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Member postings for Chris Crosskey

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

Thread: workshop lighting
03/07/2012 10:52:58

I've got some slightly older model HPF's and find they do slow start a bit however as I have 5 off twin 4-foot units in the workshop One over the mill, one over the lathe, one over the bench, one roughly between the three of those and one at the other end where the storage and door are and find that I can normally get away with just two at the work end plus the storage/entrance one. THe room is 17x9 foot (converted concrete sectional garage)adn I'm about to paint the walls and ceiling silk white to increase reflected light a bit....it is almost shadow free..

chrisc

Thread: Arrange drill bits
13/04/2012 16:58:07

A set of Bisley type form drawers with hardboard liner and subdividers?... I use form drawers for a lot of my smaller tools, though my headline imperial set (numbers to 60, 64ths to 1/2 and a set of letters) lives on top of one of them.... Alternately if you've got Dexion shelving they made drawer kits for most of their common depths.... I've got a 3 foot high unit that has 54 off 18" long, 6" wide by 4" high drawers (with subdividers in) in a 3 foot by 3 foot frontage... couldn't really be without it once I finish moving stuff, it's just swallowing bits and pieces.... label the front and away you go, and easy to resort the drawers as they just pull out....

Ebay might be your good friend....

chrisc

Thread: Herbert Simplimill
23/09/2011 15:18:23
Hi FOlks, I have a Herbert Simplimill, it seems to be typical of WW2 era British single round overarm horizontals but mine also has the vertical head.... Mine is the hgiher-speed variant I beilive and although it needs a fair amount of work to get it back to operating status 9it's in big lumps ATM) I was wondering about the viability of a few modifications...
 
1: A norton gearbox for speed selection.... I only have one set of speed gears for it (it used 12DP changewheels). Has anyone ever done this? Ditto the crossfeed (which was 10DP wierdly)
 
2: A selectable planetary speed reduction gear between the motor and it's input connection to the mill. This would be so I could get the advantages of the low-speed version of the mill as well, it ran at 1/4 the speed fo the fast one....
 
If anyone knows of anyone with experience of this machine (mine is the wheel feed not the lever feed) then I'd welcome the contact.... if you have a spare set of changewheels for it or have experience of selectable (ie geared or ungeared) planetaries then I'd love to hear from you....
 
Does anyone know what sort of colour would be correct, my machine is blue, but I would have thought it would have been grey back then.... Unless the BLue is original and rare then I'll probably paint it grey to match my Myford
Thread: Dividing Head
23/02/2011 14:19:55
Generally it's a device that allows for accurate control of the rotation of a work piece and its fixing at any point (subject to teh coarsness of the divisions available) in said rotation.
 
There are two sorts (and a third is an extension of the second)
 
Simple dividing heads consist of a a shaft onto which the workpiece can be fixed with an indexing system (normally a multiple of 12, 60 is popular) that allows you to rotate the wrokpiece to any known indexing division and lock it there.
 
Complex dividing heads generally use a worm and wheel to control the shaft and allow for much finer control (and many more divisons). You will find designs for COmplex heads that use trains of spur gears to achieve a similar effect or even put the spur chain on the end of the worm to allow for uber-fine control.
 
Compound dividing heads are basically complex ones with the addition of an extra shaft that can be powered from a gear train off a milling machines table feed. This arrangement allows for spiral milling of slots etc.
 
I would suggest a model engineer probably needs soemthing to do divisional indexing on and although they will rarely need the full ability of a complex head, let alone a compound one. THere are plenty of designs out there for simple heads and some of them are also designed to be extended into complex ones with addition of the worm,
 
THings to looki at if you're interested are the Hemingway Kits version of the GH Thomas Versatile Dividing head, you can make that up in stages, also look at the RDG dividing head as it represents decent value for money. On another tack slightly you could also look at Chronos (and others) who do a rotary table that can have a Myford nose attached and a dividing kit added.
 
