Member postings for Ian B.

Just a quick update. I was a dedicated Draftsight user for a long time. Also had the Dassault questionaire a while back Also told them what I thought. Deafened by the silence.

However tried a number of the freebies out and a number of the cheaper paid for systems. I settled on QCAD nearly a year ago and have been very pleased with the whole thing. Yes it is perhap a little clumsier than some of the others but it has proved reliable with little to complain about.

regards

Ian

Thanks guys. I had always assumed that Seig were THE makers. However if you look at Seig and Clarke machines the saddle casting is 'H' shaped in plan. These Chester machines the saddle casting is in fact parallel sided yet the fixing bolt centres for the shears are the same. Dave Fenner confirms but the original design was Russian designed with taper roller mandrel bearings. Why they were changed by the Chinese is your guess. If this grease is as you are suggesting then it will mean a complete strip down to clear it out. The change speed lever has always felt like travelling through thick treacle. By the eay be careful when buying a travelling steady. The Seig ones do not fit Thanks again. Ian

Edited By The Oily Rag on 12/10/2020 17:47:09

I cant find anything at the moment but I am sure that this must have come up before. I am a fan of the mini lathe and had a Clarke cL300M for many years. They all need TLC to some extent or another. Did the whole works with this machine and had loads of fun out of it. Motor and board finally blew and the costs were over what a new machine would cost. Foolishly in a hurry as always with a project bought and new Chester Conquest. Circumstance intervened and two house moves later and the machine was brough out to work on to make it a tractable machine. It required new shears (of laminated shim solid steel variety), three weeks of hard work work hand scraping the saddle to make it sit down even on the bed. Its a long saga as it was out of warranty anyway. You will have heard of the Friday afternoon car, unfortunately I drew the short straw. I drew a line under it and wrote off the money and time. I just gave up and put it at the back of the garden tool shed and bought a Warco WM180. Worked perfectly straight out of the box.

However I now18 months further down the line need to use my Coventry diehead. I already have the original;tailstcok from the Clarke i converted to lever operation which fits the Conquest bed so minor work gives me that problem solved.

The last big job on the Conquest was to change to taper roller bearings in the headstock which had made such a dramatic difference with the Clarke machine. Hauled the machine out of garden shed and started work. I already had pullers and bits made from the first efforts.

From the background we now get to the real meat of the job. Hauled out the mandrel, they come with a real crack once they start to move. It moved like I was pulling it through plasticine. Once out I realised that the headstock was stuffed with a blue coloured grease which is sticky beyond belief, like a very thick glue that does not set. I think Chester machines are sourced from Real Bull and has anyone come across this before. I had hoped to do the job like Dave Fenner and not tear down completely the headstock and gouge all this gunge out. starting again.

Any comments please?

Ian

One thing I will tell you about Martin and is a cause for much of my scepticism of Electrical regulation and that most of it is designed to make a lot of very unworthy people a lot of money

Some years ago we had a new house, purchased when it was just a hole in the ground and being built by a well known national developer. The gas supplier could not maintain a stable supply to the whole estate and all the houses had to be electric only (and this was in a well known South coast city I hasten to add not in the sticks). Additional insulation was installed and the house granted a "Medallion Award" After two winters of not too high a comfort we asked the Board as it was then to come and survey the house for us to upgrade (at our own expense) the heating installation. Board expert surveyor came , we were under utilised (her words) and the installation capacity should be doubled meaning we could run at about two thirds capacity in the efficent parts of the performance curves.

Despite them being the most expensive we gave the work to their own contracting company feeling we would get a better job. Two days after completion I returned from work to find that our house had almost burned down. The outlet for one fixed appliance so recently supplied and installed by "experts" had its outlet reduced to a blob of melted plastic, the wallpaper in hall and staircase charred from just above skirting board to ceiling and charring damage to the ceilings.

All lower tariff circuitry had blown out. A simple check of the whole of the house with a multimeter (of some quality) showed that everywhere there was a dead short between the earths and the incoming neutral. The duty engineer at the Board just gave me a n umber of a call out cowboy to come and make the house safe. This cost over half a weeks wages at the time just for the fitting of a couple choccie blocks. When senior management fo the Board arrived next day along with expert technical supervisor I was told thatr it was now standard practice with all new builds that there was no earth at all. All house earths were now bonded to the incoming neutral and hence at my protestations admitted that they now run just a two wire system and a dead short would always exist between earth and neutral.

