheel I suspect wheels lower down the train that transmit the power will be in equally bad shape. On the bright side that will give you lots of opportunities to practice your bushing skills.

There is an interesting download from Sherline showing a technique for bushing clock plates on a small mill developed by Jerry Kieffer. https://sherline.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/2118inst.pdf

While bushing the hole, check the pivot on the end of the arbour. With that much wear in the hole I would expect a badly worn pivot that will need cleaning up. You can smooth it down to a smaller size (as long as it's not too small) but you need to compensate by making the hole in the bushing smaller.

Also remember that in clocks the "fit" between pivot and hole is way looser than an engineer would normally accept. There is a saying " if it doesn't rattle it won't run".

To resurrect and close this thread, to help anyone who stumbles across it when trying to get silver steel to make watchmakers stakes.

Rennie Tool Company in Manchester stock the raw material and explicitly state it's for staking sets ( and priced closer to Bergeron!).

4.7mm (0.185" Thou) Diameter x 330mm Long Metric Silver Steel (BS1407) (rennietool.co.uk)

You probably want to worry less about the chances of interception, and more about the security of the people asking.

One of my pension providers has just let me know that they have been hacked, and some of my personal data “exfiltrated” (i.e. accessed and/or copied) by the hackers.

Lots of reassuring words follow, and a free one year subscription to an identity theft monitoring service! But ho-hum.