Member postings for Muzzer

Yes indeed - another accident involving a mouse which I blame on cabin fever.

One of these boys - £350 delivered including a bonus pack of filament and nozzles.

I did a quick writeup on my blog - don't have time to rewrite it all here and I can hear that the Domestic Manager is afoot now, so I'm guessing I'm about to start some more floor tiling.

Overall - yes, looks pretty good against the Ultimaker2 which is my previous reference point and at a fraction of the price. Pretty darned amazing how much you can get for so little.

As noted here previously, Myfordboy did a review on YT.

Murray

Those new ones are an improvement on the old ones where you lost the specially sized straw after first use - they were only held on by a rubber band(!). But I found the same old issue - the pressure only holds up for a while (6-12 months?), after which the contents are inaccessible without a tin opener. 

I've got a couple of these. The one I bought in Canada was silly cheap, like £5 or so (for a US gallon). In the UK you can find them for under £20 (for 5 litres) if you look around a bit, which isn't too bad. The spray bottles are fine for my purposes.

Murray

Edited By Muzzer on 29/09/2018 12:30:34

Interesting add-on for £35.....

I wouldn't bugger about - a chisel would fit in there very nicely. If that doesn't get it moving, nothing will. You can tidy up the damage afterwards and reuse it but surely won't need to do it again for many a year / ever. Looks as if you've had your money's worth out of it already!

Murray

No, that'll be Murray from Lancashire (currently) - Lytham St Annes (posh name for Blackpool).

Murray

Wow. £3300 plus painting and a lot of fitting. Pigs and lipstick come to mind. For that cost plus the cost of a Myford you could probably pick up a proper CNC machine and spend your time bringing it back to life, with some likelihood of ending up with a decent machine.

Murray

In the UK we use ring mains and a lot of double sockets so the 32A MCB is normally what is required (see the building regs). No harm fitting a smaller MCB but surely that would be the opposite of an improvement.

Murray

I think you've answered your own question here. Breadmaker = fling stuff in, press button, walk away. Then come back and eat it.

Murray

Backing off every turn or so requires the "other" side of the flutes to be sharp. It may be that the main cutting edges are sharp - but not the ones used when reversing the tap.

Murray

It's quite a simple matter to run a existing 3-phase pump from single phase by connecting the third phase through a motor start cap. Plenty of info out there if you search for it (how many uF per kW etc). Saves having to change the motor. It will work even if you can't find the start point but even better if you can, assuming it is 415V to start with.

Murray

I'll complete the permutations. On my Bantam I use ISO32 for both the gearboxes and the slideways, as recommended in the manual.

Murray

Still in use for mozzy control in India and other countries.

You may even be able to make a cocktail with the stuff.

Murray

Ooops. It's been a while since I last had a serious accident with a mouse but it was only a matter of time before it happened again. Enforced time away from the workshop seems to significantly increase the risk of such an accident. Somebody ought to do something about it.

Last time I ended up with 3 tonnes of Japanese cast iron turning up at the house, which caused the Domestic Manager some consternation. This time I received (at work!) a small box containing a Cetus 3D MkII, less than 48h after ordering. I've only bought one 3D printer before (an Ultimaker) which cost about £4k at the time. This one is pretty much £400 and sounds as if it is capable of similar precision.

Couple of video reviews by myfordboy and some Mercan both sound good.

I'm not going to do one of those pathetic unboxing stories but will let you know how it turns out once I get back to Bristol after the weekend.

Murray

Or god forbid the audio snake oil magazines who have to endorse the latest emperor's new clothes. Enough engineers on here to put a stop to that kind of nonsense here at least!

Murray

Nice work, Brian - do you have a DRO on the mill or was this painstaking manual positioning? And looks like a rotary table for the top feature?

Murray

Pretty certain the eccentrics are relatively simple ie simple offset circular. I've seen Camlock spindles on US lathes from almost 100 years ago and clearly they would have used relatively "simple" machinery to make them. Besides, it's not likely to be hypercritical in this application.

I don't recall making mine in any detail but I know I made them in the lathe using the 4-jaw to get the correct offset. Once you have achieved that part of it, you simply need to place the tangential bore in the right position relative to that offset.

The Madmodder site files were probably posted by John Stevenson ie almost certainly the exact same ones.

I still can't figure out what the "v" angle relates to.....

Murray

From what I could tell from my time there, Canadians and many Mercans seemed to equate hoppiness with greatness. Some of the really "good" beers were so hoppy and bitter they almost turned your tongue inside out. God nose why people enjoy that. I'd even end up drinking something as pathetic as Bud or Coors Light in preference.

I know that there are several distinctly different groups of people when it comes to smells and tastes and (like Rod perhaps), I'm not a lover of bitter and pungent smells. But even so, some of the hoppy stuff out there takes some stomaching. Not surprisingly perhaps, I'm not a fan of grapefruit juice either. Each to his own!

Murray

I thought about wooden, then steel (industrial) installations but finally went for a proper brick cavity wall construction, with double gazing, full insulation, central heating and wiring. Got it all approved and signed off by the planning department so that it can be sold as a living / working area. Sounds extravagant but in reality it can be reused as a space for a small business, a granny / teenage flat or indeed a multi-vehicle garage with little significant work. On that basis, it seemed more likely I could recoup the investment when we sell, whereas a dedicated workshop shed would be an expensive indulgence.

The original plan was for the whole extension (about 6m x 15m) to be workshop but I hived off just over 1/4 of it and made that a dining room / sun lounge extension opening onto the existing kitchen space. That leaves "only" 3/4 of the outline in an L shape but the narrower part with a single roller door provides access and plenty of shelving etc space and could be partitioned off later as a single garage. The remaining space is about the size of a large double garage and is good for my milling machines, lathe, welders etc, as well as several benches.

Ideally I'd have kept the whole outline for workshop use but it has to be part of the overall domestic plan (approved by the Domestic Manager of course). Next time round I'd like a bigger plot of land so that the final workshop area would be bigger....

The key to making a workshop function adequately for my purposes is to be able to move stuff about easily. So I have a large Weber crane that can lift and move all my heavy machines if I fancy a reorganisation of the layout, to focus more on one particular technology. That allows better use of the space that is available.

Murray

Bear in mind that, technically, gears are designed to operate with zero backlash and indeed when you measure them for "accuracy", you generally do this by meshing the test gear with a precision "master" gear with a (close to) perfect profile and observing any variation in centre distance. There is usually a spring to preload them with a defined force.

The reason for creating a deliberate, finite amount of backlash is to guarantee that there is no (statically indeterminate) radial preload, with some margin for thermal expansion and other tolerances. Ideally you would minimise the backlash, consistent with ensuring some is always present. Traditionally a fag paper suffices for workshop requirements.

Murray

At one point they were literally giving ink jet printers away with reams of paper. Presumably you would get it set up, start using it - and then the "demo" cartridges would run out. I acquired one like this and finally "recycled" it without even opening the box once I saw the costs and the penny dropped. Would have been better to have simply left it in the store.

Recently threw out an inkjet printer / scanner device at work. Usual problem - heads blocked because it hadn't been used for about 6 months. Apparently some people manage to fix them by washing out the heads in warm soapy water but you can imagine how this might go wrong! Some of the "professional" inkjets had replaceable heads as well as in cartridges but in my experience there was still a lot of buggerage uncertainty and expense unless they were used regularly.

I now just go for B/W or colour laser printers. Quick, clean, consistent and fairly quiet.

Murray

Edited By Muzzer on 12/09/2018 10:34:59