Member postings for Mark Rand

At work, coated carbide endmills were resharpend and recoated, but they were spending more on endmills and inserts per month than most of us have spent for our entire workshops!

Washing machine pump motors tend to be shaded pole synchonous motors, with a separate, dry, stator and a ferrite magnet rotor running directly in the 'efluent'. Bitter experience of such, because they get completely seized when you wash shop rags or overalls that have any cast iron powder on them. I got quite good at swapping out the saized one for a cleaned spare...

The law is quite clear. You must be competent. You don't need to be gas safe registered. If you are acting as an employer or employee, then you need to be gas safe registered. Otherwise, not.

The dumbing down of the country does not need to apply to those who aren't dumb...

Edited By Mark Rand on 06/09/2023 23:08:04

Get thee behind me Satan!

Some stuff I'd bid on if closer, with no bids. Some stuff already bid to pretty close to retail, before auctioneer's cut and VAT.

The requirements of The Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998, impose conditions on all installers and fixers of gas equipment, but the requirement to be registered/approved only applies to employers, employees and self employer persons. The requirement for any person to be competent, does not depend on any trade body registration or other moneymaking scam, such as was applied to electrical work.

My natural inclination is to suggest that persons behind counters in shops, who don't understand this fact, be requested to go forth and multiply...

Definitely use them dry.

I use CBN inserts for turning hardened steel. Lovely surface finish with pretty streamers of red hot swarf flying off the tool. The negative rake on CBN and PCD inserts makes for the good finish, but speed and rigidity are neccessary to get the best out of them. They won't do a lot of good on a white metal bearinged ML7.

The compressive strength of RAAC structures is exactly the same as when they were built. There is no problem with this. What has become a problem is that the re-bar used for RAAC beams in tension is liable to corrosion because it is mild steel without any protection from moisture ingress. Light weght concrete blocks are a large part of builder's' armory across Europe. Relying on mild steel rebar to give long-term tensile strength without protection from wet, not so much.

Many thanks to OpenOffice Writer for the spelling checks, which have battled with the Late Bottled Vintage Port

AAC has no problems whatsoever. when it is used in compression (walls etc.), not in tension (roofs). It's still commonly used throughout Europe with no issues. RAAC was used, mostly in the UK as a cheap, quick, fire-resistant construction material with a limited lifespan.

Had the beams been sealed against humidity, or had a (more expensive) stainless steel reinforcing bar been specified, the stuff would be good for centuries. As it is, the problem's been known about for thirty years and some buildings have been replaced or patched because of that knowledge.

I might be getting to a certain age, but I'm getting increasingly irritated by the likes of the BBC dumbing down engineering stories and getting them hopelessly wrong in the process.

HPC will increase the bore and/or add keyways to any of their gears. They do charge for this (quite reaonably).

The good things are that you know the bearings are getting lubricated (even it it's not the grease they'd normally have) and that the last thing you want is a lot of 320 Weight gear oil between the quill and the head if they are still a good fit to each other.

Consolation until you find the time and energy to strip the head and replace the seal!

It strikes me that a band with a larger cross section will need a higher tension. Maybe even to the extent that one would want exactly the same strain (percentage extension) for any blade, no matter what its size was...

What's the problem?

Edited By Mark Rand on 31/08/2023 20:47:51

I've got a 20th edition. It helped me a lot with ACME threads, 22/29 DP stub form gear teeth and spline dimensions when I needed that information.

It shouldn't be too bad, especially if it gets a lick of zinc primer and paint to protect the, now bare, steel.

What was the reason for TIG brazing rather than TIG welding in the first place?

Edited By Mark Rand on 28/08/2023 10:26:33

Sorry, missed DC31K's post 'cause I'm currently lying in a hospital bed using the pathetic mobile telephone instead of a proper computer.

Yes, a bit of inventing and smiley surgery should fix that.

I'll have a go when they let me out.

A couple of things

Those of us with access to unix/linux and, possibly Macintosh systems can probably use wget or curl to scrape up our albums

A cheeky way to make sure they were all available in the new software might be to create a dummy post with the entire contents of one's albums, if one had time and the current software allowed that.

Finally, does the current software store the albums in one or more database tables? If so it should be possible to extract the data with properly crafted queries once the database schema has been understood.

Do you know how to suck eggs Grandma?

Very much so in the instrument control world of the '80s and '90s. By the late 1980's I had over 65,000 lines of my RMB code in use in the company handling Steam turbine performance test measurements and, latterly, turbine balancing, FFT calculation and vibration management. I'm quite proud of 100 5 1/2digit voltage readings per second spread over five data loggers, all converted into engineering units in real-time. This on a 20MHz 68020... Some of the most time critical bits were written in HP Pascal \(which was closer to Modula) and the few tens of lines of really significant stuff were disassembled from Pascal and written in hand-optimised assembler.

Since then, I learned C, did some real-time PIC programming in assembler and C, for fun and profit. Now I'm learning Python in order to make a GUI based database program for all my tools and consumables, with a number of possible database engines to hold the data.

Edited By Mark Rand on 22/08/2023 21:27:07

In a fit of idiocy, our works installed a 'chuck guard' on the 14' swing Craven travelling bed lathe in the erection shop. The lathe was installed in 1948 and didn't get the 'chuck guard' untill the mid 2000's. I don't believe that there had been any chuck related injuries in all that time...

I've milled and re-scraped cast iron surface plates that were in better condition than that one seems to be.

It is entierly possible that it's actually a three phase motor that's had a capacitor added to allow it to work from single phase.

I say this because the 8" Wolf pedestal grinder in my shed has had exactly that done to it. I will be re-connecting it from delta to star and fitting a new cable and three phase plug on the end at some point in the forseable future.

Ether, if used in the starting fluid, will ignite with a 6:1 compression ratio without aid of a spark. So if you're using it with a higher compression engine, it can easily pre-ignite