Member postings for ChrisH

Well yes, I am sure that sometime in the future we will all be running around in electric cars, but I feel at the moment that transition has just not been thought through.

We will be basically be removing millions of small ICE power units from running around the roads and replacing them with cars powered by power generated from static power generators, that is, power stations. Trouble with this is that power generation capacity is near full at some peak power times already, like in very cold mid-winter conditions here in the UK as it is - where is the spare capacity coming from to re-charge all these battery powered cars at those times?

We have shut or are shutting all the coal fired power stations, some ahead of the end of their natural life, gas and oil powered power stations are also frowned upon, and I've read recently that a fair proportion of our nuclear power stations will also be closed within a very few years. Whilst renewable power sources do well, the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow as required, sometimes not at all and sometimes too much, so you need a back-up to the renewables. I don't read anything about a whole new wave of 'clean' power stations being built, so it seems obvious to me that in the future the way things are going we stand an excellent chance of power shortages..

Then there is distribution. All these charging points planned to swamp the country over the next few years are going to need new distribution cable networks installing - again I see no evidence of that planned. Current distribution networks will not cope with the increased power load, for sure.

Charging at home for many is a non-starter, even if the current power distribution in the street and homes could supply it, which many probably cannot. Thinking of terraced houses, new "affordable homes", village houses in the sticks built with no drives, blocks of flats - where are those cars going to be charged?

Electric cars will also produce the same amount of brake and rubber tyre dust pollution as any other car, so emissions will not drop to zero as some think, and as have been suggested already, in their total life cycle will electric cars produce any less climate change pollution than ICE cars?

Cost. Even if electric cars reduce in relative cost to current ICE cars levels, will the all population be able, and willing, to afford to buy new electric cars - I know by then I probably would not, and even if I could at my age would I want to commit to that sort of currently unplanned capital outlay?

Batteries. Where are all the materials coming from to make all these batteries? We could very soon be in the same position as now with oil, where we are running out of reserves and what reserves we have is 'owned' by a small number of possibly hostile countries able to hold the rest to ransom.

We seem to be only thinking UK here, but the same will apply world wide, it will be a global problem.

I do not know what the future will bring. We face an uncertain and probable hostile future. The rocketing world population requires fuel (or energy), food and water and the possibility of future wars as countries seek to ensure that their citizens have enough of all three are high; transition to electric vehicles is part of that equation.

But it needs to be thought through properly before implementation; currently it seems to be little more than just a statement on someones wish list being pushed forward.

And no-one seems to be talking about trucks, farm vehicles, heavy earth moving vehicles and the like.

Chris

Lots of edits to correct spelling mistakes!  Have always claimed any engineer worth his salt can't spell, but try not to prove it!!

Edited By ChrisH on 20/11/2020 10:11:32

Edited By ChrisH on 20/11/2020 10:12:08

Edited By ChrisH on 20/11/2020 10:14:35

I agree the Warco manuals are absolute rubbish if the one I got with my 'Economy' mill/drill from them a few years ago is anything to go by. The Chinglish manual actually made absolutely no sense at all in several places and no way could I even hazard a guess what they were trying to say.

Given that this was a machine that Warco had been selling for 30 years it beggars belief that the company could not have had one of their engineers sit down and write a manual in English that English speakers could understand; it would not take a competent person that long to do and the resultant in customer satisfaction would quickly repay them I am sure.

Grizzly did it in the USA, and thank goodness they did and made them available to download for free; that way I got a manual that was understandable and clearly written, even if parts of it were for the USA market/conditions and thus were irrelevant.

I like Warco and buy their stuff, but this in my opinion is a serious failing of theirs.

Chris

I have been using M-Machine Metals for all my metal supplies for years and have found them excellent, both the lady on the phone or else sometimes the chap (manager?) on the shop floor.

The only time I had a problem with delivery - it was very delayed in transit - and that was the courier acting up.