chrisc
Thread: Metric screw cutting
21/02/2011 13:51:36
There's alots of ways to get metric pitches on a Myford gearbox. My ML7 has the early "low-speed" gearbox which needs the 25:12 pinion to get the stated pitches, however I find if I put a 34-tooth gear on the standard pinion set then I get a 1mm thread to a fairly high degree of accuracy at a setting of 8tpi in fine-feed mode.... I did a little chart of these dodges once and found that most of the small metric and BA pitches are there if you have the correct gears for them.... I do also have the DAG Brown auxilliary banjo and it's very useful if you are switching bak and forth between a couple of pitches.... Also because I was offered some at a sensible price when I was younger I've actually collected just about all the differnt change gears Myford have ever made .... sooner or later I'll bother trying to fill the gaps, but they atre just oddball prime numbers so of little practical value.....
 
chrisc
Thread: Insulating sectional concrete garage to use as workshop
08/02/2011 17:43:41
Many thanks folk,
 
I've now found another thread that relates to this so will effectively transfer to that one as of now. Many thanks for all the advice and I'll bear a lot of it in mind as I do my insulation It's one of the last two big outdoor projects left to go on my house, the 20x10 greenhouse is the other ... it's currently sitting in bits in the workshop shed.....
Thread: Condensation in workshops
08/02/2011 15:03:12
Thanks for this thread, I'm in pretty much a similar boat and was going to ask pretty much the same question.... having measured mine I think I'll be going for polystyrene 50mm in the walls, 25mm in the floor and loft insulation in the roof with DPM and plasterboard for the walls and dpm and hardboard on frames for the roof... Floor will go DPM-screed-insualtion-floorboards but under the two main machines it'll go DP-screed-brick-built plinth with absolutley levelled surface. I'll look at putting some sort of very low level heating in on or near the machines.
 
Looking forward to this, going from my old 11x7 shed to a 17x9 with additional storage.... if nothing elseI'll have the space to rebuild the mill at last....
 
chrisc
Thread: Insulating sectional concrete garage to use as workshop
02/02/2011 21:14:27
Many thanks, all useful info and soem mgood points made that I'd overlooked.
 
re:@ the plinths... my plan for the floor will have DP then screed then at least an inch of polystyrene plus the green chipboard with industrial carpet over that. But I don't want my machines sitting on what I consider an unstable base, plus the mill could do with raiisng a bit anyway, it's a Herbert Simplimill and it's a fairly compact (though heavily built) horizontal with a vertical attachment as an option.... I could live with it being a foot or so higher....
 
Any\way, instead of the machines sitting on the chipboard they'll be on soild plinths from the screed upwards, only one brick layer for the ML7, possibly four or so for the Herbert
 
chrisc
02/02/2011 17:11:14
Hi folks,
 
The first question I asked on here had a pleasingly high signal to noise ratio in the responses, so I thought I'd wrack your brains rather than ask on general building fora.
I've got a sectional concrete garage at the bottom of my garden that I want to convert into a workshop. Currently my stuff is in a 7x11 foot shed I built at my folks place many years ago. Now that the chaos of my moving out is settling (for me anyway) I'd like to make it a priority to get my workshop transferred.... also the folks want the shed....
 
I'm happy I can damp-proof the floor easily enough (DPM and screed) and reckon that using a polythene membrane on the walls should sort that out but I'm a bit at a loss as to insulation. For choice I'd use 25mm polystyrene behind hardboard on battens on the walls and 50mm ditto or 100mm loft insualtion for the roof. But where to I put the membranes in the wall?... between insulation and wall or between insulation and hardboard or both it's cheap stuff after all).
 
To attach the battens to the wall I'll have to go through the polythene I expect, is it enough to pump silicone sealant into and around the hole behind the polythene and also around the screw/rawlplug? I'm not planning on hanging much weight on the walls, I'll build freestanding shelving for my stuff.
 
Also what to do about the roof ?.. It's a fairly shallow pent and ATM it sufferes condensation, if I insulate the roof where do I put the membrane and I'm assuming it will need ventilating, but into which layer as it were?
 
