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Member postings for alan frost

Here is a list of all the postings alan frost has made in our forums. Click on a thread name to jump to the thread.

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Thread: MEW180 CAD Article
11/08/2011 11:45:12
Ady-your post at 6.00:12. Great computer graphics. What platform are you using ? Never come across one yet that simulates workshop grime so realistically altho I still prefer actual photographs.
I enjoyed the MEW article and thought it well worth while compared with some of the articles around issue 175 altho I would n't want to be the author if AD (Neebs) ever reads it ). "Watch out for the shaper boys" is sound advice given to new recruits on another well known site.

Edited By alan frost on 11/08/2011 11:49:54

Edited By alan frost on 11/08/2011 11:57:34

Thread: MEW 180
11/08/2011 00:33:14
It appears to me that the root cause of this and many similar problems is that ME and MEW current ownership is in the hands of a company purely interested in maximising profits and with no interest at all in customer service. My guess based on several bad experiences is that they pay peanuts and we get monkey service. In general this seems to be the way the world continues to go and I suppose even bad ownership is preferable to no ownership and no magazines. Oh, for the days when niche magazines were largely staffed by enthusiasts with some notion of customer service.
 
I have a great deal of sympathy for the editor who has to field most of the complaints. My only criticism of him would be that he spends too much time defending the indefensible but then the indefensible pay his salary so who am I to criticise ?
 
It is however interesting to compare the efficiency of the ME/MEW site with the Homeworkshop site , run by a couple of unpaid (except for first choice of QCTPs ) amateurs which receives constant and deserved praise, and even the odd donation. They have incorporated constructive suggestions into the site , usually very successfully . Usual disclaimer.
 
My main complaint would be the recent quality of the magazines' content (I , to some extent , absolve the editor, who can only print what he gets) altho I bought issue 180 which showed improvement IMO with short articles which related to issues recently raised in internet forums. Was this coincidence ? Maybe DC should commission articles which relate to current issues ?
Thread: any comments on bandsaws ?
03/08/2011 00:35:04
No idea about their bandsaws but everything I have bought from them has been excellent, the best being a bench mounted "radial arm drill" , a wonderful m/c for the money. Usual disclaimer.
Thread: Scribe a Line Kitchen Knife Sharpening
27/07/2011 00:16:51
Relevant to sharp knives. I have recently purchased I think from Aldi (could have been Lidl ) 1/ a couple of ceramic kitchen knives. If you want to face demands from your beloved for extra "husbandly duties " get her a couple next time they come up but warn her they are more brittle than steel ones. You only have to show them to the toughest vegetables ,for the vegetables to fall into neat, impossibly thin slices.
2/ A damascene steel knife from Aldi. I always fancied a good Japanese sword for use as an incentive when visiting bank officials , but could never afford a good one (the sword that is, there is no such thing as a good bank official ). I could try making one (a Japanese sword that is, no-one in their right mind would make a bank official) .
 
Making one I'm told involves years of purification , and ingredients like 3 gallons of dew collected by a twenty year old virgin (for quenching -- the steel ,not the virgin  .)  In my neck of the woods ,given time one could collect that much dew , but where would I find the collector ? Yes, I know condensed dragon's breath makes an adequate substitute , but that's only slightly easier to find than the virgin. Anyway the Aldi knife is pretty good , you can see all the layers of steel in the blade ,and I hardly dare use it its so damned sharp. I plan to show them both to a turnip tomorrow to see which one , ceramic or damascene , frightens it most.

