Member postings for Simon Collier

In the spirit of this post, I have just added a profile (I think!)

My SX3 has had the board in the head fail and the main board has a problem too as the tapping function doesn't work anywhere. It is 10 years old. The green light not working was a symptom before total failure. I know nothing of electronics unfortunately.

I adapted a cheap oil can by fitting an o-ring the correct size to seal over My Ml-7's oil nipples just inside a fitting silver soldered to the pipe. You need only to grind up a little internal grooving tool to make the o-ring groove. As the oil nipples aren't very long, there is only a sliver of metal outside of the o-ring holding it. It works perfectly.

A friend had a 14xx shipped from the UK. It arrived with the roof damaged, but the packing was excellent so it must have happened before packing. The engine was steamed but a leaking whistle valve to turret fitting stopped proceedings. Investigation showed that there was zero thread engagement of the M6x.5 thread. A member, the boiler inspector, took the engine home to silver solder on standard 1/4 x 40 fittings (the owner was unwell and had lost his confidence). We steamed it again and I took it round the track. There was no weight on the leading drivers which floated off the rails causing, unsurprisingly, derailments. I found a bit of steel angle to hang on the buffers as ballast and we had a few laps. It looked good, steamed OK and went OK. The regulator projected far into the cab and was in the way of everything, which was annoying, especially firing. The hand pump was useless, perhaps because of small capacity. The axle pump worked OK. No injector is fitted. The eccentric straps were a rattling fit on the eccentrics, at least up and down. The factory paint job is very nice, but fake pressed "rivets" on a 5" gauge engine are disappointing. The owner has since died, and the new owner, another member, is running it often. He is not a model engineer however, so yet another member is currently fitting an injector. These engines are built to a price so you need to be prepared to fix a few things up. But that is the case with pretty much any engine you acquire.

I have the Gifkin jigs. Very quick and easy to use.

Graeme beat me to it, KX3

I am alarmed when I see people washing their hands in, e.g., turps. I keep pump bottles of sorbolene cream in the workshop and rolls of kitchen paper towel. These also go in my steam up kit. I regularly "wash" my hands with the cream and wipe off with a piece of the paper towel. If necessary, I then wash my hands with mild soap when I go in the house. For oil based paint, the above is preceded by first washing the paint off with olive oil. A bonus is that the springs in the pump pack, which must be stainless of some sort, come in handy, if a little difficult to extract.

What month please Neil? October? They will be late here and I'll have trouble tracking MEW down as the local newsagents don't have it anymore.

Steve, you have a PM. Also o.p. Thomas.

Edited By Simon Collier 1 on 11/07/2017 22:17:01

I found the article: Re-engineering a low cost Chinese drill press, by Brian Smith, AME July 2001.

There was an article in AME years ago too. I can't remember what was done but it was a daunting job to my mind.

I still lament the loss of Graham Meek. I was astonished at how much trouble Michael would go to to answer questions and look up all sorts of obscure links for people. I hope he reconsiders in time. I also appreciate Julian. His interests and mine coincide closely and he is extremely knowledgeable and experienced in the 5" loco world.

Brian, I have sent you a PM. Check your inbox.

I have looked through this series and Marshall doesn't really feature. The June issue compared Hackworth in different locomotives. The only Hackworth variation Simon went close to recommending was Woolf, featured in the July issue. August was JMG, September was Helmholtz, October was Walschaert's (by far the best), and November featured Strong/Southern.

The series went from June to November, looking at the suitablility of various valve gears for the loco.

Michael, there is a perfectly good third person singular, common gender personal pronoun and it is "he". I will never yield to the feminazis! "He" is also the masculine gender pronoun of course, and "she" the feminine. "It" is the neuter. One uses the common gender pronoun when the sex of the subject (or object) is unknown. While speaking of gender, all will have noticed the recent, almost ubiquitous use of "gender" instead of "sex", including on many official forms. This seemed to happen very suddenly. Jane Austin was happy to use the word "sex", so why suddenly are we squeamish? To clarify, there are two sexes, male and female, and four genders, masculine, feminine, common and neuter, and these latter apply to nouns and pronouns. The push to replace "sex" with "gender" has been very deliberate. It is somehow politically correct, but for the life of me I can't work out how. One would have to have that tangle of contradictions that is the left wing brain to understand it.

Well said Hopper. And why is the greatest scourge of the world, religion, off limits for discussion?

Andy, there a a few ways you can do this. First determine how much metal you have to play with, i.e., how much machining allowance is there on the casting? It looks pretty nice from the picture so I am guessing the bore is fairly parallel. Use a vernier to measure bore to port face, and bore to drain cock land, on each end of the cylinder. This will tell you how close to parallel the bore is to your machined port face. If the edges of the port face are to be machined, machine them square and parallel to the port face. Then clamp with these edges square to the face plate, face the cylinder end and bore. There must be plenty of step by step photo essays of this on the net for similar cylinders.

Thanks Brian.

I have just fitted a leadscrew handwheel to my ML7 and there is a tapped hole for a pointer. What is that thread please?