Member postings for Gone Away

That should have been: "the keyboard Backspace key ....."

(I'd put ' Backspace ' in carets and it disappeared. What a super editor. It wouldn't even accept ctrl-c/ctrl-v cut-and-paste to copy the original phrase and amend it. All it copied was the first word.)

Just an observation ... the keyboard key is a shortcut for the "go back a page" button in most browsers.

FWIW

I too have seen the problem where going back a page just nets you the current page again. Usually I can hit <back> several times in rapid succession to get there. I've wondered if some sneaky sites are actually programmed to open twice (or more) in succession when you go to them to deliberately cause this effect. I think that's probably possible and if it can be done, I'm sure someone will do it.

Edited By Sid Herbage on 21/06/2013 00:49:48

Thanks, Stephen, that's very encouraging.

Now I wish I'd had the castings shipped to me when I was in Florida a month or so ago. Shipping of them within the US is much cheaper than shipping to Canada.

Stephen, I'm curious - how much effort does it take to operate one of these things.

Across this side of the pond, theses a set of castings available here (about half-way down) for building a small version which I've toyed with buying but I don't half a lot of strength in my arms these days.

Nor have I on a decent size mill but on a small mill it's quite do-able. It's not, necessarily, that the cutter "stalls" per-se but these small mills can be easily loaded up to the point where their fuse/cb blows and stops the cutter - particularly in high gear.

I think the OP is right to be cautious and allow for things going wrong rather than assuming "it won't happen if I'm careful".

You are not worrying over nothing believe me. Stalling the cutter (and probably blowing the mill's fuse/cb) is arguably much more likely than a power cut and under those circumstances, the pf will continue to drive the work into the stalled cutter.

At that point, several things could happen:

1. If you have a rotating head machine, said head will be forced to rotate out of the way against its locking nut. Recoverable but you're faced with re alignment which is difficult without destroying your setup

2. The pf may simply stall and/or blow its fuse/cb (if you're lucky)

3. Potentailly the pf could burn out its drive motor if you don't get there to switch it off in time.

All of this means that you tend to feel you have to "babysit" the machine. It would be nice if the machine manufacturers foresaw this (particularly if they are the ones offering the pf for their mill) and included an accessory outlet with appropriate switching.

Ask me how I know all this.

I did start a thread on this topic here a while back if you're interested.

Edited By Sid Herbage on 17/06/2013 01:49:13

If you have significant astigmatism in addition to normal long/short sight, then non-prescription single vision lenses probably won't suit and those things usually (always?) come in the same strength for each eye which may not work either.

Can't directly answer you question, Clive, but over here (Canada) I bought the Grizzly power-feed for their WM16- lookalike on the basis that it looked, in the catalog, like another WM-16-lookalike I had from BusyBee locally and it fitted just fine. It looks like the Toolco one.

There's not much to the interface actually. It's mounted to two empty threaded holes on the left end of the table - which you should have and the drive couples to leadscrew by removing the handle and dial on that side.

As I mentioned before in this and another thread, if you happen to stall the cutter under power feed it can be a bit problematic since the machine will stop but the feed will continue.

Edited By Sid Herbage on 15/06/2013 17:34:05

... but not, in that case, an anti-reflection coating. (The anti-scratch has to go on the outside where it negates any anti-reflection coating).

I personally prefer the anti-reflection coating, especially for driving at night, so I forego the anti-scratch.

Varifocals do take same getting used to (as do regular bifocals) since your eyes/brain have to train themselves to automatically look through the right part.Moreover they actually distort the image at the edges which your brain needs to tune itself for. They need perseverance at at first and I've known several people who simply gave up.

I've had mine for years and they are generally fine in the shop. For fine work (electronic soldering etc) I swap them for one of several pairs of cheap, single dioptre reading glasses (in different strengths depending on what I'm doing).

They (varifocals) are absolute crap for watching TV from a recliner! I actually have a single vision pair for that (I also use those for driving long distances - it's more comfortable). To complete the set, I also have a pair of prescription single vision reading glasses which, again, are more comfortable for extended periods.

My varifocals are still used 90% of the time though. I've been through the middle-age variability and my eyesight is pretty stable now.

I echo what Chris says: eyesight is generally relatively stable in youth and "older" ages but in the middle years it often changes rapidly. If yours is undergoing frequent changes, you would do better waiting some years for it to settle unless you like shelling out for expensive lenses.

Nice job George!

There are some very reasonably priced heat-shrink guns around that make a useful workshop addition for small (and not so small) heat shrinking jobs. (As well as heat-shrinking of course).