At my comments about the uselessness of IEE488 regulations then they just shrugged their shoulders, suck it up its cheaper for us to distribute this way. They redecorated, repaired and replaced as necessary and paid me money effectively to keep my mouth shut.

Never trusted electricians and electrical "engineers" since.

Experience is a very wise teacher.

regards.

Sadly not so Martin. The building is nominally 3 metres by 4 metres and only 2.35metres high at the apex.. It will stand 1 metre from both the boundaries it is adjacent to of our land. All NOT needing any form of building regulation notification except the electrical installation it would seem.

I had planned a proper installation internally with metal clads and conduits and the correct cross sectional cables, earth spike, consumer unit properly populated etc.. Once the "professionals got involved before my holiday to prepare the final specs and quotations this was the end result. The first demand was a submission under Part P. cost £300 in this area for public servants and it is on their own paperwork. Then the four figure sums started to come out. Then no sign- off unless the correct depth of burying and pea gravel, sharp sand, warning tape and so on and a completely OTT 10mm sq each conductor in the SWA cable..

No longer interested. A suitably sized "site" extension cable has been purchased, as said 58 quid today. This can be plugged in when I want to work and run out and unplugged and put away when I finish unless of course one of the experts wants to to tell me that is also illegal as ther will be nothing fixed in the building even the lighting I have designed to hang off cup hooks now,. It must therefore be illegal for me to use the external sockets to use my strimmer, hedge trimmer and drills fixing hanging baskets to the masonry and so on..The external sockets are already part of the rewire certification. Nothing else is needed. I won't bother trying to do things properly again that's for sure.

Thank you for your interest.

regards

Ian

Edited By The Oily Rag on 08/10/2018 19:04:50

I now have a similar one to this, bought for the downsizing exercise. I will have to look into this problem as the bits I have used it for so far have been OK. Never thought of this before as I had a pretty chunky one with the larger machine, a Chinese cheapie I hasten to add yet it took all the abuse I could throw at it. Hand on heart that was a fair bit, hangs head in shame.

regards

Ian

I think Nick is on the right track, It looks very much like a small manometer. The Spirax Sarco company still exists and is very much involved with pressure measurement instruments. I cannot find this exact item however.

regards

Ian

I thought as a postscript to my involvement in this thread I would just bring my thinking and what has happened up to date. My workshop build happens in a couple of days, but on returning from a few days away, I found all my plans for the electrics had to be thrown away.

Insulation is going to have be a main part of the build. The Part P Nazi police in this area seem to be having a go at people with power in their sheds or wanting to do so. A simple installation like the one I wanted which is four double sockets on a ring main and a lighting circuit through a small consumer unit and MCBs is no longer acceptable. Firstly the Building Control Police have to be notified up front with forms and drawn plans before any work is undertaken, I am charged £300 for the privilege of some numpty public servant saying yay or nay, if yay then work can commence. The on cost is then going to be several thousand pounds as the workshop will be 30 metres from the house. I have to have a large steel wire armoured cable buried to a minimum of 750MM (30inches), special yellow warning tape buried just above the cable I cannot export the "PME" house earth, all earths must be isolated at the house end and only connected through a "TT" earthing system at the shed end, it goes on.

However as we have external sockets anyway installed at the time of rewire (fully approved and certificated) on their own ring I am getting a thumping great site extension cable (commercially made and available to alleged idiots like me) and plugging that in using extensions internally in the workshop for my needs. Maximum machine motor 600watts, LED lighting and still have capacity over for a bit of heating as I am told I can use up to 3125Watts, the rating of the extension and the Nazi BC police admit they can do nothing about that. I can only use one machine at a time, I am not clever enough to use the mill, lathe and drill press at the same time with all of them fully lit, oh sorry forgot the bandsaw.

What an insult to all of our collective intelligence by people whose knowledge of O-level physics is probably negligible. So much for safety.

regards

Ian.

All I can add to this is that I have regretted every moment since selling my S & B No 2 fly press. My needs have come down in magnitude somewhat but have planned in for a No 1 in my new workshop. But I only press fit wheels onto axles, make proper louvres in brass sheet, punch the odd hole and set bearings into their housings.

