Member postings for Martin 100

engineers black book

Sub £20 on ebay last I looked and good value for money

Or if you are skint then just list them here and I'll look them up

Edited By Martin 100 on 08/02/2017 14:28:39

The Eclipse 20T is one of the few general purpose hacksaw frames I have, been in use for approaching 40 years and still in production today. I also have another Eclipse, model unknown with a wood handle dating from the 1960's that fits in the hand like a glove. All get a decent amount of tension in the blade. Blades are a mix of Sandvik, Bahco, Eclipse and Starrett, migrating mainly to bimetal Sandvik as I got gifted dozens of them a while ago.

I must have driven under that bridge on the M62 near Scammonden dam hundreds if not thousands of times over the years. Glad to wake up this morning, look out the window at the thick fog and frost, and relish the thought of not driving on a day like this. The cat possibly appreciated some company at home today. The closest I got to any engineering was glancing through MSC's latest offers (Mitutoyo digimatic coolant proof calipers 'as low as £2.23' it says on the cover ) and watching a few videos on Youtube.

The Mitsubishi FR-Z024 drives fitted to the Boxford TCL160 lathe and VMC190 mills are the same, with just a power and alarm LED and certainly no way of displaying or changing the configuration onboard. There is an optional membrane keyboard and 7 segment LED display that plugs in that costs just £325 on Ebay I have one somewhere in my junk pile

It's the same with quite a few drives even today, the Schneider ones for instance have just a basic display a couple of switches and an optional plug in configurator. At least with quite a few modern drives from some manufacturers you get some degree of PC connectivity for configuration.

I had this problem repeatedly a few years ago with my Boxford when it was situated in a cold unheated workshop. Worked normal for a few minutes then a gradual slowing of the spindle to zero speed and a squeal from the v belt and the motor dropping below the centrifugal switch speed, kicking in the start winding and then cutting it out again a second or so later. The pulley was effectively locked solid to the spindle.

It was eventually traced to a lack of end clearance / lubrication on the multistep pulley (item 250) that fits over the spindle. Remove the two grub screws in the bottom of the v groove, lubricate with lathe oil, replace the grub screws and run under no load for 10 mins or so, with both the sliding gear and back gear disengaged such that you are only driving the v pulley and nothing else (the spindle may drag slightly)

If no improvement and the pulley stops again then back off the nut 119 by a smidgen. A blow or two from a nylon or hide faced mallet on the non chuck end of the headstock might be useful.

The method of setting the bearing preload is detailed in the Boxford spare parts leaflet which should be floating around online, my experience says it is very temperature / bearing grease dependent, and the setting is in my view maybe on the high side. What preload works now could easily be useless come mid-summer.

http://www.boxford-software.com/spares/3656HeadMk1.html

As a Boxford owner for many years, and with no more than five minutes playing on an ML7 decades ago, it's always puzzled me the reams and reams of discussion in ME and elsewhere about oiling Myford lathes and how the Myford oil gun is useless and lots of suggestions from all and sundry on how to fix it, and store it, and stop it leaking, and etc.

With a Boxford I just use a Reilang gun, prod the end into the oiler squeeze the trigger a couple of times and get on with using the lathe. Is a Myford oiling point something so massively complicated it needs a 'special' solution to apply the oil?

There is no mention of the term defective goods in The Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 (which replaced the previous distance selling regulations)

For returns other than defective the onus is on the seller to specify those costs at the time of the original contract or otherwise the seller bears all those costs.

The applicable legislation for defective goods is

The Consumer Rights Act 2015

This replaced The Sale of Goods Act, The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations and The Supply of Goods and Services Act.

Section 20 Right to reject

"Whether or not the consumer has a duty to return the rejected goods, the trader must bear any reasonable costs of returning them"

I've rebuilt a few Bosch 14.4v NiCd battery packs using NiMh (the standard Bosch charger being compatible with both) They use sub-c cells, originally 2Ah, I fitted cells rated at 3Ah. With the drill costing around £250 in 2007 and battery packs from the manufacturer at around £90 a piece rebuilding was an economic proposition and a relatively sound idea around five years ago.

