Member postings for Francis Sykes

You want Silver Spoon!

But yes, it's one of the two British sugar producers.

For what it's worth, I bought the 2217-30 from SPG Tools last year - it arrived before Christmas.

I've only given it a small amount of use so far, although it's seen action on mild steel, aluminium and nylon so far. Most of the time since I've spent building/welding together a cabinet/stand for it. It did make some slots in the top of the unit (3mm mild steel) for coolant drainage (going to cobble up a coolant set up for it, have washing machine drain pump at the ready for this duty!)

Good machine, although as yet I haven't done anything needing lots of precision so can't comment on that. It's the equivalent to the Warco WM-18, but was significantly cheaper than the Warco at the time.

Pleased to see the price has gone up by £200! Glad I got it when I did.

It's 215kg (when I finished the stand a couple of weeks ago, an engine frane was used to lift it up), so relatively hefty for a bench mill.

I have a similar parting tool - just bought from RDG.

It has a 9mm shank - and I had to make some packing to get the centre height correct - I have a home made single toolpost arrangement that merely clamps the tool to the compound slide. I just milled off some 3mm aluminium to make it the correct height.

I guess that doesn't help you too much, if you need it lower then perhaps mill off 2mm off the bottom of the shank?

I went to Brunel University in Uxbridge - it was (early 90's) at the time the best university for percentage of graduates in jobs within 6 months of finishing the course. Mostly this was down to the majority of courses being run as sandwich courses.

So, first piece of advice, whatever university, do a sandwich course (it adds a year ot the qualification, mostly now they'll be thick sandwiches, i.e. study years 1,2 and 4, but year 3 is out working, that's for a BEng). It'll put you nearer the top of the CV pile when it comes to applications, apart from the practical real business grounding it will give you.

Where I work we've got most of our undergraduate placement engineers from Loughborough, good university, many companies like to get Loughborough students, and quite a few of them big names too.

There are other good universities of course, I'm just speaking of the ones I know!

My brother did UCL for his mech eng degree too, but then he went into IT, so it must have been rubbish... (joke, btw).