Member postings for Bazyle

Could be valuable in a few years when they convert the gas main to hydrogen and propane/butane has been outlawed.

Kind of in the opposite direction I remember listening to Voice of America news read in 'Special English' - a vocabulary of just 200 words but sufficient for the task.

My father could read punched telex tapes. It is just pattern recognition so you could learn it - we just happen to have learned the squiggles we call written English. Arabic, Korean, Chinese just completely different squiggles. Like reading Morse code by sound or vision.

I would be possible to bring up a child so they thought verbal communication was done in Morse code and reading was barcode or QR code.

One thought is how long the standard will persist in our rapidly changing digital world. Will these go the same way as VHS tapes and be a problem to read in ten years? NFC tags are an alternative.

They must be there for you unless you come over here to my local shop, or so I hear.

Can we have 'curate' and 'optics' back too.

'Pure' - look up Victorian slang meanings.

Apparently lots of people are dog walking these days, no wonder there are so many puppies around. Well, must go and cover my horse (with a blanket - what were you thinking Michael as you are perhaps the only one to know the alternative meaning).

Ah, I didn't realise you were looking at a new one, thought the company had faded away not having seen them for decades at an exhibition. I'd look to get a used one that has less plastic and fewer corners cut. We tend to get one or two come up in the club from member's estates or just packing up the workshop. EDMES were just given one (??make) a couple of months ago.

Isn't it the same as multiple other ones, just with different paint? Mine is a Nutool and about 30 years old.

The bearings are fine but the quill has free play and there has been at least one solution in ME. And the return spring on the handle rather than the quill itself is less than ideal. It is a bit of a pain changing the speed if there isn't enough movement in the motor plate to make the belt loose so I really should do something about that in the next 30 years.

Cast iron and mild steel are a bit of a special case. Cast iron is steel with so much spare carbon that it makes flakes of free carbon or graphite as we all know. So you have steel rubbing on steel except that carbon gets in there and provides emergency lubrication when the user doesn't provide any.

By te way when earthing everything make sure you avoid 'earth loops'. They are often the source of the coupling from one system to another. The bane of the old HiFi music equipment. .

Different materials have varying reactions in phosphoric acid. I only paint it on not dunking things and sometimes it 'gells' almost immediately and sometimes does nothing, depending on the material, carbon content, presence of rust etc. After half an hour-ish I washi ti off and then get the grey appearance and milky white water. IN damp conditions I can get the grey in advance.

The striations in some wrought iron are the result of the old methods in an open hearth furnace which involved mixing in more iron ore. This produced a lot of slag mixed into the bloom which along with the oxide that formed on the surface of red hot iron as it was rolled gets pressed into the material. I think it is a characteristic of the metal being rolled into thin sections rather than the drawing that is now used,

The bed has been cleaned whereas nothing else has been. I think they may have picked it up for a song with a view to restoration and decide it was a bit too much for their time/capability. Note the sellers name - this is not his prime hobby. Now if it had been a Drummond I would have been interested but these ML's are just too modern for me

Look at the earthing and screening of the DRO. Also routing of wires, where its mains is plugged in. Then same for speed control. You can use an old Long wave radio to get a feel for the range and power of the emissions.

Do you have a problem with chatter owing to a lightweight stand?

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/144506658456
myford lathe a1 metal work shed workshop project

Ignore the lathe, just look at what it's sitting on

Given that ovens are used at >100c which will kill all microbes why clean it anyway? Unless you are using it for its proper purpose, ie baking enamel paint then I can see the need to ensure there are no sources of smuts

Anyone remember the 'Curta' hand held mechanical calculator? My physics master had one then got an early HP calculator about 1970.

Calculators can be too precise though. I mentioned on here a few years ago how some people had been speculating on how a device from the '20s had been designed as a particular dimension 'needed' to be accurate to a few tenths to avoid accumulated errors. Spreadsheet calculations which involved a cosine did not seem to work out. However when the cosine was reduced to the less accurate value from 4 figure tables as would have been used in 1920 the calculations 'rounded out' nicely.

edit - just checked there is a 3D print design for the Curta

Edited By Bazyle on 15/04/2022 11:42:31

The tubes in walls thing slope down just so that rain running down the walls doesn't go in. Nothing to do with damp air weight. And it is only foggy every day in horror movies.
However there is a huge difference in climate between different areas of the country. The south east especially is much much drier than the south west and I imagine many other parts of the country. Rainfall data will tell you that but you may not realise that also that has the effect of humidity going along with it.

The quick solution, today, is an old cotton sheet over the machine then a blanket over that. (the sheet keeps the fluff off the oil). You must have a few old incandescent bulbs around you can swap for LEDs eg in the attic and cellar to put under the machine, This provides a microclimate although obviously not sealed it is a quick helper improvement. Don't use plastic sheet and cotton/wool is a lot better than man made.

Often in abandoned workshops and even in houses one sees metal items that have the top surface rusty and the undersides better. This is because dew forms even inside at a tiny level and falls down, maybe from the coldest air near the ceiling that has radiated its heat into the night sky. This can happen when the conditions are not such that a cold machine attracts the condensation onto all its surfaces. So cover metal with a cloth whenever possible.

If D is driving E you don't need the specific values - just something to give you a 1:2 ratio. Since you have a 36 you could make an 18 to give you that with less effort unless they are needed elsewhere.

Great link. I have boxes of PE under my stairs from my last house move, in '87. Also remember 'Emma' and the silver nitrate random number generator. Funny how some brain cells are still dedicated to holding that non-essential information.
Around 1969 there were some articles on designing bistables and logic for model railway automation that have never been surpassed upon which I built my 40+ year career in electronics.

We had this in the offices. Although there were devices on the walls all temperatures were 'controlled' by people in Nottingham 100 miles away who didn't care what the system did. Have just finally got local control back.

By the way standby power is much less than it used to be. For getting on for ten years all equipment sold into the EU has had to meet 'Lot 25' which first required a standby power of <1W and now <0.5W. Provided you don't move it from the factory setting. That is why some things take longer to start up than they used to.

Edited By Bazyle on 10/04/2022 14:26:24

Don't worry about tramming - there is nothing to adjust on a Warco Minor.
Vices should be banned from beginners anyway to make them learn other techniques. When clamping to the table though always put a sacrificial piece below the item so that you don't mess up the table. For a lot of things MDF is flat enough.