At £60+ for a couple of sets of cells, plus the time and effort involved you really have to have a drill that is worth keeping alive. Plastic cased rebranded plastic junk will remain just that. Old cordless drills from a quality manufacturer will probably have an all metal geartrain with decent bearings and even now reasonable spares availability for brushes etc. On the downside they are very significantly heavier to handle than todays Lithium powered offerings.

While the AA and AAA Sanyo (now Panasonic) Eneloop NiMh cells have very low self discharge, with large capacity NiMh cells used in power tools it remains a significant issue, and it's often higher than the equivalent NiCd. Leave the battery packs for a couple of months and they will be unusable until they are topped up, leave them too long or discharge too much in use and you run the risk of one or more cells failing and reducing the overall capacity and voltage of your pack. Such a conditon is unfixable without removal from the housing, individual cell voltage measurement and charging in situ.

A brand new Lithium Ion drill with two 3Ah batteries from a quality manufacturer is available around the £120 pricepoint, it'll be faster lighter and easier to use, with the benefit of instant use after a few months sat on the shelf.

The cell supplier I used was batteriesplus No connection etc

I first used holesaws in the lathe in the mid 80's to cut 2 inch diameter holes in circa 3/4" steel followed by a boring operation. Mainly using the off the shelf yellow starrett holesaws as they were freely available.

I have some rotabroaches dating from I'd guess the late 1970's from 1/4" up to about 3/4" but they are still unused sat in a drawer in the toolchest.

The discs are used on a wide range of GM vehicles in the 80's and 90's usually the lower powered ones

Drawing here but as shown in the photo above you'll lose some flat area to the radiused inner edge.

http://www.brakebook.com/bb/pagid/en_GB/52404_82/datasheet.xhtml

The pad friction area enables an estimation of the usable disc material

http://www.brakebook.com/bb/pagid/en_GB/T0841_402/datasheet.xhtml

Ditto, the title of the email was "Message from Mike"

I'd certainly buy more from them if they reduced their prices by a reasonable amount...say 85%

Just wondered how their UK pricing policy is compared to the USA. Years ago when the £ was around 1.80 it always seemed to be 1:1 for the UK market almost regardless of the company or product involved, and then we had VAT to add.

I remember buying a bit of specialist test kit in the mid 1990's It was cheaper for me to fly to New York for a long weekend (on a ticket booked a few months ahead) buy it retail, fetch it back to the UK, paying duty and VAT on the full declared value than it was to buy from one level up the distribution chain in the UK.

Nice pics and amazing what you can do with a bit of image stacking.

I take the easy option, a fresh image every day, no need for a telescope and I get to sleep all night

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Edited By Martin 100 on 10/01/2017 10:51:02

Question 3 admirably demonstrates that the metric system is, by some considerable margin, easier to understand and use.

For motor sizing the articles by Dick Stephen on his conversion of a Sieg X3 mill to CNC in MEW a few years ago might be useful as it goes back to fundamentals rather than just making a wild stab in the dark.

Part 1 (2nd link on this page)

Sieg X3 Mill - CNC Conversion

Edited By Martin 100 on 09/01/2017 14:17:58

1cm x 1cm box section is way too small for any off the shelf wax sprayer to deliver a suitable thickness coating The typical recommended coating thickness for cavity wax is around 0.1mm 'wet' which reduces to about 30% of that when all the solvents have flashed off. Underbody waxes are applied at about 0.75mm flashing off to about 0.4mm.

By off the shelf wax sprayers I include the waxoyl pump-up tin of old, the aerosols with extensions, a Schutz Gun and the professional compresser fed cavity wax gun with multiple interchageable nozzles and spray patterns as used by many body shops.

All you will be able to do with any of those methods and that size cavity is to massively overtreat and partly fill the cavity and that can stop it draining. This could be a very bad thing to do, actually promoting more rust and making any subsequent weld repair 'interesting'

It's the wrong time of year to be considering treatment, pick a very hot day and get the wax as hot as you can. Let any excess drain, maybe drilling additional holes Even then you'd be far better off fabricating a new piece of steel, possibly a bigger section if you can, properly removing the rot and getting it properly welded.

Dinitrol do an aerosol phosphoric acid RC900 which can (although not specified as such) use an extension nozzle used for their range of waxes but it will only give you a couple of feet of extension.

rejelrustproofing on ebay is a good mail order source for Dinitrol phosphoric acid, cavity and underbody wax and application kit (no connection)

While it is British I'd not use Waxoyl, it's still iirc a one mix formula does all and cavities have totally different requirements to exposed underbodies, and old cavities have different requirements to new ones. The waxes that vehicle manufacturers use have been way ahead of Waxoyl for decades.