Once I needed 6mm plate, the plate supplied was just 5.5mm, mentioned it to the nice lady who said something about it maybe coming from the current unchecked batch and another piece would be checked for correct sizing and despatched FOC, and please keep the old piece! And it arrived very promptly. OK, it was only a low cost item, but it demonstrates their application and good attitude to customers.

Excellent service. (Not that it resolves Ramon's issue!!)

Chris

Edited By ChrisH on 01/11/2020 11:31:54

This thread triggered a sad memory:

In an earlier life in the early 1980's I had to condemn a Lancashire boiler which was doing an excellent job. It burnt all the sawdust and waste wood in a sawmill/timber company, providing them with heat/power and saving on waste disposal.

I had to crawl underneath the boiler and do an ultrasonic examination of it's riveted seams along the centre shell section between the two brick pillars the boiler stood on. Every rivet I checked showed multiple cracks in the shell plate radiating away from the rivet hole - caustic cracking they called it, but you couldn't say that from just an ultrasonic examination.

It was too bad to make a repair so it was a condemn/get a new boiler job. Gave me absolutely no pleasure ar all to tell their manager that.

That would not be a problem in a model boiler with a nice one-piece copper tube shell of course!!

Chris

Welcome back Andrew!

Chris

In all the years I was at sea - 15 - we always called the ship we were on, or in if you were poncy - a boat. Just saying.

An hotel instead of a hotel, after you only use 'an' if the object it refers to starts with a vowel. And so on.....

PC - I don't do PC, for goodness sake, say it as it is. If you are short you are short, not vertically challenged.

Being told I must say "having an ageist moment" instead of "having a Senior Moment". The former is an insult, the latter - I am taking the piss out of myself, and I'm happy to do that. If I don't then someone else will!!

As well as disliking "like" every other word the inability for the young young to describe anything without saying "you know" every other word. If I knew I wouldn't be asking, you know?!

++ for most of the other grumps on here.

All lives matter, not only ones of a certain colour.

People who insist on talking through and commenting on a programme when I am trying to watch and listen to it, and then asking what happened/what did he say........  If you had shut up, watched and listened, you wouldn't need to ask.

Snowflakes complaining about everything instead of just getting on with life, accepting what will be will be, and what was still is what was and always will be as you can't change history, life is how you find it and cope with it and doing what has to be done; how would they have coped when times really were tough and hard, like living through WW2 (not that I did, but then, I don't complain but just "keep buggaring on" as Winston used to say.).

I could go on and on but you get the drift. I have the tee shirt "Founding Member of The Grumpy Old Mans Club" and proud to wear it.

Chris

Edited By ChrisH on 11/10/2020 22:16:00

Edited By ChrisH on 11/10/2020 22:16:47

Steel will burn. On some water-tube boilers, if fired and water levels allowed to drop, the tube can ignite and develop what is known as a hydrogen fire. Trying to put that out with water is doomed to failure, as the water turns back into component parts hydrogen and oxygen gases and away it goes. Saw the results of a hydrogen fire on a little water tube boiler on a ship I joined once - not a pretty sight. Boiler had to be replaced, wasn't worth even considering to repair!  More common on dirty superheaters when overheated with a lack of steam flow through them.

Edited By ChrisH on 06/10/2020 09:30:54

Edited By ChrisH on 06/10/2020 10:00:32

Just for the record, I have a Warco Economy Mill/Drill - just been using it in fact - and for the life of me I cannot see how this attachment from Chronos would fit to anything on the mill or would work. Don't think it is designed for this type of mill at all, as others have posted; avoid wasting your money!

Very expensive item, more than half what I paid for the Economy 9 years ago or so too!

The ones from Gate Tool Services, as said, even more expensive, work on the cantilever beam principal with a short overhang, but they would not fit the Economy mill as it's quill diameter is only 83.80mm and the attachment is to fit quill diameters of 85.725-86mm diameter. And they weigh a ton, 12kg for the smallest one one, do you really want that weight hanging off your quill?

You could get a load of other tooling and/or materials, or a good DRO system (if you haven't already got one for the Economy mill), for that sort of money! Just saying.

Chris

So, Plasma is leaving because he was upset by thinking the moderator was insulting in the way he replied.

