Member postings for Andrew Evans

I have seen many things over the years on eBay that cost more 2nd hand than new. Some people just don't bother to research prices or shop around.

Jizer

I wish Lidl did a CNC water jet cutter for £80 - now that would be handy

Thanks, this is really helpful. I have completely stripped the lathe and cleaned it all up. The slides and ballscrews all seem to be in excellent condition with all the original scraping marks still visible. It is a really well made lathe.

If you can get hold of one hospitals use a lift designed to lift patients from a bed. They are like a small folding engine crane but very lightweight and easy to store.

I gave up with cheap ink jets and got a Samsung monochrome laser printer - it's more economical over time, way quicker to print and no hassle. Obviously if you need colour it's more expensive but I don't.

I would say get the shaper if you fancy it. I had a Boxford shaper and a milling machine in the past and did use it. It is a nice machine to use, quite quiet and sort of peaceful - there is something mesmerising about watching it work. However when I moved house and now have a smaller workshop I chose to keep the milling machine and sell the shaper.

Smells a bit fishy

Thanks Alistair - I have now completely stripped the lathe, it was so dirty it needed doing. Where did you get your smoothstepper and drivers from?

Thanks John. I have considered keeping the existing steppers and drives. The lathe has been in storage for at least 15 years and some of the electronics looked a bit dodgy so I have taken it all out and just thought I would get better results with a new, more powerful spindle drive, steppers and drivers. I want to do threading in steel. Previously I converted a Starturn to run with Mach3 using the original motors and it did struggle cutting steel to any depth.

I will look at Zapp

I am doing a complete rebuild of a Denford Orac - can anyone recomend a good UK based supplier for stuff like quality stepper motors, drivers etc? I was thinking of Gecko drivers and a smooth-stepper interface.

Any advice is welcome. Andy

Why are they so expensive?

no idea why my post was deleted - I didn't quote anyone and made no political point - unlike a previous poster.

It's an interesting and complex topic. I used to work on the multimillion £ Digital Preservation project at the British Library. As part of that we built a system that automatically copied each digital file to 3 remote storage sites, it automatically checked each file on a regular basis to ensure it hadn't changed and if it had changed recovered it from a remote site. Files on hard drives can spontaneously have bits changed and of course there can be bugs and physical problems like fires. We archived digitised books and newspapers as well as websites and other 'born digital' files such as the huge master files for Ordnance Survey maps. When one disk started to fail it was swapped for a new one and data automatically copied over. I am sure that project has evolved since then.

Files stored on older CDs can be unreadable as the surface degrades, generally they are poor way to store data long term.

90% of the data collected during the Apollo program is now unreadable - the data format was never recorded but the data itself is fine.

For files created with a specific program you need to store the program with the file or instructions on how to read the data - no point in having a well preserved file if you have no idea how to read it.

The BBC had a project in 1981 called the Doomesday Project to record census data and general information about life in Britain - the data was stored on Laser Disks. I understand there is only a single, working Laser Disk player in existence now that is capable of reading this and this is used as a classic example if digital obsolescence. So it can be a hardware problem as well as a software one.

Data loss isn't always accidental, governments can try to change data - look how Trotsky was erased from photos after he fell out of favour in the Soviet Union. So a good preservation strategy has to cope with deliberate data tampering as well.

Not sure if there are more autos in Australia compared to Europe. You always pay more to rent an automatic, purely because the rental companies can charge more as some people either can't or won't drive a manual. Think it is even more in the US where most people seem to have never heard of manual transmission.

Ok boomer

He is a really interesting guy. Stefan Gotteswinter also has some great YouTube videos - he is very focused on commercial work that can be done in a home workshop.

I live in York and the machine is local to me I think. If your friend is serious I am happy to take a look at it for him.

I live in York and the machine is local to me I think. If your friend is serious I am happy to take a look at it for him.

First Cut Is The Deepest was actually a reference to Rod's experience using a lathe.

Can anyone else work in Rod Stewart song titles or lyrics into model engineering or model railway puns?