Member postings for Stephen Benson

Very Jealous excellent quality kit Donald De Carle is the author of the following very useful books

"With the Watchmaker at the bench" would be my first choice

"The watchmakers lathe and model engineers lathe a users manual" would also be helpful and much easier to find

Well Wilding's Small Weight driven Tower Clock uses Mod 1 throughout, has large gears; is certainly impressive and not difficult to build.

Smaller modules effect size which in turn reduces the power requirements which then allows for more wheels for longer running but does not improve the accuracy by a huge amount.

Edited By Stephen Benson on 02/02/2015 08:55:54

Thanks for the info just bought both mags from PocketMag and downloaded Colin Ushers excellent program so my Cowells lathe is going to get an upgrade.

When a "brand" is controlling the quality then Chinese goods are the best in the world when they work through distributors it seems to be very variable do ARC Euro trade still strip and rebuild their Chinese imports

I had to check this out as I own a lovely 9b 1943 South Bend and would never part with it except for one of these

http://www.southbendlathe.com/products/lathes/SB1001

Varable drive, taper roller bearings, toothed belt drive but kept all the other features standard brilliant

Come on guys does there must be a few more ideas, does anybody have own a Sherline or Wabeco will they comment?

I have a Cowells and like Myford they have done almost nothing to modernise either the lathe/mill or production techniques as far as I can tell it is a shame when a great product does not move with the times people expect more now variable drive,proper spindle bearings, CNC upgrade etc etc

I have had a Chinese lathe (Chester Conquest mini lathe) and there was no pride of ownership too much plastic, burrs poor castings and paint dodgy electronics ( it was a few years ago now) but I did manage to turn quite well with it.

If I was starting form scratch for my size of work (clockmaking) Sherline seem to fit the bill heard nothing but good reports UK distributer is

http://www.millhillsupplies.co.uk/sherline/

For larger work I would be looking at  Wabeco they seem to be for me to provide the best combination of cost and quality

Edited By Stephen Benson on 23/01/2015 12:59:06

Cheap DRO's do not like cold damp garages first the battery connect ions go green an easy fix but the soon after they just play up intermittently. I ended up taking mine off and refitting the ruler and pointer system much more reliable.

Steve

Does that help or hinder condensation? my guess is it would would increase humidity but it would be nice to know

This is something I do all the time just remember 0.040 = 1mm and 4 thou = 0.10mm and use a metric micrometer.,my mill and Cowells lathe are metric but my larger South Bend lathe is imperial

When I was an apprentice one of the gaffers would often say "never put your fingers where you would not put your c**K "

Sadly I ended up picking four of his fingers out of the swarf tray of small Colchester lathe when he put it in reverse while holding the chuck key. He was explaining something to me and another apprentice at the time we certainly learned a lesson that day. They managed to reattach them but they were never the same.

Edited By Stephen Benson on 28/09/2014 19:13:10

My Downham Jig borer is designed to sat at with everything to hand **LINK**

My Emco vice is excellent a real quality item worked in engineering all my life and this little beauty performs as well if not better than any vice I have ever used. This is after buying it second hand and giving it 10 years of abuse.

Edited By Stephen Benson on 09/09/2014 13:33:17

After spotting this thread I got worried and tried to access my mags offline (win7) and the viewer just crashed so spent some time with primopdf printing to PDF via sIlverlight all the articles that would interest me now or in the future the append function of PrimoPDF is very useful so when a new digital mag is available I can just append.

This is actually the best way to store and access interesting articles so this restriction has forced me to do something I should of been doing anyway.

Paper copies are great if you have loads of space and a understanding wife I have neither she just about tolerates my keeping every issue of Clock magazine in the upper cupboards of our Static caravan keeping ME MEW as well would be too painful to think about.

Edited By Stephen Benson on 03/09/2014 15:47:10

Edited By Stephen Benson on 03/09/2014 15:50:31

Edited By Stephen Benson on 03/09/2014 15:51:22

I have a Cowells and I believe they are the only wholly British made lathe available today my Lathe with a Newton tesla conversion **LINK**

Cowells Website

**LINK**

The issue was never the fact that the drawings were in imperial the problem for me was that fact that they are all in fractions and incremental.

It would very easy to lose the fractions and replace them with imperial decimal almost every customer has to do this for themselves as evidenced by this thread I would guess very few mark out the castings as the designer intended.

Slightly harder would be to make the dimensions come from a common datum I agree to make them metric would be impractical without a redesign but the longer they put this off the more customers they will lose in my opinion as already mentioned Stuarts are largely ignored by Continental Europe and of course the biggest new market is China which has always been metric.

Edited By Stephen Benson on 01/08/2014 12:34:41

That is good to hear the castings must be flying off the shelves at Stuart Models with all their customers perfectly happy to convert their drawings dimensions to decimal imperial, does not follow any business model I am familiar with but I am pleased to be proved wrong.

I worked in Drawing Office for a time and was tasked with getting the Draftsmen off their boards and on to computers it turned out to be much easier than you would think as they could see the advantages, production trebled in a matter of weeks. One of the thing we were very keen on was that they should make it easy for the machinists to read and use no calculations should be done on the shop floor everything from a common datum making use of the digital readouts all the machines had so I guess I am a bit more sensitive to bad drawings than most especially as I know how quickly they could be redrawn.

Edited By Stephen Benson on 31/07/2014 10:14:24

I use www.pocketmags.com you store the mag on your computer and you can access online its cheaper to also the print quality is excellent.

a bit tricky to find the MEW and ME they are in the DIY section strangely 

Edited By Stephen Benson on 30/07/2014 20:03:30

Excellent video great quality and very clear explanation you should be on the telly