Member postings for Muzzer

God alone knows where you managed to pay £1400 for a 3kW VFD - they must have seen you coming. Get a true professional quality drive and save the best part of a grand. (But you'll also need an EMC filter).

Mark - no urban myth. Most VFDs specifically tell you not to switch motors under load, particularly vector controlled drives. You say this every time it comes up - perhaps you should write to all the manufacturers and tell them you know better. I know, I know, you have one of the few brands that DOES allow it but exhorting people to ignore the specific instructions regardless of the model won't be doing them any kind of a service.

As pointed out, the VFD starts the motor off at zero speed with a controlled torque and actually very little power draw. Ignoring losses, the electrical power is torque times speed - do the math.

Murray

If it is this product, the remote "extractable keypad" won't gain you any extra functions. You have to program it using the basic interface provided (which is the same with either interface), just like most other VFDs.

There's no obvious alternative to reading and following the procedure in the manual. Although I'm not an expert on the VFD market, I suspect this is an unusual (rare) product, so unless an expert in their use comes forward, it may simply come down to you to tackle it - somewhere around page 24.

Murray

Nothing wrong with what you are saying, Howard, although I suspect you lost him after the first sentence. Heating by burning hydrocarbons produces a lot of water and there is the risk of CO poisoning. Not clear why anyone would choose to use carbide of all things.

On another front, in many ways it's like lighting a fire - it takes ages for the carbide to stop producing acetylene and you can't store the gas safely. Hardly convenient or safe.

Murray

Rater than talk about it, just watch the video #2 and you can see exactly how to do it. That guy is a very experienced toolmaker and his runout is pretty darned good....

Murray

Have a look at Threadexpress's video channel where he discusses chucks and backplates. The "adjustable backplate" method is just what you are describing and if it's good enough for Cluff (he's a Kiwi it's going to be good enough for the likes of anyone on this forum. There are 3 parts to this video and part 2 seems to have some particularly relevant stuff around 11 minutes in.

If anything it sounds possible your register needs to be further turned back to provide enough adjustment.

Obviously you need to be certain the backplate is clean, free of nicks etc and properly / squarely seated before you start looking to adjust the chuck.

Tell us how you get on.

Murray

Yes, good point. the electronics and controller software don't come cheap, nor do they wire themselves up magically.

No idea how many (if any) they have sold but if course, if you don't ask you don't get....

Murrat

Lots of ill informed tosh about lead free solder here. Almost every electronic product made in the last 5 plus years will be lead free and the process is well understood and consistent. That includes computers, phones, cameras, cars etc etc. There is absolutely no issue with the stuff. Easy target to have a good rant about though....

Murray

The trial ran out before I had a replacement. Then my daughter needed some help getting up to speed with Solid Edge and I played with this for a while. Very nice and powerful, proper professional stuff. Then her trial finished and I had access to Solidworks through my job. I have yet to see any mainstream programs that can import native Alibre files, so you are stuck with exporting as STP and IGS which lose most of the model parameters - it's hardly worth doing.

As I recall, the license cost for Alibre was pretty steep, there was no "hobby" pricing and the local rep (covering Canada) was pretty condescending (insulting in fact), so we left it there. Yes, I know it's under new ownership.

30 or even 90 day trials are all very well but just be aware that the time you invest and the work you produce won't be 100 recoverable if you change horses. I enjoyed learning each of SE, SW, Onshape, Inventor and Fusion in a structured, methodical way but if you are just trying to get something done, you might want to look at ongoing costs and whether the features you want are there (or cost extra) before you start.

Murray

If you have any interest in any of full 3D modelling / drawing environment, true multiaxis CAM (CNC or 3D printing), sheet metal, thermal / stress / vibration analysis, a wide and very open user base, an active development team and user forum etc, then Fusion is for you, not least due to the fact that all of this is free.

It's true that the product is still in development but having followed them (and used it) for the last 3 years or so, they are clearly very close to having a finished product. The "missing" features are probably ones very few us would ever have a need for. If you have any doubt about its capability, have a look at what is being done with it.

