Member postings for Nealeb

I find it mildly entertaining that some of the scam bank emails have actually taken the text from a real bank email, including the bit that says that they will never ask for personal information via email! Rather like the old Nigerian "I want to give you $10M" emails with their spellng and grammar errors, it's almost as if they include something that tells the aware recipient that they are scam so only those not savvy enough to know what's going on will respond. More easily deceived and less likely to know how to chase afterwards, buying time for the scammer to cover their tracks?

This kind of discussion always reminds me of the "four rules", applicable to almost any area of modern life.

1. The rules don't make any sense.

2. If you get it wrong, you go to jail.

3. Any questions - see rules 1 and 2.

4. The boys ain't got a sense of humour.

So, so, true.

I can imagine the response from club members on boiler test day when they hear that boiler testing has been cancelled "because our lawyer is off sick."

Or am I just getting cynical these days?

My club has a deadweight tester used to calibrate the master gauge used by our boiler testers. I believe that the key components they used - the piston and cylinder - were sold for a diesel injection pump and met the high finish/very close tolerance requirement. I guess that if it can handle diesel fuel without leakage, it can do this job! Working out the weights required is a straightforward job once you know the piston diameter.

I'm on holiday at the moment and without access to any more details but it might be something worth exploring.

I use led tape, fitted in an aluminium extrusion with a diffuser fitted. May be the same output as equivalent led tube but lower profile - less likely to get damaged when swinging long objects around. I tried some cheap tape direct from China but replaced it with UK-sourced tape which was much better. The plan is to add a few individual led spots for specific machines, probably separately switched.

Extrusion works on the area between two boundaries, as noted. Couple of additional points worth mentioning, though. The first is that you can select more than one area (hold down "shift" while clicking on regions) to extrude at the same time. This means that even if there seem to be extraneous lines crossing the area you want to extrude which seems to divide the area you want, you can just click on both sides and pick both. Which then leads to the point that a sketch is not a "drawing". You absolutely do not need to tidy odd lines and so on in a sketch; a sketch is a means to an end and once used (in synchronous mode) will be ignored thereafter. So, for example, if you want to extrude a rectangle that has a circular arc cut out of one corner, you could carefully draw an arc, trim out the excess lines, and extrude the remaining shape as desired. Or you can just draw a circle centred on the corner of the rectangle and just select the area you want to extrude and ignore all the additional lines. Saves time although it upsets the traditional draughtsman! But this is a sketch - not a finished drawing...

SOD has also mentioned reasons for using the hole tool rather than extruding. This just emphasises the fact that you can often achieve the same end by different means. Creating a circle in a sketch and then extruding is great for a hole that goes right through the part, and is also useful for non-circular holes. However, the hole tool is really useful for counterbores/countersinks/part-depth holes - or holes that go through more than one part in an assembly.

Edited By Nealeb on 24/08/2022 22:22:32

When renewing rail cards (or so I have been told) it is cheaper to renew online than by going in to your local station. Roughly the same price for 3 years online or 2 years over the counter. Worth checking, anyway.

I suspect that what shows depends on the car software. For example, some cars it might play by file name, sometimes by track number. And what then displays is another variable. My current car appears to play by track number but displays track title, not file name. I'm pretty sure that a previous car played by alphabetic order of file name. I doubt that there is a one-size-fits-all answer - you just have to figure out what your car wants/uses and then work with it!

...and in SE, if all else fails, type what you want to into the "find command" box at the bottom of the screen. Helps enormously find functions that aren't in the current menu tab.

Don't forget that in synchronous mode, SE gives you the "steering wheel" for manipulating the model. How you can wrap up so much power and intricacy in what looks like quite a simple item baffles me - and I swear that it does something slightly different every time I use it! But it's the kind of thing that, once mastered, gives you access to very quick and accurate model manipulation. One day, I'll be able to use it...

As SOD says, experience with other CAD packages doesn't always translate directly. I've been through TurboCAD (where I found 3D to be next to impossible), OnShape (possibly easiest to use but least powerful at the time), Fusion 360 (good, CAM really useful, but I found problems once models/assemblies became complex) and now SE - very powerful but somewhat intricate to use and takes a bit of learning. These days, I model and (if needed) produce drawings in SE but export to F360 for CAM/CNC use.

In brief, with SE(CE), the process for producing printed conventional drawings is fairly easy but maybe not intuitive.

Have your model open on the screen. Right-click on the component in the LH list which shows all the sketches, etc, that have gone into the model. Select "create drawing..." and you will be presented with a blank sheet with title box which lets you position your component on it. You can add further views, including isometric, at this point. Use the dimension tool to add all the dimensions you wish (including baseline/incremental measurements if this suits your way of working).

Once you have the drawings/views wanted, click the very top LH button on the menu (with the SE logo on it). From the LH menu, select "paper print" and you can then choose to print directly to a printer, or save as PDF format for later use. I have just checked this with SE 2022; not sure if it is true for earlier versions.