Looking at what the moderator actually wrote, I thought he was spot on and not insulting at all.

People sometimes need to think before they act!

Nir also looks as if he has an expensive 3 axis DRO fitted to his pillar drill; I have the same DRO but fitted to a mill/drill, and absolutely love it. Luxury indeed!

But is this DRO inappropriate for a pillar drill? Or over-kill?

If it were me, and such kit expensive in an expensive world like Israel seems to be, that DRO would be fitted to the Stig where perhaps its expertise would be better served.

Just saying!! Merely a suggestion, an observation,

Chris

I've been using M-Machine for for my stock supplies for several years and always found they give excellent service too.

Chris

I remember back up to the early 1960's our house had no central heating - we then moved to one that did - but the heat and hot water was supplied by a coal fire with a back boiler in the dining room, the main source of heat all autumn, winter and spring. That fire was never allowed to go out, you 'banked' it up with coal dust last thing at night so it lasted until the morning. Only very occasionally would the fire in the front room be lit but that was for aduts only, us kids realy went in there. A paraffin heater in the hall and another in the bathroom took the chill off the rest of the house. Jack Frost on the bedroom window was the norm. Getting dressed in the morning was a very quick affair!

Trolley busses in Brighton until the early 1950's when they stopped running them, they were so quiet, I loved them.

You used to go to school regardless of how you felt, ie unless you were actually dying, or unless you were so stricken you couldn't get out of bed, or you had something considered highly infectious like measles or chicken pox, no skiving off because you felt like a day off - how would todays snowflakes coped? And you walked or cycled the mile or more to school each day in all weathers regardless, carrying your satchel with all your books in, no soft run in mummys car back then.

Dad had a pre-war car in the late 1950's, on one Chrismas Boxing Day, waiting for Dad to get the car out to go to Great Aunts for the day, after ages he came in and said no go, the engine had frozen, despite a paraffin heater and a blanket, both under the bonnet. That was the end of that car!

We had inside toilets and bathrooms, the houses were 1930's built, but I remember even in 1970 being in a house in 'Sunny' South Shields with the toilet at the end of the garden, great in the dark and rain.

The change to decimal money in 1972 (was it) was a great rip off. The sensible solution would have been to call the ten shilling note the 'new' pound, a bob would have been ten pence instead of twelve, ten ten pences would still have been ten shillings or a new pound, we wouldn't have had the inflation and rip-off we had and the elderly wouldn't have been so confused - explain to an 80 year old that the penny she has in her hand is not what it was and is in effect 2.4 new pennies. The ten bob note to become a dollar is what Australia and New Zealand very sensibly and painlessly did; it was suggested in the UK but the idiots in charge said no we must have tradition, we must retain the pound - then years later the same idiots or their successors suggested we did away with the pound and swapped it for the Euro!

Rationing - as a kid if I was very lucky I might have a sixpence now and again - at very long intervals!! - to go into a sweet shop and it felt like all my birthdays had come at once that day, then decisions decisions, what should I buy, the luxury of it, but I don't think sweets were rationed but everything else food wise seemed to be. I remember you had very simple meals, filling meals, to keep you going, you were usually hungrey, and you eat everything on the plate and any 'seconds' if it was available. Eating a plate clean is so ingrained in me I do it to this day. You certainly would be a fussy snowflake at the dinner table back then, you would have starved.

Chris

What can you say but WOW!

What a lovely bit of kit, so well designed and then so beautifully made. Following with considerable interest.

Will you be publishing plans for this (in a MEW article perhaps)?

Chris

An interesting reprint from MEW 10, or it should be, in the current MEW 297 of an article to make an Engineer's Level.

However, the original article included several drawings and sketches which were missed out on the reprint, the reprint only showing the photos.

The article refers to the sketches/drawings, talking about, for example, machining faces A, B and C as shown on the drawing or sketch, but without these drawings and sketches who knows what faces the article is talking about. At that point, middle of page 2, I gave up reading, it was pointless going on.