Edited By Sid Herbage on 07/06/2013 21:24:58

I don't agree that a more "modern" website is necessarily better than some of the older ones. They can be real bandwidth hogs (even at 15 Mb/s) and can take ages to load and there seem to be more and more ways to improperly program them. Many won't work properly (or at all) if you've turned off some of the more contentious browser features that can affect security. Many are just plain jarring on the eyes/ears.

If I want to be in-and-out of a website quickly just to check some information or to grab, say, a pdf that I need, I'd much prefer one of the simpler, older sites. I don't need "entertainment" while I'm at it.

Then again I'm fine with the Yahoo groups too

Edited By Sid Herbage on 04/06/2013 16:14:18

Does anyone have any practical tips for adjusting the leadscrew backlash on these machines? The Grizzly manual covers it in basic fashion but the adjustment screws are pretty much buried and I didn't have much luck on a quick-look a while ago.

I have a DRO and tend to make-do but it really could use some adjustment on both axes.

Sounds interesting, Ed .... could you point me to one?

Andy, I don't have any problem with building something like that - just wondered if there was a better way.

.... Well there is (a better way) as Dustin suggested. That would involve modifications to the mill itself though which I'm loath to do. Also, I suspect, Dustin, that both the mill and power-feed are both fed through one fuse or CB in that case, which is not what I want.

I have this "itch" in my brain about somehow using the same kind of zero volt dropout switches (what do we call those?) that the mill uses, externally to the mill somehow. Can't quite formulate it.

Edited By Sid Herbage on 31/05/2013 22:52:36

My mill (WM16 lookalike) was imported into Canada under approval from the local electrical authority rather than CSA because of the low volumes. Part of the approval required that the original 8A fuse be replaced by a 6A component. I have to assume they knew what they were doing but it did make the mill rather sensitive to any slight heavy-handedness, particularly in high-gear, and it became a nuisance replacing fuses (assuming I had one at the critical time).

I considered replacing the fuse with a circuit breaker but then, rather than modify the machine I decided to do that with an external box with two outlets: a local-breaker-protected (6A) outlet for the mill and a separate outlet for the power-feed that I have on the mill. The fuse on the mill was replaced with the original 8A fuse.

This works very well - except under one condition. If the mill breaker trips during a cut with the power-feed, the feed continues for a second or two until I can react enough to turn it off. Usually, the upshot of this is that the force on the cutter rotates the milling head against its locknut and leads to subsequent re-alignment attempts without tearing down the whole setup to do it properly.

What I need is for the electrical outlet for the power-feed to be controlled by the same circuit breaker that protects the mill such that if the mill trips, the power-feed will shut down too. I don't want to directly run both from one circuit breaker since then it would react to the sum of the two (variable) currents. What I think I need is for the mill circuit breaker to also be wired to the coil of a relay whose contacts switch the power-feed outlet.

Is there a better way? Are there any commercially available devices that will do this?

I've considered doing that to mine (several times actually). However, I have a power feed and the odd time I've pushed it a little too much and had the cutter stall. At this point, the power feed continues for a few seconds until I can summon up the wits to kill its power. Some real damage could be done ..... if it weren't for the fact that the head can untilmately tilt (notwithstanding its locknut).

My ER-25 chuck has the same problem. At the top of the mill there is a tubular nut with flats on it that the drawbar jacks against when releasing. I used to do that nut up as tight as I could and hold it with a wrench when tightening/loosening the collet nut.

That was OK when tightening the collet nut of course. As with all my ER chucks, I don't overdo the chuck tightening - just a little nip - nonetheless at intervals when loosening the collet nut, the top nut would loosen and I'd have to remove the whole chuck and put it in the vice with soft-jaws to undo it.

Then I bought an ER-32 chuck which had proper flats on it which I prefer anyway since the size range suits me better and I rarely use the ER-25 any more.

Edited By Sid Herbage on 30/05/2013 02:08:40

George, do you find that table will actually stay in any raised position during a reasonable-sized cut?

I had one of those before my current 6" and no matter how hard I tightened the clamp screw the angle would always creep during a cut. I even tried viagra to make it stay up.

Boy this has been done to death. Just put ' digital printing ' in the site search engine to see what I mean.

Given the publisher's oft-stated phobia about finding pdf copies of the magazine circulating on the internet, repeatedly discussing methods of getting around his imposed printing limitations (in the publisher's own forums no less) would seem like an excellent way of shooting one's self in one's foot.