Edited By alan frost on 27/07/2011 00:20:11

Thread: Elliot 10M Shaper.
26/07/2011 23:41:47
Normally £400 for a shaper with vice would split £399 for the vice and £1 for the shaper. Unfortunately this rule does not apply to Elliotts. The 10M is a rather good shaper , its vice is pretty useless as a shaper vice. £400 is rather a lot for a 10M unless it has vertical feed (rarer than hens teeth ) in which case snap it up. As others have suggested read Neebs (Adrian Nic(h?)olson ) on the home workshop site , both on Elliotts and shaper vices.
Thread: Something to ponder 02
15/07/2011 20:48:49
Michael
 
You'd be amazed at what the local university throws into skips. . Hospitals, the military and educational establishments all buy top quality stuff and bin it at the slightest excuse (well, its only taxpayers money after all). A while back my skip diving partner (he enters the skips with a rope round his ankle and I stand by with my engine crane in case he needs to be hauled to safety ) and I could have had an electron microscope and at about the same time we rescued about 10 Oertling precision balances. We would have walked the Nobel prize for weighing had we entered..Top quality benches and chrome plated storage racks on wheels are common fare,
Mind you its not all easy work -the university is very disorganised and often throw out beautiful benches but do not always bother to keep matching legs and bench tops together. Disgraceful!! Do they think that as pensioners we have all day to sort this stuff?A while ago I rescued a double beam oscilloscope , thinking I'd have to do a few repairs. I was right I had to put a plug on it. It had failed the Elfin pastry electrical tests. Well I come from Bill Bryson's indestructible generation (grew up in solid smoke , did n't have a little safety seat or crash helmet ,swam in polio infested swimming pools etc. etc ) and its fine for me. Selfishly the University tends to hang on to the higher bandwidth models.
 Other rescued items include lots of electric motors, about 200 metres of stainless steel (8 ton breaking strain) cable etc. My friend when he built his house extension pretty well obtained all his building materials from the University skips. He has some of the most intelligent walls and ceilings in the country.
Regarding the indestructibles ,like all of my generation , my house and everyone else's were filled with smoke , while the local cinemas had difficulty projecting the film through smoke clouds resembling intergalactic dust clouds. How many kids did I know with asthma, hayfever , allergies , or respiratory diseases ? One or two over my entire school life of 15 years. Nowadays half of any class suffer-no immunity-a slight smoke haze lays them low -we could cope with large viscous lumps of tobacco smoke.
Anyway , enuff elderly ravings -must check out your email references given in last postings. Regards

Edited By alan frost on 15/07/2011 20:57:15

15/07/2011 01:22:53
Ah,thanks for inputs on piezo. The one I vaguely remembered was long travel and as I remember it the piezo gave a small twitch which was then" anchored" in some way ,then another small twitch ,anchor again and so on.
Using stepper type waveforms one could presumably fairly quickly do quite a long traverse. Maybe two piezo crystals were involved , twitching and "anchoring " in turn. Problem is it would lose precision with many" twitch and anchor" sequences as any error per step would be accumulative although the error as a percentage of travel would remain constant.
Anyway I feel quite a warm glow knowing ,thanks to your inputs, piezo materials are used for precision movement of microscope stages.
As a matter of interest one of those gadgets that cuts microscopically thin slivers of specimens for microscope viewing ( I can never remember the somewhat illogical name of the damned things,its a sort of precision bacon slicer-you know what I mean ah-its coming back to me a microtome ? ) also has a very precise and small incremental movement ,
The one I salvaged from the local university's skip achieves this with a very fine and precise screw thread with zero or very little backlash ). One of these days I'm going to convert it to a device for slicing quarks off hadrons ,or at least electrons off atoms. Then I'll be famous and as I intend to start with a fairly beefy atom, slicing one proton and one electron off the one up from gold, quite rich too.
. Regards

Edited By alan frost on 15/07/2011 01:37:43

Edited By alan frost on 15/07/2011 01:40:05

14/07/2011 09:42:25
Not an area I have any expertise in at all , but is there no possibility of using suitable Piezo-electrics for very small ,accurate, well-defined motion. I vaguely remember reading something on it years ago. Any experts in this technique ????
Thread: A New Dividing Plate for my Dividing Head
10/07/2011 23:36:58
Nice looking job , pretty quick too
09/07/2011 00:35:51
A ps. Don't know how you value your time but M.E. Tools (no connection ) produce some reasonably priced dividing plates which I seem to remember have extra rings of holes with useful numbers such as 25 and 127. My memory is not what it was-perhaps someone else can confirm ?
09/07/2011 00:16:42
An old trick I admit to never trying is saving your old broken bandsaw blades and turning a wooden,aluminium, or steel disc to a diameter accomodating exactly the no. of teeth required, and using the teeth with a lashed up detent as an indexer. Guy Lautards bedside reader ( number two or three ) has a more sophisticated and probably more accurate method using ball bearings (I think ) spaced round a suitably sized perimeter ). There must be better ways-such as using CNC but I'm too old for such passing fads.
 
