Member postings for Enough!

You think? Not in the manufacturing sector which is largely (dare I say almost exclusively) imperial. Naturally since our largest trading partner by far is the US. Go to a hardware store and nuts, bolts, screws etc are mostly imperial with a sprinkling of metric if you are lucky depending on the store.

Metrication is mainly in the supermarket, gasoline sales and highway speeds. (And at that, they had to produce special legislation for the gas station operators when we "went metric" in the 70's because they ignored it and continued to sell in gallons - imperial, not US).

Even our duty-free is oddball. The liquor allowance is 1.14 litres per adult which is actually 40 oz even though liquor and wine is almost exclusively sold in metric both here and in the States. There are a couple of distillers products that are made in 40 oz sizes (as well as metric), mostly for the duty-free trade so the situation is self-perpetuating.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 20/01/2015 23:14:07

To illustrate what I was saying about the DaVinci above, here's a part that I made recently:

This is a ring-light for the mill. I saw an article in another mag not long after I got the DaVinci, which involved considerable machining and it dawned on me that this would make an ideal 3D Printing subject. (It fits around the spindle and uses circular arrays of LEDs - "Angel Eyes" from eBay). This was a somewhat modified version of the magazine design.

The laminations can clearly be seen. Also visible on the far side is a delamination crack .... I should have put a decent radius in that corner. It didn't take much stress for that to happen. I put some roll-pins in to strengthen it. (The red colour is from Locktiite, used - unsuccessfully - to fix the lamination crack and also on the pins. I'll clean it off with some alcohol when I can find my wife's toothbrush).

Nevertheless, for functional parts such as this, the machine is a handy device to have around. there's something really kewl to sitting down to design something with a CAD program and immediately producing the part.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 18/01/2015 22:55:32

A few DaVinci observations:

- the laminated nature of the finished part is pretty visible no matter what layer height setting you use. Not a problem on purely functional parts but crummy for "art" objects (I use the term in its loosest form) which may be the hardest parts to post-finish.

- parts can easily split along the laminations if stressed, at least on my machine - I've even done that when removing the part from the platen. It's almost as if the temperature needs to be a little higher but that's set in the cartridge as someone noted. Problem can be eased by careful design, minimising stress-raisers.

- the slicing software supplied is generally reckoned to be rather "brain-dead". I'd have to agree. It's for the totally unsophisticated user (not using "sophisticated" in the Tom Lehrer sense if anyone remembers him)

- as noted here, the cartridge can be "hacked' allowing you to use an external material source as well as modify the temperature a little. There are also ways to use slic3r instead of the manufacturer's software. XYZ though is not sitting back and letting it happen. Some of the recent software/firmware changes have been aimed at preventing such hacks. This means that it's safer not to update if you intend going that route since there is no (official) path to downgrade again .... although there are unofficial ways that are purported to work.

- the ultimate hack of the machine is to replace the firmware altogether allowing slic3r and perhaps other slicers to work. Also allows much greater control over temperature and material. All levels of hack, of course, carry the risk of turning the machine into a boat anchor ..... except perhaps the cartridge reset which really only affects a cartridge, presumably empty and useless anyway.

Something you might want to consider as an intermediate, cheaper and less drastic step is to cnc-convert an X-Y table which can then be mounted on the mill. You still have one mill-axis to do of course but at least the mill is available for making parts for most of the job.

I just finished a 2D conversion of a standard, Far-East X-Y table fitting it with ball-screws (tight) and steppers for use in engraving and cutting PCBs etc.

The Workshop Practice Series "Drills, taps and Dies" (Tubal Cain) is usually quoted as the "Bible" in this respect for model engineers. Its reference tables cover a range of thread depths for just about any thread system you can think of.

On top of that the whole book is a darned good read (one of the few reference-type books that I read from cover-to-cover).

Can you get the press-on knurled caps for SHCS in the UK .... this type of thing?

Would it do the job?

I see they're putting safety springs on these things now too - to protect me from damage due to leaving the chuck-key in.

Now, if they can only come up with something to protect me from the skinned knuckles I get when the chuck key slips out 'cause I'm fighting the ejection spring .... then they'll really have system.

Morses for courses - if it's designed for a certain size of MT collet, any MT collet of that size should fit. It's a standard.

Might be worth a try. I recently got a DaVinci 1.0 and while it might be very useful for functional parts, the "scan-line" finish would preclude something like this.

It is also s ....l....o.....w. Each half of a case for a Raspberry-Pi took me about 6 hours - admittedly on a rather "good quality" (as far as it goes) setting.