Yes the OP has a problem and as you pointed Toby out quite early in this thread it could be existing leakage on the existing installation, I agree entirely!

My point immediately above was not all the installation nor indeed the entire consumer unit requires replacement for the sake of one new circuit, or additions or modifications to an existing circuit

Like for like requires nothing more than what was there originally. Indeed by 'improving things' such as extending RCD protection to lighting circuits it removes shock risk but increases the risk of falling down the stairs in zero lighting conditions. The former could be survivable, the latter quite possibly not.

To add futher fuel to the fire

"There is no legal requirement, and no regulation in BS 7671, requiring an existing electrical installation to be upgraded to current standards. However, there is a requirement under the Building Regulations for England and Wales to leave the installation and the building no worse in terms of the level of compliance with other applicable parts of Schedule 1 to the Building Regulations than before the work was undertaken. (Schedule 1 gives the requirements with which building work must comply,)

Electrical Safety First Best Practice Guide No. 1 (Issue 3)

Replacing a consumer unit in domestic premises.

Link replaced  (quote is taken from the best practice on consumer unit replacement where lighting wiring historically does not not have an earth connection) 

Edited By Martin 100 on 06/01/2017 15:36:57

As the bloke on the Irish roadside says I wouldn't start from here: ) Milling on the lathe is always a bodge. The vertical slide is clumsy, the capacity is rubbish, the travel nowhere near enough, the overhangs and resultant rigidity rubbish, the visibility of the cutting edge often non existent. Holding cutters needs an effective collet chuck and they are quite expensive. Horizontal boring is a little easier but still a huge compromise.

For the money the original attachments cost you could probably pick up an import milling machine and do the job properly.

My Boxford had essentially just the chucks and a single 'american' toolpost when acquired, now some 40 years later It's now relatively fully tooled with taper attachment, 3C collets, ER collets, vertical slide, slotted crosslide and a boring table. The 4 way toolpost foolishly bought in the late 1980's now replaced by a model 100 interchangeable one from arceurotrade and insert tooling more or less entirely replacing HSS and brazed carbide.

Without workshop space for a milling machine I never bought one until about a decade ago and so milling on the lathe became a necessity.

But, for other than a very small handful of jobs over the years the task of milling is so much easier on a machine actually designed for the task. The vertical slide was iirc last used in the 20th century and the last time I recall using the boring table was about 2010 ish for a one off horizontal boring job that I recall well as it took a couple of weeks to set up as it required extensive jig and clamp manufacture and just half a saturday morning to machine a couple of mm from a 30mm bore for 70mm length in aluminium.

I'll never part with the boxford attachments because a job might come up that actually needs them, but for most of my milling work I would never even contemplate using the lathe as even a cheapy import milling machine like my Sieg X3 does a far better job.

The wiring regulations (BS7671) are not retrospective so, unless this a is a property subject to a periodic inspection regime (rented) then rewireable or cartridge fuses, no RCD and without earthing to ceiling pendants and light switches is permitted on an original installation dating to say the late 1950's where PVC insulation became the norm.

Sadly Part P of the Building Regulations (a separate document to the wiring regulations) and probably the £250 cost of building regs approval for standalone wiring changes has appeared to have driven the general public away from any permanent wiring installations towards multiway socket extensions that, along with multiway adaptors the fire brigade now deem a new potential source of fire in the home. (despite them generally all being constructed and fused to BS1362 & BS1363)

Also with the introduction of the 17th edition 3rd amendment to BS7671 somehow the tens of millions of plastic (and wood) enclosures that have been used for decades for consumer units are also now 'unsafe' and new installations have to use a metal enclosure or be housed in a fireprooof cupboard. The cynical would suggest they only become unsafe when wired for intensive indoor horticultural purposes when operating at 300% of their intended design rating.

Edited By Martin 100 on 06/01/2017 11:42:31

It's been a good few years since I rebuilt the apron on my Boxford but I seem to recall there was some degree of adjustment available on the clutch with a screw or a nut - mine is the earlier model with the rotating metal handwheel.