Member postings for Bazyle

Insurance £900 - £1500, rent £500 - £2000, speakers for club meetings £300, website £100. Running a club is expensive even before you do anything. Unless you have a huge membership that can't be covered by a reasonable level of subscription.
Many clubs only run for the public one day a month leaving 27 per month for private running.

St Albans has no regular public running so has to run an exhibition for two days. Is setting aside the last weekend in September when the holiday season is over too much effort?
Exeter does public running only on the first Sunday of the month plus events with the portable track but lots of days are available as our lease allows only private use on most other weekends.

Use Google: I got

"Caithness Model Engineers

https://modeleng.proboards.com › thread › caithness-m...

Hi everyone, I'm trying to get a club up and running in Thurso, Scotland, (thats near John O Groats!) So far there are four of us, ..."

I also found someone on this forum in John o Groats.

Model railways gave me Durran's model shop

Mens shed gave me a Scottish shed search site which gave me a shed in Lybster.

A variant on SOD's cabinets is brick piers. You can always find some free bricks in a skip so the cost is just a bag of cement (which is a horrendous price since lockdown). Big drawback is that you really have to have settled on your shed layout first.

This is all available in the FreeCad - just fill in the table.

(Perhaps SOD who dod such excellent tutorials in basic use of FreeCad would like to cover this )

I had Brickplayer. The special 'cement' quickly ran out so I used real cement so then it couldn't be taken apart by soaking as per advert.

The wire rods used in Bako were made a special non standard diameter so that people couldn't buy ordinary SWG wire to replace them. We sometimes have someone displaying large buildings in Bako at the St Albans club show (last weekend in September).

Google "model Engineering Thurso", "Men's Shed Thurso", "Model Railway Thurso" and follow up on the leads.
Don't expect something tailor made and right on your doorstep. Connect up with the above leads and you will find a few like minded people who would like to get together in a pub or coffee shop to start things off.
Even in crowded London it is a 30 mile round trip to my club meetings and in Devon a 55 mile round trip.

No. He had the makings of a reasonable bench until he stuck the beam in there. A mild steel tube contains stresses so may distort over time, will 'ring' at some frequency, and while strong is not rigid. A simple flat pate would be fine, say 3/8 thick to give some mass, or a few 2in angle irons with paving slab on top. You don't need the mounting points machined to some super flatness, just an adequate bolting surface - you bolt down 3 of them then shim the fourth foot as you level the lathe.

Probably sent over herein bulk to help us Limey's convert our Whitworth threads to UNC and make adaptors for captured continental thread equipment. Your buckets being the stores clear-out some while later when we went all metric.

Same with everything. Just can't find a replacement large soup bowl of the same depth (ex ASDA) - current fashion is wide and low. Good thing about willow pattern was they at least sort of matched so one could get odds bits in boot sales. Not so much around now.

And they did it with lathes. The Drummond M-Type was not fancy but pretty good for a simple functional machine for hobby use. Blow me if after only 30 years even Myford stopped making the copies.

I notice that on the BBC website 'local' news option if I put in a Devon location I get local news if I put in an Hertfordshire location I am overwhelmed by football 'news'

Picking up on the Scorchio thread mentioning solar panels (lack of) perhaps everywhere needs a ban on petty regulations obstructing domestic solar installations.

The 'Picnic basket' is a tin, possibly once contained biscuits. Kind of funny that you brought it to my attention as I have had one for decades in my workshop. I think mine contains old 12v incandescent light bulbs.

The lathe looks like a BH600 or the earlier 12x24 type. I'm not sure if the buttons on the left of the headstock are standard or indicate it has a VFD. Value from £1500 to £2500. Make sure you get all the original equipment sorted out.

The BP looks clean and probably similar price, I think identifying the head type is important to BP owners.

As always do some research on ebay for current selling prices, not the inflated BIN prices.

There was a radio piece the other day about a vegan only restaurant chain going back to mixed owing to lack of business. Since if a group of people go to a 'regular' restaurant someone would nowadays make a fuss if there was absolutely no vegetarian options it seemed a bit odd that they would think the converse was going to work.

Back to the original question.

You already have tools. Decide what you want to build. Look at the drawings and list the materials you will need and the bits of material you already have. Find a part that you can make out of the bits of metal you have. maybe put in an order for some more material including common sizes which you will need anyway one day.
As you make it you may see that you need a particular tapping drill that you don't have, or a tap.. So try making another part. Once you have a list of a few things you need that are stopping you progress put in an order.

You have made a start and can just progress without being in too much of a hurry. After all you don't buy all you food for the year in one go in January, so no need to do that for model making.

Oh and start looking for a second hand grinder, You can put a wire brush on one end if you don't do lots of grinding.

It's funny how the USA <> UK relationship works. Lots of things are taken for granted as being the same yet we suddenly find great gaps in understanding. Like loads of Californians have their HVAC (Heating, ventilating, air conditioning) but have never even seen coal let alone an open coal fire in the living room. Come to think of it not many Brits nowadays know how to handle a living flame fire. (BBQs don't count)

Don't forget your electric motors and especially motor control boards don't like the heat either. If you must run things try to do so for half the usual time. This applies to lathes, grinders, DVDs, washing machines, all of it.

A previous post about printed gears

Also someone has reported printing backgear for a SouthBend lathe and using it for years.by now.

Yesterday up at the St Albans track it was very nice sitting in the shade with a breeze wafting trough the trees. Most of the track is in shade and the first few cars to arrive also get the shady spot. Luckily there was no obligation to do any maintenance work or building of the new G1/16mm track. I had planned to read the latest G1MRA newsletter but spent all the time chatting and this morning MEW turned up so I've got a backlog.

Currently inside at 24C as garden is rather sultry even in the shade.

St Albans use Ionos and have multiple emails forwarded to appropriate committee members not just one. Not sure which package it is though and how it is set up as I'm not the admin.

You are lucky to get 9Mbps up if on 38Mbps down though that sounds like a phone connection. Cable used to run 10:1 ratio (back in the day it was me that specified that) but as the download speeds rocketed up the DOCSIS protocol did not allow for proportional uploads.

The reason for the imbalance is that the upload was only designed originally to send small housekeeping acknowledgements of downstream packets not running servers which by the way is outside your terms and conditions, It really isn't fair on your neighbours to run a server with anything more that family downloading photos as you can slow the local network down for their simple streaming and stuff ping times for the game playing kids.

I thought they had tightened up Trading Standards powers to include online sales.

Great opportunity to set yourself up a website loaded with clickbait adverts then sue this 'celebrity' whoever he is. The resultant personal publicity sends people to your site where you get the advertising revenue. You base your claim for compensation on trying the device while driving lie a prat so your fuel consumption, as proven and witnessed by an engineer mate, actually increases.