Perhaps because in many, if not most, other Western countries, the term "Engineer" is protected by law and cannot be used to describe a person who is not a qualified member of the local Engineering Institution (I Mech E etc equivalent). Fifty years ago when I was an Engineer in the UK, that wasn't true there (although the engineering institutions claimed to be working in that direction) - I don't think much has changed.

If anyone and his dog can call themselves an Engineer, it's not surprising that the general public has little respect.

In Canada, where I live now, even the term "Model Engineer" is pretty iffy if someone wants to push it. Dropping the "Model" part, as often happens here, would render a person liable to legal action.

I don't think rats come in those colours, Ady.

Sure, I've seen rats. I dont deny they're around in sizeable numbers. It was your method of interpreting some statistics that I was commenting on - the common (and erroneous) practice of using mass statistics in individual cases.

"there is at least one rat within a few feet of you at any given moment"

gives the same statistical weight to my living room as it does to any rat-infested sewer; the same statistical weight to a square mile at the south pole as to the most flea-bitten third world country. It takes the total number of rats and divides it by the total land area of the earth and the result is then quoted in various forms on the internet (where they manage to get a different result on each "authoritative" site).

If you want to spend a little more time on this, find a deserted parking lot somewhere; draw a circle of "a few feet" radius; stand in the centre of the circle; count the rats in the circle.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 15/12/2014 01:05:06

There's lies, damn lies and statistics.

.... then there's abuse of statistics

I can confirm that the Pocketmags reader works fine under Win8.1 .... well, rather than "fine" perhaps I should say "as intended". Windows 8.0 too.

How you actually launch it under that awful new Windows-8 front-end is anyone's guess though. I got rid of that fiasco (well, overlaid it actually) from day-1 with Windows Classic Shell and can launch the reader the same way as any other program that we have been used to for years.

We even used to have left-hand threaded ones (for subway cars).

I hope you're right - for you ..... it certainly never worked well for me. Things bog down real quickly once you get below tooth-height and the swarf has nowhere to go. Filling up the tooth gaps translates into abysmally little feed before having to withdraw to clean out the saw and the narrow annulus that it cuts. If you don't fully clean it, things just bog down all the quicker at next pass. The use of cutting fluid, as advocated by some, makes matters worse, if anything, leading to a gooey mess in the slot that's hard to get out.

Personally I'd lean towards trepanning it if I couldn't mill or turn it out.

If you do attempt it I hope you make a video (with a clock visible) and post it.

I don't know much about the gearbox but I assume that it's also used for automatic feed. In which case it lets you change feed rate on the fly (say for a finishing cut) without reconfiguring a bunch of change wheels. That's pretty handy over and above it's screwcutting uses. (In my case, it would be its primary advantage were it not for my ELS below).

Of course, better still is an electronic leadscrew such as John Dammeyer's which gives you pretty much infinite control (within range) over feeds and threads, imperial or metric at the touch of some buttons without needing change wheels or gearbox.

Edit: sorry, Norman, should read all the posts before posting mine.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 11/12/2014 15:34:21

Maybe I'm not adventurous enough but I wouldn't attempt to go through 1/2" steel with a hole-saw even on my 3/4 HP pillar drill on its slowest speed.

Apart from all else I would expect it to take literally hours given that a hole saw is one of the worst configurations of cutting tool since that there's no route for swarf removal and you have to withdraw it every few seconds. If you are the least bit tardy on that, it heats up with loss of cutting edge and the swarf welds itself to the blade making it even more difficult and time-consuming to remove.

I'd be very interested to hear how you get on.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 09/12/2014 18:23:37

(Highly) subjectively, I don't find it any slower than it's been for the last couple of weeks. There was a noticeable drop in speed at that time though, which has continued. On my PC.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 07/12/2014 17:43:14

My subscriber number (when I had one) was 10 digits long too - but the first two digits were both zero which, as Dave says, you have to drop when entering the number.

Pretty daft-seeming really. If they don't want you to use the zeros, why include them in the number they give you? It's caused more confusion than enough over the years. Or failing that, why not write the software to ignore leading zeros, if they exist in the entry, and then it doesn't matter whether the subscriber enters them or not? (I have at least two other memberships elsewhere that do the same thing as this site).

As far as I recall when I had a subscription, the "Magazines" link takes you to all the magazines (the current mag and the archive of past mags). The only selection involved is choosing ME or MEW. I think perhaps the "Online Archive" terminology in the welcome email pre-dates the site update that happened some months ago.

Edited By Bandersnatch on 03/12/2014 01:56:20