Member postings for Bazyle

Lots of small grinders available second hand. We sent half a dozen off to the 'tools for Africa' place last year. They should be cheap then you can spend money on the new wheel. Otherwise the Titan 8in from Screwfix is good out of the box.

Don't get intimidated by it being a 'black art' or any more difficult than making decent tea. eg over stewed tea = overheated bit etc.

You don't need a fancy adjustable toolrest until you are sharpening end mills.
Find the references on this forum to a stack of wood blocks and the height above wheel centre creating the grind angle.

You only need one angle to all faces = 10 degrees. Just do everything to 10 until you really have a reason to deviate. (obviously not thread tools)

To save carving off huge chunks of a new blank get a pack of used tools off ebay which will have much of the work done so only need finishing off.

If you find that you 'need' a more powerful motor on your grinder as indicated in an earlier post you are using the wrong grade wheel and it is clogged.

You can put the strop through the bed close to the headstock and around a bit of 2x3 wood under the bed. Simple. Importantly then put a thin rope though the spindle, around the strop, and back through again to pull the strop close to the headstock otherwise it can sip down the bed. This also ensured the pivot point when lifting a bare lathe without a cabinet is above the CofG.
Last time I stripped a Boxford I weighted the bed alone and it was 60lb and i wrote it on it. Unfortunately that's the only marking left but I think the all up is more like 400lb than kg including cabinet.

great timing - to clash with Midlands Garden Railway show at Warwickshire on the same weekend.

Sort of the inverse of hobbing a wormwheel.

Ah, looks looks you have a 4tpi leadscrew. I suggest you see whether you can modify the banjo or add an outrigger to enable 6 wheel trains. Then use a 2:1 starter pair eg 20 & 40 to make everything more 'standard' so you don't need the high count wheels.

About 50 years ago a cutting at the St Albans club site was turned into a 30 ft tunnel by putting in shelter sections and covering over with about a foot of soil. Over the years some substantial trees had grown up within feet though not actually on top. In 2020 we finally decided that the bottom had rotted enough to make it unsafe so it had to go. Back to a cutting but we left the brick portals and a hint of the original iron. Though ideal as a tunnel they must have been really cramped for a long wet night with bombs going off.

Which gears do you already have? For an 8tpi leadscrew the 'best' set is 11 wheels in steps of 5 teeth from 30 to 65 plus 2x20 and 38 (to do 19tpi BSP only) plus a couple more to get you metric. However some lathes used steps of 3 and all sorts of odd ones which are not so elegant.
You could look at which threads you are actually likely to cut and just get the ones for that. Also they don't need to be particularly strong or precise (unless you are cutting a new leadscrew) so you can get away with plastic, thin aluminium and even hand file the teeth.
Perhaps not big enough to span the gap but it might be easier to get a mini-lathe set as they are the most common.

If you have or know someone with a 3D printer there is an opnscad thing on thiniverse to print an index plate with any number of holes and control over diameter and fixing hole position.
The picture shows a test I did for a single circle of 73 holes (prime) and big hole for attaching to a carrier plate to save printing time and filament.

Thanks for the info. I hadn't found that particular source of details. Now I can make up something as a sort of exhibit. It is interesting in a way that although there will be a dwindling number of people that actually got one as a child tehre will be far more who have heard about it via the internet.
Over a 20 year production life, including through WW2, that is a far longer period than so many modern 'inventions'.

Just found a Juneero tool in the Men's Shed scrap box. They can be too ready so consign things to the bin and not recognise classic items.
Unfortunately the sheer section of the casting is broken but still an interesting exhibit.

Anyway does anyone have any of the strips to measure the thickness, and width? The adverts and other info online doesn't mention this. i assume it was just soft iron but brass and aluminium would be fairer on the old tool.

There was a programme on the BBC recently about some tests of basic cheap AA against expensive makes and none of the premium ones gave more than about 1.5 times life let alone their extra cost factor.

Or the end caps may be repair items for imported plastic furniture. Could you get square drainpipe and cut and glue it?

While inevitable that all the LEDs are in series it does present a reliability nightmare as every single one failing brings the whole unit down, even though this case was the chip.

You might look around for for scrap floodlights. I picked one out of a skip for the aluminium housing but the reason for failure was the square LED array not the psu. Since the array on it's own was more than the whole assembly it was BER. I couldn't think of a use for the psu as it was fully encapsulated so too difficult to get to the bits to make it adjustable for any other use.

If you get a mini-lathe you might well at some time want to make a small drilling spindle for it (rather than cobbling up a holder for a Dremel) that can also help with gear cutting either for milling or for acting as a dividing head. If you make this in a suitable way you can also make it work as a watchmaker's lathe headstock.

Lee the workshop build sounds interesting. Photos? more details? (in another thread to avoid topic concentration in this one.)

Spent the day moving stuff into storage for the church into the old Rectory stable block. This consisted in its day of a two horse stable and carriage section (double garage size) and a gardener's potting shed with a 'tack room' sandwiched in between. This room is only 6ft by 15 deep but has wood panelling, parquet floor and a Victorian domestic fireplace. So the Rector on returning from touring the parish on horseback could warm up and dry off. Whole complex would be a superb ME shed.

No it wasn't. Every single village and town had a network of roads to the others. Just not paved.

Alignment of roads to towns was possibly done over long distances using beacons by night and smoke by day. Add to that some understanding of navigation by stars and planets, rising and setting sun or moon and you have a lot of info that we just don't get taught these days.

Even more impressive is the early navigation in the Pacific over far greater distances with severe consequences from errors.

At that rate a psu plus 24v wheelchair motor is a contender for a small lathe rather than a VFD etc.

£50 squids! That's a whole day at minimum wage. Would you pay someone for a whole day to make you a little handle? Yes it might take me a day, allowing for coffee breaks etc, but I certainly don't have that kind of spare cash. It is also 50 slices of cake at the local 'warm space', or 50 hours of running the lathe to warm up the workshop,

Are the pallets just a bit of bent steel strip like mine? It is amazing they run at all with little regard to correct geometry.

Not sure what 32 oil is but proper clock oil is formulated not only to be thin enough but to not evaporate for years,

Sometimes it is better rather than stetting to correct time to set to 12:00 each round and see if it stops at a similar time eg at 12 minutes to the hour.