Member postings for the artfull-codger

My favourite is cellulose thinners, I use it for thinning various paints for spraying with of course,& cleaning all sorts of oily filth off machines, it dissolves some paint finishes so you've got to be carefull & there's nothing better for cleaning paint brushes out. turps sub & white spirit don't come anywhere near for cleaning paintbrushes.

Well done Vic, really interesting, the company I worked for had a rolling mill in darlington [darlington & simpson rolling mills rise car darlington] when we did work there we used to watch the blacksmiths making tongs/tools for handling the rolled sections,I still have a couple of pairs that I use in my foundry. The roll turners had lathes that they knocked wedges in to feed the tool in to turn the rolls instead of handwheels.

Unless you have fingers of a 3 yr old kiddie I can't see how you could be electrocuted as the metal part of the sockets are 5mm or so recessed in the front of the plastic face.

Graham.

Havn't had any nuisance calls for months till this week, same stuff,about your accident sir, I tell them I can't remember it & can you give me the details?,after about 6 calls this week I got a bit tired of being bothered so as soon as I hear the foreign voice I just tel 'em to get a proper job & put the phone down.

45 yrs ago I bought a cut throat razor from our local tool merchants [kayes tools newport rd middlesbrough] a fantastic traditional engineers supply shop that served the local shipyards & engineers on teesside alas now gone, it was £3, 10 shillings, I've used it ever since, allthough I have a beard I still have to shave all round it!! I strop it each time & every 3-4 months a few strokes on an arkansas stone & off we go.

Quite a usefull tool I also have one' but it's air driven from my compressor as opposed to a mechanical drive, not sure which is the best. probably not a lot in it.

I allways used my sievert torch with the appropriate burner & still do but for larger jobs my flamefast beats it hands down, when I got it it had natural gas jets in, I phoned flamefast & they quoted me £30 per gun [I worked in the d&t dept then but they did me no favours] so I tried it on propane & it works a treat, the only thing you have to watch is it's sensitive to adjust but it only uses 2-3 psi & I saved myself £90 for my 3 guns.

I worked in the glass trade for a large proportion of my working life, & hydrofluoric acid was used as a decorative treatment on glass,[it eats glass away] on a lot of your old pub windows/ traditional public buildings etc, our embossers used a combination of hf acid, often mixed with other acids, mica, sand blasting,brilliant cutting & coloured silvering etc & produced some of the most beautifull designs on glass, alas the company we worked for closed us down, & a number of skills were lost allthough some started on their own.

I've got a rapidor with a centre vice & the beauty is you can cut small lengths of metal in it [ no overhang] had it for over 40 yrs I never pay more than a couple of £ for eclipse/starrett blades at autojumbles, you can't cut angles but I have the larger machine mart bandsaw & it's a good machine,their blades aren't up to much but I buy 100ft coils & make my own up with a scarfed & silver soldered joint, my mate has the same saw & it's really been caned over the years making "wrought iron" gates & has never given any bother.

I have a genuine dixon toolpost from a boxford & it was too high for the myford & also the centre hole was too large so I turned a bush for the centre & machined some off the bottom of the body & it was really tough but managed ok with a carbide milling cutter on the milling machine,to be honest I have myfords 4 tool holder on most of the time with an eccentric enginering diamond tangential tool in [my favourite tool], & only use the dixon for any repetition work.

I'd just like to thank you lads for the intrest & help, I ended up mounting the body on a turned mandrel, for concentricity [not that it was really required] & bored it out, then turned/bored & threadcut a piece of bronze & pressed it the body in in the bench vice with some loctite & it's now up & running on the engine.

Thanks for that valuable info Sam, I'll pass it on to my son, he has a couple of them [he loves them!!]

Thanks for the reply John, I thought someone would have heard of it, [hmmnn must get the old "chicken box" out !!]

Son came round yesterday with the carburettor from his seagull outboard, the banjo housing threads were stripped that connects the floatbowl to the body, the brass banjo bolt ok just the alloy body stripped, no problem says I, I'll turn a mandrel & mount it from the other end so it's concentric with the slide & I'll bore it out & loctite a bronze sleeve in & threadcut it in the lathe,then I tried to identify the thread, it's 5/8 x 24 tpi, looking through my charts in various books/zeus etc & finally found it in my machinerys handbook which states it as "unified & american standard fine & extra fine series,it is the extra fine series, what puzzles me is it's a british seagull motor & an amal carburettor, perhaps its another thread? I remember reading in ME an article about seagulls.

I worked in the glass trade for a large proportion of my working life & the silverers were very secretive about the mixes for coloured silvering, the embossers who did all the decorative work on glass with acids/sand blasting,brilliant cutting etc were very secretive about formulas as were the stained glass artists, the leaded light dept wern't bothered, I was only too pleased to show young lads if they were interested which is why I loved the latter yrs as technician in d & t dept at my local high school helping students,after all they're the next generation of craftsmen.

Graham.

Ha ha, really funny, a bit like my old gold star "fires at every lampost" definitely crows about with that welding.

Brian, I used to dress my wheels with a diamond dresser [we used them all the time in the decorative glass trade] dressing all the processing wheels, but now all I do is buy a cheap diamond angle grinder wheel [sometimes for a quid at autojumbles & steam rallys] & offer it horizontally to the grinder & it cleans it up a treat, & it's so cheap.

Graham.

Malc, you might want to check it when she brings you it as I got"Mrs Artfull" to get me some & she came back with borax substitute from the supermarket, & the lass in the local chemists hadn't even heard of it!, I ended up getting it off the internet, I use it as a cleaning flux for brass in the foundry.

Graham.

The belt for my lathe cost me £150 to get made up a couple of yrs ago, [a flat belt for a colchester student,] it's a real good quality triple laminated one so it'll see me out, & I hinged the motor platform & made a rise & fall mechanism similar to a traction engine reverse lever to create a clutch [a real colchester failing not to have a clutch] my old edgwick had a similar mechanism fitted.

Graham.

Thank's for that Mark.

Regards Graham.