So what at face value should have been a good and interesting reprint, especially as the castings for it are still available, is a bit of a waste of time.

Still, if you are a subscriber, at least it points you to to the original article in the archives, but that really is not the point; the omission makes six and a half pages of the current edition effectively worthless as an informative read.

Chris

Bazyle posts a comment about spelling.

I have long maintained that no real engineer worth his weight can spell correctly through a whole phrase, let alone a whole sentence.

JasonB in his posts confirms my theory. Often has spelling mistakes, but as an model engineer producing superb models .......... am in awe of what he produces! And his experience in machining and advises given are invaluable to many of us less mortals. So no worries about spelling stuff correctly. Just JDI!

Chris

Mathew, glad the link was good. I have had the 'Economy' mill/dill for about 10 years, forget when exactly I got it, and it has served me well during that time.

I have made a few alterations over the years, fitted a DRO to all axis, 3 ph motor and inverter, changed the belt drive to poly vee and fitted power feed to the x axis, and see no reason to change it for what I do, certainly could not justify the expense of changing especially as I got it for only £600 from Warco as they were selling the last few (imperial machines) they had in stock off cheap. SWMBO thought I was mad when it arrived, but it offers a lot of mill for the money and certainly more than I would otherwise have been able to afford at the time.

So enjoy it, realise it has limitations as all tools do, the main one here being loosing tool registration when raising or lowering the head but even that can be worked around.

Chris

Nick - you are quite correct, I didn't see "RF-25" but looking again and zooming in it is quite clear as is the serial number.

I also have the Warco "Economy" mill, but the Warco manual that came with it is completely useless; it is very badly written in Chinengllsh, most of which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever however hard one trys to translate it. Given that Warco sold the 'Economy" for about 30 years it is rather a disgrace that no-one at Warco bothered to sit down and write a sensible clear manual, it's not that it would take that long to do.

Far better is to go on the Grizzly.com website, an American tool supplier. Look for the manuals section and then for the Grizzy Model G1005Z Mill/Drill and download the manual from there. It's very clear and written in English! It is also all in imperial, so if you are a metric man you will have to do some conversions!

Chris

PS the link is:

**LINK**

I concur with Richard, plus there is a serial number on the nameplate - hopefully still legible, and maybe a model number on there somewhere, which would help Warco ID it.

Chris

Hi - and thanks to all who have commented. I actually did write a reply after Colins post, but like an idiot forgot to post it so it is lost. Never Mind.

Quite reassuring that some of you have had iPads and iPhones with cracked screens and carried on no worries for years in some cases.

I think Micheal G's Infixit teardown of an iPad Pro is the one I have got, but the thought of actually stripping it down scares me!

I do like the idea of a screen protector but.

The screen I have is cracked and breaking up in only one corner and mostly on the little black margin there anyway, plus several cracks across the screen, and a screen protector might just hold it all together. If it lasts another 3 years then it will be due a renewal then anyway. I think Apple are quoting about £400-450 for a screen repair over the phone.

I am going to their "Genius Bar" next week with my wife's MacBook Air which has a touchpad problem so will get an upto date quote then, but the screen protector option at about a tenner is looking good at the moment!!

Chris

Calling all Apple Experts! Anyone know anything about iPad glass screens?

My daughter had (I have it now as she's replaced it) a 2018 iPad Pro. Nice bit of kit. Unfortunately she dropped it and it cracked the glass screen. in one corner of the screen tha glass is badly damaged and trying to get out, plus there are a couple of cracks going across the screen, otherwise the screen is OK and the iPad seems to function OK with no problems.

I have booked an appointment with the Apple Genius bar at an Apple store to discuss/arrange a repair of said screen next Tuesday. However, looking at it tonight, and finding the tablet works OK, I am tempted to just pour some glass epoxy resin in where the screen is damaged and call it done and save the cost of the repair (if I am honest!!). I have been told that the repair, if it can be done, is in the region of £450-500, so not an inconsiderable amount

Anyone had any experience of a cracked iPad glass screen and tried what I am suggesting, or some other work around?

Chris