Member postings for Bikepete

Neil, were you intending to make/adapt an ASCOM driver for it? Seems it should then be able to interface easily with all sorts of astronomy software, much of it free. One example here.

Looks like a pretty generic power supply unit. Try e.g. the 5V 10A version here and if the dimensions match you should be good to go. Just the first seller I found on ebay, plenty more around...(edit) or for lots more money, a very close match to the original: here.

Edited By Bikepete on 03/11/2015 19:56:32

A 'wet' sub (i.e. no pressure vessel - pilot is in standard scuba/dive gear) is a much less risky DIY venture...

**LINK**

Site is up again

Just found, though, that the email functions aren't working - attempting to get an email for editing an ad gives

"SMTP Error! Could not connect to SMTP host."

and no email comes through...

I attempted to use the form on the site to contact the admins but that gives the same error, hence posting here in the hope that the relevant people will see it .

Many thanks to all involved for their work keeping it up and running.

Pete

This is the D3000:

Must admit I'm curious as to why those bar bed lathes even exist. It just looks like a recipe for vibration - can just picture the saddle bouncing up and down like a trampoline in the middle of those slender, unsupported bars. How can that be better in any way than a properly supported lathe bed? I guess if you are DIYing a lathe with minimal resources, a bar bed lathe may be easyish to construct, but Wabeco can clearly make 'proper' lathes too...

Suppose it might just be cheaper, but I for one would rather have the cheapest Chinese lathe with a proper bed (i.e. structurally sensible, and could be improved for fit and finish) than such a fatally noodle-like design... or am I missing something here?

A bar bed is not intrinsically bad, but it needs an order of magnitude beefier bars! I always quite fancied one of these: Kneller lathe - clearly in a different weight/size league but my point is that the slenderness ratio of the bars is far less...

Second edit - Wabeco want 3800 Euros for the D3000! £2700ish. Colour me gobsmacked.

Edited By Bikepete on 25/06/2015 08:34:16

Edited By Bikepete on 25/06/2015 08:34:40

Neil - String pulling horizontally, pulley diverting it to vertical, (known) weight on end of string...

(edit) ...for a column deflection test, anyway. Wouldn't capture flex in head and table as your schemes with a force applied betweeen the two will.

Edited By Bikepete on 31/05/2015 09:47:44

Edited By Bikepete on 31/05/2015 09:48:10

Sorry if I'm missing something but why are you even considering a joint in the column? Surely you (or he) just needs to buy a new 750mm length of column material. If he wants to revert back, he fishes the old shorter column out from under a bench and refits it....

Edited By Bikepete on 31/05/2015 09:23:57

"(iv) One last point could someone give me some tips on inspecting a used mill?"

Worth a read here and here.

As everyone says - a separate mill is a vast improvement on a vertical slide and, alongside the lathe, almost indispensible for a general purpose workshop. I don't think you've said what else is in the shed but really you may have to start with the lathe and mill and fit everything else around them - sacrificing bench space if necessary, or moving storage so things are stacked more vertically to use less floor space. Good luck!

Great stuff. In that case it is indeed manual and not CNC, and it comes with a very useful vertical slide so you can do basic milling in it.

If it's not too late I wonder if you could ask the seller to have a rummage round for any accessories - there will likely be a lot of smaller items associated with it (but he may not know to identify them). A chuck key for starters, and also maybe a four jaw chuck, steadies, a tool holder (to hold a lathe tool when the vertical slide is removed) etc.

ON EDIT: Just seen on the ebay description it comes with a box of attachments - that's great news.

Perhaps someone familiar with these machines could chip in here with more observations - I've never used one.

Edited By Bikepete on 28/03/2015 20:40:54

Hi Alan, is this the one?

Don't worry about pics Alan, I'll find them on Ebay and post some in a mo...

Hi Alan, hard to say. Does it look basically like the one on that USA website or does it have extra motors and wires visible? Any chance you could post a photo? If it is a CNC lathe it will be designed primarily to be driven from a computer, usually via a control box, with motors driving the motions (though maybe with handwheels as backup). If it is a manual lathe, it just has the one motor (driven by the mains) and you twiddle the handles to get the motions on the slides etc.

Sorry if that is a bit basic - not really sure where to pitch any advice. Are you a complete novice to lathes who has bought a machine and is trying to figure out what it is, or do you know the basics and are just asking about a naming curiosity? What is your experience level, and what sort of an answer are you looking for?

Cheers, Peter

Assuming you're using it on the mains voltage that it's intended for i.e. 240V then there should be no danger of you frying anything. The makers will produce (and advertise) the machine in both 110V and 240V versions, depending on where they intend to sell it - I believe 110V is more common for the USA, while 240V is what's wanted in Europe generally.

You may have looked it up and found this one - which is being advertised by a USA company, who will be the distributor rather than the manufacturer. Look instead at e.g. this pretty much identical machine from a UK distributor and it is 230V (functionally the same as 240V) and as Les says, the motor is specified as "435W input/250 W output".

So if you are somewhere with 240V mains you should be good to go.

It is a Medcalf pump. This is a commercial site but a good reference, with e.g. instructions, spares, how to tell the age etc: **LINK**

Look at what they go for on ebay before you scrap it! "Medcalf pump" should bring some up...

Neil, that advice could do with cleaning up - specificially, it would be less confusing if you deleted your initial suggestion of stripping out tags etc., and all of the subsequent discussion, and just left the post from JasonB at
02/01/2015 13:50:18 which shows how to do it the easy way. For a proper job you could edit it to be self-contained i.e. not referring to other unspecified threads.

In fact, if that thread is supposed to be a useful help reference, I'd suggest deleting all extraneous discussion and just leave the advice posts.

Manual

http://www.emco.or.at/index.php/downloadneu/doc_view/48-emco-unimat-sl-english

Parts list

http://www.emcomachinetools.co.uk/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=LY50fXNfWJs%3d&tabid=260&language=en-GB

Intro vid - the bit you have is actually for drilling not milling it seems - in fact yours looks like a very cut down version.

Edited By Bikepete on 18/03/2015 16:00:13

Edited By Bikepete on 18/03/2015 16:05:54

Mmm, from the page source it seems like your pics are on Photobucket, at:

**LINK**

Way I did it was to use Photobucket's 'get link codes' button, then 'direct' and copy the code there. Then go back to the forum and hit the image button, paste into the URL line, and hit OK.

Looks like a useful milling set-up.

Edited By Bikepete loadsa times, most recently on 18/03/2015 15:49:30

Edited By Bikepete on 18/03/2015 15:51:49

I think maybe it's a bit more sensitive to the graphics performance of the computer it's used on than I first thought. So not quite 'anything that can run a web browser'. It's great on the computer I have at home but here at the office (on an unexciting Windows 7 machine) it won't run at all on Firefox (claiming no WebGL) and only very poorly on Chrome (it renders things, but with glitches, and any movement is very slow and laggy).

Difference is probably that this office PC has an integrated graphics chip (ATI Radeon 2100, FWIW) rather than a separate card.

It won't run on my Android mobile either, but a message does come up saying that mobile use is not supported so that's fair enough!