My vote is with the fly press every time and home made tools are actually very easy to make.

regards

Ian

Gordon shunting Clarabel up the sidings? Really? I missed that after chapter 19 of Lady Chatterley's lover.

I have an automatic centre punch of some quality but unknown maker I suspect Starrett which came from my grandfather so must be the best part of 100 years old (i'm 70). It still works if a little fractiously. However I bought a cheapy of Oriental origin I suspect which was/is only really useful as a marking out tool, the point is far too shallow an angle for drilling but gives a good centre for a proper centre punch.

It stopped working of course in double quick time and was sidelined for a while. By accident I discovered that slacking off the top cap a couple of turns allowed the tool to work pretty reliably from not working at all with the cap tightened to its shoulder hand tight as it was delivered.

regards

Ian

My 2.5CC FROG diesel has cheese heads not Filaster. The engine is 48years and I have had it from new.

regards

Ian

H'mm Am I to take this thread as a laypersons guide to the reading material frequented by colleagues on here?

There is awful lot of detail here. Ahem!

regards

Ian

The gears certainly look like Meccano gears to me as well. The motor I have no idea but over the last year say 18months one of the regular contributors on vintage matters to "Model Boat" magazine ran a short series on model motors and their development. might be worth trying to get have a look at the archives or asking about back numbers with those articles in them.

regards

Ian

ArrrrrrrgH! Can we have a specification for committing Hari-Kari please?

Unfortunately David, it depends on just how old the machine actually is. Colchester them selves these days are not the most helpful of companies. Their records of older machines prior to the machinations of a number of takeovers are sparse or non existent. On older Colchester machines the serial number can be found in a number of the major castings of the machine like bed, headsock, apron etc as a small round insert, mine was blue in colour "AAxx". A colleague of my wife at the time around 1998 put us in touch with a man named Derek Robinson in Leicestershire who found us a copy manual, identified exactly the machine and its date of build and its specification plus he held some spares. Shell themselves give the comparison charts but that early Tellus oil is no longer belnded so an alternative had to be found anyway.

regards

Ian.

I have no idea whether this operation still exists but it might be worth a try

Useful thread for me. I am being pressurised to buy a breadmaker for our kitchen as I am constantly complaining it has been alleged about supermarket bread. Top of our list was the Panasonic machine.

regards

Ian

Have you tried here:-http://www.screw-shop.com/

They are part of the Modern Screws company. I have used them in the past for 10BA. I wanted proper round head screws and I bought 1000 on offer for less than the cost of 100 from anywhere else. The sometimes have special offers on as well. Service was next day to boot.

regards

Ian

Make that another +1 Trevor. And I agree with the remainder of the post. However I think a lot of us have built our kit up over a good number of years and probably in the end the tooling for any given machine costs a lot more than the machine itself. I started my "workshop" over 35 years ago with only a relatively cheap bench drilling machine which was not sold on until 2016. Tooling and machines were bought as I needed them hence spreading the cost over a longish period. Clearly a lathe came next but bought secondhand that was also with me until 2016. Tooling after the simple cutting tools at the beginning was built up over all those years.

I have had to cut down but those items of a larger size were sold to fund my set up of all handleable bench top machinery along with the tooling. My feeling is don't jump and just try to buy everything because everyone talks about it, get started simply, gain a bit of experience, build up as you go along, buy sensibly and wisely as you need it. Don't be afraid of failures either. Tubal Cain (Tom Walshaw) in his books particularly those for beginners, staaes that on some parts even highly skilled professionals make a couple of an item because they expect some parts to fail or not be completed successfully.

Also its a great stress reliever and therapeutic to nip out to the workshop after a bad day or the appearance of "The Black Dog" and make a great pile of swarf for no other reason than to make a pile of swarf with your lathe (or mill later).

Best of luck Derek, answers are here if you ask. Most of all enjoy this hobby.

regards

Ian

I have to agree Murray. I had a 1965 vintage Bantam "Eagle" for over 20 years. A sad day when I sold it. However the specified oil of Shell Tellus 27 no longer existed and I used a standard ISO 32 hydraulic oil in the headstock and also for lubrication around the remainder of the machine without any problems.