Member postings for Baz

+1 for the butane heaters, I have a 20 year old one for emergencies, it lives in the garden shed in the summer and gets put in the house during winter. I always keep a couple of full gas bottles for it so it’s always ready to go. We are fortunate to have an open fire in the living room and I keep a supply of coal ready just in case.

We used to get lots of power cuts, just ours or half a dozen houses until a couple of years ago, the lights were flickering all day so I phoned SSE and they sent an engineer round to check our supply, they discovered that we had no neutral, just live and earth, immediately they turned us off and traced the fault to their cable in the road, a generator arrived and we were on that for three weeks while they dug loads of holes all down the road. Cannot complain about the service from them except perhaps that they took away my 100 A fuse and replaced it with a 60 A even though I complained. They assured me sixty amp supply was more than enough.

Bloke from alarm company came round late last year to service house alarm and noticed the key safe. He reckoned they can be got off the wall in seconds and then taken somewhere and forced open at the thieves leisure. His advice was to epoxy the bolts in or use rawlbolts.

My advice for what it’s worth is that if you are happy with the first one do the others exactly the same, feeds and speeds are always a guess.

+1 for Warco Neatcut, I purchased two of the 4 Litre at one of their open days, only problem / complaint is that it smokes a bit and has discoloured my autolock chuck on the mill leaving a brown rusty deposit, same on lathe chuck but to a much lesser degree.

At the start of lockdown I bashed out a couple of small vertical gas fired boilers and lagged them with the usual wood strips. The only varnish I had available at the time was Ronseal polyurethane satin so they both got a couple of coats of that. Both boilers have been steamed for the amusement of the grandchildren on at least a dozen occasions and the varnish is as good as the day it was applied, The varnish is turps / white spirit based, not the water based stuff.

Some sage advice from my brother in law “Machining can’t be that hard, we all done metalwork at school”

For a programme entitled Smoke and Steam I didn’t see any of either, not impressed with it at all.

Kasenit has not been available for years, the modern stuff works equally as well and doesn’t seem to give off such overpowering fumes. I think that wherever you buy from nowadays you are getting the same thing. There used to be two versions of Kasenit, numbers one and two, I don’t know what the difference was, I always used number two, I am sure someone will enlighten me before the day is out.

I will start off by saying that it keeps for years, mine is 35 years old and still working fine. I used to do a lot of case hardening back then and bought the stuff in I think 10 kilo tins, For Rob Roy bits a tobacco tin full will do, heat the part up until dull red and dip it into the powder, if powder doesn’t stick it’s not hot enough, heat the component for about five minutes, dipping into powder as necessary and then quench in cold water and jobs done, when all the crud is removed you should have a matt grey surface left which hopefully will be glass hard. The longer the job is heated the deeper the case, if you can put it in a furnace that would be ideal but dip and heat method works well, just depends how long you want to stand there twiddling bits around in the flame, don’t do too much of it indoors as the fumes aren’t particularly good for you.

I would imagine that four of those could easily be made out of a bit of ally bar, six inches of two by two ally should do the job nicely.

As Andrew said earlier the cart is before the horse,we need to know what sized holes and to what tolerance the OP intends doing, let’s all hope he can share the information with us all so we can get a clearer picture of what he is trying to accomplish.

I will just be grateful to get to 80 regardless of the 25p a week.

+1 for it being a Myford item.

Maybe I am just thick but I cannot see an overall length, taper is 3.5mm but how long is parallel 1.8 dia length? Also how deep is the hole ?

Edited By Baz on 26/01/2022 17:40:52

I wanted some tips just before Christmas, went to my favourites to find their site and just got a message saying closed until the spring, the site has been taken down, no idea what is going on, just have to wait for spring to come and see if they return.

Sorry Andrew I cannot help with any dimensions as my machine is the 1 1/4 capacity.

Andrew which size Britan do you have, they made 3/4 and 1 1/4 capacity machines.

In over 50 years on the tools I cannot remember a slitting saw that ran true, they always seem to cut for part of a revolution, if you push them hard enough so they cut continuously they have a nasty habit of going Bang!

Great idea using the small milk tubs, I will remember that. I also use the wooden stirrers, they make great lagging strips for small stationary engines.

Really sharp HSS, drop the speed and increase the feed.