Don't see the need for them-for the benefit of regular readers the time is 00.12 (9th July ) and I've nearly half finished making my brush ring for an electric motor using a file. Started only just over a week ago-who needs CNC ?. Mind you I'm not rushing -stopped for a coffee yesterday.
 
PS If no-one comes up with a better way will look up Lautard method and post details. Rgds.

Edited By alan frost on 09/07/2011 00:25:23

Thread: Harrison Universal Milling Machine Feed Gears & 3Phase
08/07/2011 23:49:17
I vaguely seem to remember someone suggesting the best way to clean a coolant tank was to toss in an elfin pastry inspector , the death struggles usually being sufficient. Rgds.
Thread: Dean Smith and Grace
17/05/2011 01:05:03
Don't want to make anyone too green about DSGs but a young friend of mine was on the look out for a large Harrison or Colchester or similar. I had told him DSGs occasionally turned up and went cheaply at auction as not everyone has the space. No sooner had the comment left my flying keybord fingers when one turned up in Peterhead ( we are both in Scotland) on ebay which he procured for £650 plus a longish drive with a Landrover and heavy trailer. It came with most of the accessories including a taper turning attachment , power boring fitting etc and looked in v. good nick (I have n't been down to see it yet ). Miracles do happen !! Would that I have had the space !! The TT fitting is probably worth what he paid for it , and to think I paid £350 more for my, albeit wonderful , Emco V10P.
 
Alan Frost
 
Every day is a schoolday.
Thread: Suggestions please.
30/03/2011 21:08:15
A simple solution ,but not too cheap is to buy the poor man's projector , a magnifying loupe with the relevant graticule. get an illuminator a a few graticules and you can check all sorts of dimensions accurately.
Thread: Acceptable runout
27/03/2011 12:58:43
This site is full of amateurs-it makes me sthick, sthick, sthick.An engineer works to Smidgeons (as do brain surgeons) , a bricklayer works to Tads.How do you amateurs ever make anything accurate????

Edited By alan frost on 27/03/2011 13:02:29

Thread: Well lubricated (but sober)
23/03/2011 21:59:34
My word ! I subscribe to MEW and occasionally visit the forum. Had a few moments tonight so thought I'd catch up on posts. Few moments !!-so many posts I'd need a few weeks. Does anyone make anything or are we all frustrated authors ?
Anyway having got as far as the lubrication posts I remembered reading recently that one should never oil a surface or tool and cutter grinder unless one was prepared to clean it after every use. The recommendation was to apply molydenum disulphide in some proprietary form and then wipe it off , the theory being that the microscopic molecular balls of moly would impregnate the steel/ iron surface at the atomic level and keep everything moving smoothly for a few weeks after which one repeated the treatment. The wiping off prevented any sort of adhesive or sticky layer from forming which would "fix" dust or swarf.
This seemed a reasonable theory to me . Any comments as to its truth from the atomic physicists or chemists ?
Apols. for risking starting a different thread on lubrication but having waded through 4 pages on the last lube thread plus another hour or two's catching up on other threads. Thought my query might get lost otherwise.
A final thought. I doubt we home machinists stress our machines enough to worry about what lubricant to use , given a bit of common sense , but grinders ,by their very nature are perhaps a bit more critical.
Thread: A strange fluid
26/10/2010 20:56:04
I hope I can settle the name of the mysterious fluid-opinions differ -a very few say 'tis "dielectic" , most say 'tis "dielectric" but oi say 'tis "dylectrick" (with apologies to Blackadder). Orwl agree-- it don't matter a lot.
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