One of the worrying things is that I believe there are tail-gaters who are blissfully unaware of what they are doing wrong. They are not aggressive - just unseeing and unthinking. A friend once gave me a lift home. Very pleasant intelligent lady, no sense of urgency, no desire to overtake the car in front - but never less than a car"s length from it at 40-50mph. Could only be lack of awareness of what was going on. What about the Nissan Micra you see a couple of lengths behind a lorry on the motorway, completely blind to what's happening in front and at the mercy of the lorry-driver's braking? There's no cure for stupid!

I was in a similar position, although my hot water comes via a hot-water cylinder. Feed to kitchen was via a 22mm copper pipe buried in a concrete floor slab (done by a previous owner). Might have made sense with cheap energy and sink/washing machine/dishwasher to feed but a real pain now that w/m has been moved, d/w is cold-fill only. Couple of weeks ago I ran a 15mm plastic pipe complete with insulation from cylinder to sink. Saves water/time/energy. Doubt if the payback time makes strict economic sense but £35 in materials was worth the increased convenience.

I guess it's a very small-scale example of "invest now to save later" decision-making that it would be good to see at a national level?

(Duplicate post)

Edited By Nealeb on 08/08/2022 10:43:28

I was desperately trying to avoid a more in-depth explanation! Can we agree that there is no such thing as a simple resistive load, everything has associated inductance and capacitance (even the cables feeding the device), but as engineers we can accept a reasonable approximation?

There are probably a lot more mechanical than electrical engineers reading this so it seems sensible to avoid too much distracting and largely irrelevant (even if interesting to some of us) detail. "How much is this costing me?" also applies to intellectual effort needed to understand the answer!

"He who spends too little on a tool regrets it every time he uses it. He who spends too much forgets it the first time he uses it."

More than a grain of truth in that but we do have to draw the line somewhere! It's why I bought an elderly English toolroom lathe rather than a similar price new Chinese machine (plus I got a cabinet full of useful accessories with it) but frankly it was a close-run thing. Not always an easy decision.

Tim - I'm certainly not confused but as you might tell from the way I wrote, I was trying to simplify what is quite a complex (and I use the word advisedly) situation. I didn't even mention power factor! I would argue that a tungsten filament, once allowed to stabilise, is pretty close to a resistive load, but that's not particularly relevant. I just couldn't think of another simple household example. Maybe an electric cooker?

I've just done a quick check on my phone charger. With no phone connected, it takes 30mA at 243V. Simple multiplication would say that it is taking 7.3W. Switch to power measurement mode and it says 1W. I doubt that my cheap meter is particularly accurate, especially at these low values, but that's a big difference. On load, the difference is smaller and that will be generally true for motors and devices with big transformers as well. The lower the load, the more misleading the current measurement in terms of power consumption.

In short, don't trust a simple current measurement to estimate power consumption unless you know the nature of the load - it's good for working out an appropriate fuse/breaker rating but the days as far as it goes!

I had been expecting someone to jump in with a warning about finding power consumption by measuring current and voltage and multiplying together. While that works for a simple resistive load (like a tungsten light bulb) it fails with more "difficult" loads. Motors fall into this category, as do a lot of electronics. It is because the alternating current is not in phase with the voltage - show the current and voltage on a graph and you will see the usual "wavy lines" of an alternating waveform, but the peaks do not align - there is a shift between them. This means that the power is not a simple multiplication. This is true even with devices like phone chargers - I use (like some others here) a cheap plug-in power meter from Maplins and if you measure voltage and current and multiply together you do not get the same answer as switching to measure power directly, which properly takes the phase shift into account.

So - beware of simple current measurements and converting to a power value!

Briefly, yes. Lathes like the Myford and some of the Boxford machines use a threaded nose spindle and the chucks (if made with the appropriate thread in them) or a chuck on a backplate just screws on. Makes running the lathe in reverse problematic, although I never found this a big problem. Bigger lathes often use the Camlock fitting like my D1-4 size, where there are three cams which are turned with a chuck key to lock the chuck on. Quick and easy. And in the middle there are the flange-fitting type. I often swap between chuck and collets as my lathe takes these directly in the spindle nose so the Camlock is convenient but if 99% of your work will be with the 3-jaw then it's clearly not very relevant.

One of the things that the smaller Warco lathes share is a flange-fixing chuck. You have to go up a size or two (and about a 50% price jump) to get a D1-4 spindle nose. I went from a screwed-nose Myford to a D1-4-equipped machine and I have always wondered how easy or otherwise it is to swap chucks with the flange fitting. I appreciate that cost is a major driver but I always look a model or two up to see what I'm missing when buying something so at least I do it with my eyes open. I don't see this point discussed much - is it an issue in practice?

Must admit for me the QCTP argument was over years ago - one of the first things I made under the direction of the student workshop technician (thanks, Ifor!) was a QCTP compatible with the Tripan on his Smart and Brown lathe. I used it for years on my S7 before buying an old English lathe which came with the next size up Tripan and finding that my home-made tool holders fitted.