Finally are engienering bricks good enough to build a plinth for the lathe and mill on, probably only be a single layer with a levelled concrete top, it's there to provide a properly flat surface and get the units clear of the flooring (ie they'll go straigt onto the screen, the insulated and probalby carpeted floor will be around them.
 
Other folks must have done this so I'm hoping to learn from experiences both good and bad.
 
Many thanks
chris crosskey
Thread: Milling Chucks
11/01/2011 09:42:03
Posted by The Merry Miller on 06/01/2011 13:47:15:
It's weird that Myford still refer to their collets as ER.
 
Anyway we're back to my earlier post  and almost full circle now.
 
I'm with you Chris on this one.
I will not use my Myford collets for milling and will look again at the Posilock chuck and even the MT2  drawbar collets that Arc Euro sell.
 
Chris, would you use those for 1/2" cutters?
 I'd probably go for a proper chuck for 1/2".... I do have some cutters that look like a 10mm version of the FC3 style, they go in a morse adapter but the bigger stuff goes into the Autolocks for me... I used to have a Pozilock and it was very good, I only replaced it when I managed to get a 1 3/8" non-stick taper Autolock for the Simplimill and it made sense to standardise on the one collet type...
 
chrisc
06/01/2011 13:07:29
Myford collets have nothing to do with ER.... if the nose is the same size I would suggest it is coincidental.... It's a Morse Taper collet that uses a nose closer rather than a drawbar.
 
I've got a full set of Myford collets in Imperial 32nds and metric wholes, with some 0.5mm, 64ths and an odd hex but I'd recoil from using them for milling unless I had to.... I've got some drawbar MT2 collets to fit 6mm and 1/4" as it is useful for FC3's but for the bigger stuff I use Clarkson  Autolock as I've been able to get a small fitting chuck to fit both my Myford and my Herbert Simplimill (for when it's rebuilt) as well as a bigger chuck for the Herbert....
 
chrisc
Thread: Lament for a lost grease.
24/12/2010 12:47:04
Sturmey Archer's own brand grease was calcium-additive based.... I've still got a pot of it somewhere for the Sturmey I grafted onto my Sinclair C5 to give3 it gears on the pedals.... Wierdly it never looked much like grease though, more like swarfega..... when I upgraded the C5's electric motor reduction gear to steel pinions with proper bearings I used the Sturmey grease on them and the thing stopped eating gearboxes every couple of thousand miles.... I did a lot of miles on a C5 back then...
 
Thread: Orrery?
24/12/2010 12:05:48
This is sort of my point.... there's a handful of professional makers, one kit that is a very good starting point but I want planetary rotations and it hasn't got it and then almost no real information outside of a handful of Meccano plans.... and they're not a huge amount of use to me as they are working with purely the meccano gear range....
 
I'm assuming I'll have to manufacture box-section skeleton arms for the outer planets, their systems will weigh a fair bit. I can use some of their gearing for things like moons as a counterbalance hung off the other side to the planet..... Indeed if I could factor in the modifications that it causes to the various ratios I'll do that with a lot of the gearing, the Saturn system by itself is about 50 gears.....
 
chrisc
15/12/2010 10:27:13
Many thanks for both replies. I'm surprised there's been so little published. Though equally after I'd sorted out what I wanted to put in the  one I'd like to build in terms of the eight planets plus their more interesing moons, the two most interesting asteroids (Ceres cos it's large enough to have formed itself into a sphere, Sylvia cos it's the smallest thing with two sattelites) plus Pluto and Sedna and their moons and realised I was looking at at least four if not six gears on each orbit and the same again on anything that had a rotation that wasn't tidally locked and it came to a lot of gears.... at least it will allow me to have an excuse to build a hobbing system I suppose.... also if I use anything bigger than 80DP the damn thing will be too big to get in the lounge....
14/12/2010 19:01:56
Has ME ever published a design for an Orrery?... I've searched the forum and this is apparently the first mention of such a thing.
 
chrisc
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