Member postings for Mark Rand

I was a 'Competent person' according to the Wiring Regs up until Part P was enacted. I rewired my own house, did electrical wiring at work in the UK and around the world, worked unsupervised on 12kV systems at power station sites, got offered outside work. I have copies of and follow the Wiring Regs up to the 17th edition (haven't done any major new work since the 18th edition came out). Unless I shell out £400 per year or more, I'm not qualified to run a new circuit from the CU that I installed...

I'm afraid that I treat Part P with the contempt that it deserves. It is a protection scam layered on top of the pre-existing quality requirements.

The same applied to our main site electrician. Qualified to maintain and install all electrical services on a 22 acre site, from 11kV down to 240V, but not qualified to do work in his own home...

I'm fairly certain that Hubrol 'enamels' are now acrylic, rather than the proper alkyd resin enamels that they onece were.

Built-up-edge happens at certain speed ranges when cutting aluminium with HSS and carbide. The solution is to reduce the cutting speed until it stops, or (if you can) increase the cutting speed until it stops.

Carbon steel will cut EN24T quite well. Just keep the speed well down.

Both 1 1/4" and 32mm are standard sizes, unfortunately...

Devil's advocate:- The seller is offering his/her father's tools. The Estate agent speil is extermely irritating when not backed up with evidence.

Far too few engineers in government.

OTOH, Maggie was a chemist (non-pharmacological) for a few years and was the one that set us on the path to destruction.

"Here we have a fully restored beautiful Victorian hand powered metal shaper / planer.
No expense of time or money has been spared in bringing this price of industrial history back to working order."

Lots of paint, some polishing of handles etc.

Ways have had no work done on them, still showing wear signs.

Bloody porch paint restorers.

Edited By Mark Rand on 11/08/2023 22:09:54

I tend to buy my wheels from Abtec. The 32mm/1.25" thing is a problem. I've been caught out by it before. My solution was to open the bore of the affected wheels with a 32mm Rotabroach cutter, by hand (Que gasps of horror and warnings of explosions by the ignoramuses in the audience).

The units appear to be pre-gassed and contain 2.0 kg of R32, so I'm a bit puzzled as to why the sellers claim that F-gas certification is required for intallers.

I've got an interest in this, but am conflicted as to whether the option of pay someone to do the install and claiming the (£5,000) grant will save any money compared with doing the install myself and ignoring the grant.

When I installed our CH system in 1988, I anticipated that we'd have children. So I designed it with radiators that would work happily at 45°C and that's been where we've run the boiler in all the years since.

Note that normalizing and annealing are different processes. With normalizing, the work is allowed to cool more rapidly than in annealing, usually in free air, not by insulating it or furnace cooling it.

Annealed steel has a coarse grain structure and machines like chewing gum. Normalized steel has a finer grain structure and is more pleasent to machine, while still being stress free.

Note that between the ways, the ML7's are painted a cream colour. Lathes with hardend beds were painted white instead.

Get thee behind me Satan (and push?).

I've designed and started to write a tool and consumables database program because I can never remember where I put things. The database design was fairly simple, but the GUI program has been slow going because I learned Python for it and still spend more time in the text books than writing code.

For some daft reason, I thought that if I wrote it with nice tidy code and good comments and help, that others could use it if they wanted. I was progressing quite well for a couple of weeks, having broken my ankle and being forced to sit on the bed using the wife's laptop, with said ankle proped up on a cushion.

When I recovered the drawings for the diesel engine at work when it was scrapped, with permission (so I could build a model of it in the future), there was an indicator and a planimeter in one of the cupboards. The engine was built in 1960-61 and used in the laboartories' building, that used to be the engine test house up until 2000 for peak load generation and blackout protection. It made a profit of £80,000 per year through the '90s...

Cutter lines perpendicular to the stroke are chatter. See Pete's comments about sharpening the blade. A cast iron disk turned smooth and flat on the lathe, with diamond paste pressed into it with a ball bearing makes a good lapping fixture. Use 5µm diamond maximum for sharpening. Make a rectanglar or square bar with the top sloping down by 3° towards the plate to support the blade and give you a consistent angle. You want a mirror finish, if possible, and no visible transition between the front and the bottom faces. The Sandvik inserts have far too large a radius for power scraping, which makes control harder.

This is my every-day blade for the Biax:-

The material is 3mm x 20mm ground flat stock, which is more flexible than Sandvik's hand scraper and is the same size that Biax use.

I go down to about 3mm for finer work, slightly less when aiming for the most possible points per square inch.

Start with the 10mm and see how it goes!

BT is the same taper, but not the same shape. It's not as long as NMBT.

Pictures and dimensions here:- **LINK**

The large end of the tapered bit...

I've actuately got some of them on my J&S 1400 surface grinder. Mainly because the only 5/16" BSW screws I had that firred the need with the right sort of head, had 5mm allen key heads. Not a problem, it's only me that needs to remember.

1/2" UNC -s 13tpi, 1/2" BSW is 12tpi. If you are screwing one into another, then one or both threads will be buggered over the length of engagement you should expect for a 30 taper or R8 drawbar thread.

All of my holders for the Beaver are 12mm ISO30 with one 1/2"BSW, I recently aquired a Beaver made horizontal drive, which is original and standard 1/2" UNC NMBT30 thread. So I've got to make a third drawbar. Thinking of making double ended bars with M12 on one end and UNC/BSW on the others, with appropriately threaded nuts for the top ends. That way I'm back to two drawbarsand only need to change the nuts and ends over for the two least used fittings.

Edited By Mark Rand on 26/07/2023 19:25:04