Member postings for Bazyle

Don't panic about overcooling your soil. I haven't redone the calculations but a m3 of earth yields 1KWh per degree temp change. So with a surface not borehole the snaked out pipe which covers a lot of ground has only a small effect which is very localised, to a couple of feet range because of the low heat conductivity of the soil.
One of the problems is the way people are still thinking of overheating their entire house rather than reverting to the position 70 years ago of just heating one room. Mid winter I think 500W continuously would be affordable so plan to add insulation until that is enough.

Wow - shiny. It looks like you have been polishing it on a buffing wheel. Didn't we have a thread on this lathe model a couple of months back when I mentioned I have never seen any spare parts on ebay for it. The spindle thread is unusually fine so not similar to any of the other small lathes.
There are loads of little chucks on ebay though so you just need to make a backplate. You need another lathe for that. Just make the threaded part initially in cast iron bar in case it doesn't come out right. Then solder on a disc and finish on you lathe to make sure it is true. Actually as the current chuck is poor why not remove it and true up the backplate in situ?

It is not a screwcutting lathe. Therefore the bed is only to hold bits together and you could use a bit of angle iron instead. It is completely pointless to regrind the bed. All the real work is done by the saddle/cross slide/topslide assembly.

It is a good lathe for clockmaking, model railways, small engineering up to G1, not just an ornamental antique except for the fact that it is so shiny.

Use an industrial sewing machine motor to power it; which also gives you variable speed.

That second tailstock is interesting - can you provide a better photo of just that please.

None of these actually need to be level. Therefore since only one corner will ever be 'in the air' you only need one wedge to take up the slack. Another option, currently in discussion on HSM forum, is fitting everything on 4in timber beams each side so you can get a pallet truck under for moving around.

While 433MHz stuff works for remote controls if you are pressing the button every second the battery consumption might soon be a problem. So you rig up a mains psu. But by the time you have run the wires from that along the mantlepiece you might as well have run the wires from a reed switch all the way to another room. What's more if only carrying signal current you can use fine shellac insulated wire virtually invisible along the skirting.

Elsewhere sunshine has been mentioned. Is this going to cause temperature related variations in the electronics? We have major problems every summer with telco cabinets in the streets which are balanced over a wide temp range but then suddenly go over their limit at midday and crash out until the cool of the night. (in case you are wondering hot countries are more careful about positions out of the sun or underground)

Steve, If you are still looking for engineering contacts the Tarka Line (full size) are having a grand reopening event on Saturday at Great Torrington.

Shock horror. using a bearing as a bearing will never do!

Maybe rebuilding with an aluminium key would help as someone advised me on a recent thread wrt an engine flywheel.

Size not a problem except for maybe a watchmaker's lathe. Hold thick end in chuck with operation end in fixed steady. Perhaps best to locktite in oversize piece and turn to size to ensure concentricity.

Well the melting could have been done with a charcoal furnace and vacuum cleaner blower, Nice to see the 'casting floor' is below the level of the standing area.
Concave radius tool is a nice simple thing that could be of use to wood turners.

Have you joined the 'Colchester Lathe' group on Groups.io ? As well as potential information and help from people who have the machine since a lot of people remove the variator you might find someone who can sell an old one for spares.

Couple of points.
Make the weights out of water bottles so that there is less bulk to move and store and adding a variable.
Don't make the bearings too low friction so they just go on for ever. Children will want things to come to an end fairly quickly.

This is aimed at the modern young office/shop worker who is permanently glued to their phone. As they read the text from their co-worker standing next to them "Wrinkly Customer has asked for old texting implement called a pencil" the reader app will be already open to identify the transparent plastic box containing antique writing devices.

The inappropriate head/bar combination is probably a reflection of the most popular sales to thousands of small far eastern factories wanting to minimise the boring head cost while getting the depth the design calls for. Persevere with the long bar and reduced quality and you can become a certified machine tool manufacturer.

You don't really want a 16mm socket to be precisely 16mm or it won't fit on a bolt head that had a little more plating.
I have a 5 sided socket extension bar and wondered what it was for. Thanks for that info above.
Bear in mind that a car is an assembly of modules made in various places. A factory making say heater assemblies will make a batch taking 3 days. Then a batch for another car maker for two days etc. They will not want to change the tooling on the assembly line and will charge if they have to.
So the production engineers make sure the designers use what the factory prefers to save costs. Fighting against this is the design office wanting to use 'what we used last time' to avoid the management complaining they are holding up the schedule.
Meanwhile the bolt salesman is offering both factory and designers special deals to try to trap them on their product. Then the company MD gets taken to lunch and golf and declares that something else is the preferred product and production is switching to his brother-in-law's factory.

When we first switched to 'security' screws on a product it came as a surprise to field operations that thousands of field engineers needed the special screwdrivers. EEEK!

I suggest as a starting point you measure the wheel spacing and diameters and provide a table of same with conversions to feet and inches using both 10mm and 3/8" scales. (NOT metric because train buffs with know these in imperial not metric)

Just adapt it to turn on the under-mill heater when needed, and the workshop lights to make it look like you are down there etc.

The 1.5" square thig is the base for a Potts drilling spindle I think. Not got mine handy to compare.

Hole counts are needed for prime numbers, but you are not going to bother with a circle of just say 7 holes. So the lowest number is eg 3x7 but it might be 2x13 and so on, picking multiples of the lowest primes. Plates often have 6 or 7 rows of holes and a set of 3 will probably give all the divisions up to 50 and lots more but with gaps in the sequence.

This covers most normal work but manufacturers would have a couple more plates to give some more prime numbers covering almost everything up to 100 though they probably hardly ever got used. A larger more fully equipped machine shop would have a universal head enabling differential indexing to get those big primes, like 127 for metric conversion gears.

There has been a small group in the Barnstaple area but I'm not sure what their status is currently. Otherwise there is Exeter and Tiverton. The L&B railway also will have some machine oriented members. There are Men's Sheds at Torrington and Okehampton and I think one is starting up in or around Bideford,

What you have is commonly known nowadays as the "BS0" as it is (probably) a copy of the Brown & Sharpe one.

There are copies of the B&S tables on the 'net and plenty of others too. For many divisions there is more than one way so tables may not agree exactly but it is also good to know how to calculate yourself. (there is one mistake in the original B&S tables but I can't remember what it is as it is a count nobody much uses)

3-phase. My mistake. I saw 3 brushes but now I look again there are 4.