Member postings for Paul Wirdnam

This vice came with a turret clock I rescued from a derelict house in Kent in 2020. For the last 3 years, it's looked rather sad and rusty on my garage floor but this afternoon, I stripped it down, cleaned it all up, and I find now that its rather a nice vice, but there is no makers name on it anywhere. Most parts have "32" stamped on them apart from the vice itself which has "12".

Looks to be very well made and vice jaws are 3" in length. Any ideas who made it?

I bought this 1/2" BSP coupler from my local hardware store today.....it fits perfectly.

Thanks for all your help.

Thanks for the thread size. Do you use the drain?

I also have a tray at the headstock end of the bed, but brass goes everywhere!

My previous 1940's Sheldon had a removeable steel tray between the two sets of feet and the tray caught 99% of the swarf and chippings, so cleaning was easy.

The Warco sits in a tray and is bolted down through it. If I was only cutting mild steel then I'd use a magnet, but stainless steel and brass in particular are a right pain to clean up. So my questions are:

1) The tray does have a drain at the back with a course gauze as part of it. Underneath there is a flange with an internal threat. Does any one know what thread this is please?

2) If I can attach a hose to the thread in 1), what fluid should I use to wash down the lathe and tray?

3) Any other tips for cleaning up sharp swarf without wrecking the paintwork?

Many thanks for any tips...

Very interesting! Which Warco lathe is that? Is that something you did or does it come as standard on the bigger models?

I would prefer it to be a radius dial because that's what I'm used to but I can live with it as-is. If I was using a milling attachment, then it would be awful....

Thanks for all your comments.

Absolutely! It's crazy, isn't it? I'm ok with 0.4 and 0.8 which are marked and I can just about find 0.6, but 0.65 would challenge me.

And yet my 80 year old Sheldon was a Chicago made lathe....

Finally got to do some serious turning on my new WM250V...but have been scratching my head why I can't seem to take the right size cut. Never had this problem during the 40 years of using my old imperial Sheldon....

At first I thought it was my unfamiliarity with metric units and me constantly looking up imperial equivalents in my Zeuss book. Finally dug out my imperial dial gauge and took some measurements as I wound the cross feed table in and out.

So when did the cross feed dial indicator change to show total reduction of diameter rather than amount of movement of the table??? On my old lathe, if I wound the table in by 20 units on the dial, it would move in by 20 thou of an inch and take 40 thou off a diameter.

With my Warco, if I wind the cross feed in by 0.8mm on the dial, it actually takes 0.8mm off the diameter. i.e table only moves in by 0.4mm (or 16 thou inch on my imperial dial gauge in the photo)

I appreciate the latter set-up is more useful. But when did this convention change? Of maybe there is no standard at all...

Thanks Mick....that's good to know about the 250V. I loved my 80 year old 10" Sheldon but it lacked many features that a modern lathe has like electronic speed control, reverse motor, power cross feed.

I put the following table together using data from the bilar website link posted above, so I'm not responsible for the calculations but having checked a few of them with other software programs that do these calculations, they match. I'll be using this table rather than anything in the manual or on the front of the lathe. I have it as a PDF but couldn't find a way of posting a PDF file on this Forum

Thanks for the reply Brian. It has a 2mm pitch.

A quick intro : for the last 40 years, I've been using my WW2 Lend-Lease Sheldon (Chicago) 10" lathe to restore pre-war British motorcycles. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a new metric WM250V and sold the Sheldon to a friend. Time will tell whether I'll regret this......

Got a few questions on the WM250V if that's ok? BTW: I've already read many of the excellent threads on this subject and have downloaded NthreadsP and PICCLOCK's "WM250 Change Gear Calculator" but my favourite is this online tool, **LINK**

1) The marketing blurb said the range of imperial thread is 8 to 56 and I foolishly forgot to see what actual threads fell within that range. Initially, I was a little alarmed not to see 26tpi as one of them in the gear change tables in the manual or on the front of the machine but Googling led me here and all is well. My first question concerns the recommended (as in the facia table) change gears for 20tpi which are stated to be 40 (spindle), any idler, 80-75, 60 (leadscrew). All the above software programs show this combination to have an error of 1.575% and yet another combination for 20tpi of 40 (spindle), any idler, 70-50, 45 (leadscrew) only has an error of 0.012%. What am I missing here? Is it that some combination won't physically fit on the machine? I've now created my own table covering all TPIs between 8 to 40 focusing on the least error and using the minimal leadscrew gearbox on the 250 (A 1:1, B 2:1 and C 0.5:1), this range can be expanded to 4-80.

2) Second question concerns the engagement of the horizontal leadscrew. The 250V introduced power cross feed but this level can also engage the horizontal feed but at half the speed (I think) to the main lever. Is there any reason why I should not use this new lever for thread cutting? If not, it means I can set up the change gears (for example) for 20tpi on the A (1:1) leadscrew gearbox setting and cover 10tpi on B (2:1), 40tpi on C (0.5:1) and then 80tpi if I use this new lever for leadscrew engagement?

3) I have no idea how to use the thread dial indicator when cutting imperial threads on a metric lathe...can anyone advise please? In the meantime, I'll play safe and not disengage the leadscrew....

4) Why does the leadscrew have a groove running down its length?

Man thanks for your help and advise