Member postings for JonBerk

Some advice please.

I want to make a gear change lever for my 1971 Triumph T100 motorcycle out of aluminium.

The gear change shaft is finely splined.

Therefore the hole in the lever will have to be similarly splined, but I don’t have a dividing head to make the splines.

So as this will be a one off I was thinking of obtaining another shaft and modifying it so it had a lead. I would then be using it as a broach to press the splines through the aluminium. The shaft is steel but not hardened and didn't intend to harden it when using it as a broach as the alloy isn't that hard.

Is this likely to work and if not what alternatives do I have?

Thanks

John H

As a non-attendee at Sandown, reading this has made me think about the shows and where they are, that I do attend.

I live in the perfect area from which to visit Sandown, Ally Pally, Bristol and the Midlands Show. The shows I do visit are Ally Pally and Bristol and occasionally the Midlands and rarely Sandown. A major reason for me and my friends not going to Sandown is the venue which I find doesn’t have the ‘atmosphere’ of the other shows. This is largely because of the shape of the halls. All the shows have roughly similar reasons to visit but Sandown appears to have less of all of them.

I wonder if the Sandown exhibition is in the wrong place. Looking at where the exhibitions are held in the country you can see they all have a population centre to draw visitors from. Sandown, apart from London where it competes directly with Ally Pally, does not.

One high population area which does not have a big show is the South Coast from Portsmouth along to Poole. Moving the ME exhibition into that area could attract more visitors than Sandown. The ME and MEW magazine sales records must show where the sales are in the country. Using that information it should be possible to work out which area would be most likely to support the ME exhibition.

There one other major reason why the number of visitors is falling and that is what I would call ‘the lost generation’. When I was apprenticed, not as an engineer, the machines I worked on and serviced and the cars and motorcycles I owned, were ‘mechanical’. All of my friends were doing similar training with ‘mechanical’ machinery. My son, in his mid thirties, is the only one of his group of friends that has completed an apprenticeship.

This, to me, means that visitor numbers to exhibitions must fall as the number older visitors ‘falling off the perch’ are not replaced by a new generation. To counter this as much as possible the exhibitions must be attractive and in the right place.

John H