Portability or the ability to export your work into other formats is an important consideration. I have some Geomagic / Alibre files that can't be opened unless I pay for a license, whereas the likes of Fusion come with a wide range of import / export capabilities. So even IF Fusion were to start charging (which I doubt), you'd be able to save your work beforehand and open it in another application. I can do this with my existing SW files, although there is no way with any import filter to retain the mates / joints / assembly constraints, so you have to reassemble the individual parts afterwards

There was another factor that caused me to stop using my works Solidworks licence - the longer I used it, the more work would be at risk of loss unless I were eventually to buy a license myself, at vast initial (and eyewatering ongoing "maintenance" costs. This greedy behaviour on the part of Solidworks is of course the very opportunity that the Fusion team is capitalising on.

Murray

This is pretty good. ncviewer Opens in a browser and you can simply drag and drop your file into the window. Written by an intern with Autodesk - I think you can be certain he was offered a job afterwards.

If you created your g code in Fusion 360, it has some very powerful plotting functions and stuff like tool / holder / workholder clash detection.

Murray

Edited By Muzzer on 02/10/2018 18:10:10

A Canadian schooner is almost a litre. That's probably their Scottish heritage showing through. Not surprisingly, Mercan schooners are smaller and ill defined.

Be careful if you ever fancy a sherry in Canada, Neil.

Murray

It's worth considering the cost involved in simply creating and maintaining a part number on the system - and storing, auditing and shipping it next day. Honda, like most car companies hold spares in a central warehouse (in Belgium in their case). Even if the part itself were non existent and simply comprised an empty ziplock bag, there would be quite a cost involved.

Until fairly recently, Honda used to claim that you could still get parts for the S800 (mine was made in 1967) and indeed at one point I was able to obtain a variety of small parts for the brakes and engine. Some were reasonably priced but others (ball joint covers) were silly money. And of course they wouldn't make any new parts, even if the tooling existed. I'm guessing they probably still held some parts until a not so many years ago but unless you asked for the exactly correct part number, they couldn't even check for stock.

Murray

If you look in the "thread designations" pages starting at pp5 in the linked document, you can see how tolerancing works for the various thread systems. Few MEs come across thread tolerancing, hence the experiences with rattle fits and stripping threads that arise from crappy rolled studding etc. However, for critical stuff like automotive and aerospace it matters, so fasteners are specified with tolerancing like a G (nut) and g (stud).

Murray

No, you can also get what Mercans call "agnostic" inserts - we call them "partial profile". Fine for what we need and doesn't require such a large number of insert sizes.

Good guide here if you have time.....

Murray

No, that's the problem. You will continue to generate steam, no matter what back pressure you impose on it. You can calculate the amount of water you are converting to steam quite easily.

The heat of evaporation of water is about 2200 kJ/kg, so every 2200 J will result in the evaporation of about 1 ml of water. If you had a 2.2kW steam generator, you would evaporate about 1ml per second. The volume of steam is about 1600 times that of water at atmospheric pressure, so you would be generating about 1.6 litres of steam per second.

Obviously if you restrict it, the pressure will rise and the resultant volume per ml will decrease but it won't reach equilibrium unless you tun off the electricity or allow it to escape. Failure to do so is likely to cause you to "make mud" and put you in hospital or a box.

Murray

If you look at the link I posted near the top of the thread, you will see that supercapacitors are an order of magnitude even more worser then batteries.

Murray

Here's the YT review myfordboy did. Clearly the strong and silent type!

Funny to see snake oil salesmen selling "organic" rock salt to the gullible. Ultimately, all of our edible salt comes from the sea, either directly (by drying the liquid) or indirectly (by mining ancient, dried up sea deposits. I suppose the mined stuff will be sightly lower in terms of pollution but when we are swimming in a sea of our own detritus it seems unlikely to be of any consequence.

Ironically, the reagents used by chemists and pharmacists may well have been made in a chemical plant but ended up purer.

Murray

Check out the energy density of different technologies and you will understand why chemical energy (petrol, coal etc) is so much better than battery storage. It's true that battery technology has moved forward a lot in recent years but it starts from a disadvantage of an order of magnitude or more.

You could achieve a limited run quite possibly but look at the Isle of Man TT as an example of the relative range possible with motorbikes using the different technologies.

At least with electric heaters, the efficiency of the final stage of conversion is very close to 100%.

Murray

So, rather than making a silly dig at unelected burocrats etc (yawn), why didn't he simply apply his supposed common sense by applying a sell by date that reflects the fact it never goes off? Like 20 years hence? Just a thought, even if it would devalue the anecdote....

Murray