Member postings for Greensands

Hi Stew - Your Crab is coming along very nicely and the build quality to say nothing of your rate of progressive is most impressive! I notice that the smokebox has been painted. Would you be able to give a brief account of what surface preparation was carried out, which primer have you used and the make an type of black paint, (presumably a heat resisting grade) and not least, your method of application i.e. brush, aerosol or spray gun.

Keep up the good work

Sam, I have sent you a pm

Greensands

Barrie - I have sent you a pm

Can anyone on the forum suggest a possible source (and common name) for the waxy type of plastic sheet/block material used for test proofing of CNC software. I have a small piece left over from a previous job which is blue in colour and when cut gives a very clean and precise finish. Ideal for proof machining purposes.

I believe the Compucut system designed to be run from a 286/386 PC made available from Roger Bertlett who was based at one time in Coventry offered a manual control option of a CNC mill

Hi - I am building a 5" gauge Don Young Black Five and am considering using in-line boiler feed check valves mounted horizontally beneath the side platforms in place of having them as an integral part of the top feed fitting as specified by DYD. This arrangement as used by Martin Evans in his 7.25" Highlander (ME 3 February 1967) and has obvious advantages in terms of accessibility and maintainence issues but I am not sure just how this works out in practice. For example is there an issue with keeping the balls on their seats if mounted in the horizonatal position?. I would therefore be very interested in hearing the views of other builders who have had some practical experience in fitting and running with horizontally mounted check/clack valves before taking any further decisions.

Apolgies if this query sounds a little familiar but my previous posting was mis-placed and may lave limited its general readership

Hi All - Martin Evans in his description of his 7-1/4" Highlander Black Five gives a drawing for the use of in-line water check valves (ME 3 February 1967) but from what I can see makes no reference to exactly where and how they should be fitted. It is also interesting to note that he opts for the use of in-line valves in place of valves mounted in the top feed unit as for the prototype and also as adopted by Don Young for his 5" gauge Black Five. I would be interested to hear the views of builders who have opted for the use of in-line valves and what are the advantages/disadvantages of using them. One obvious question arises regarding just how thet should be mounted i.e whether vertically or in the horizontally, the latter implying of course that the balls would not naturaly be resting their seats. Does this then mean that one would have to adopt the use of springs in order to keep the balls on thteir seats? All views and opinions would be much appreciated - Reg

Hi everyone - Thanks for the replies and support given on the subject. As I am working with a stand alone system I can see that baud rate is of no great concern to me.

Hi - I have a Heidenhain 3 axis DRO system fitted to my milling machine and am very happy with its general performance. It is an ex-industrial piece of kit fitted with a Type VRZ 720B/760R series display unit which can be pre-programmed in a number of ways via the keyboard. One of the many options is to vary the baud rate (parameter 06) but I am not sure why and when one would need to make any changes to this particuclar setting. Perhaps someone would be kind enough to explain its workings.

Apologies for the delay in coming back but many thanks to all for the help and usefful suggestions. I found a way out of my problems which I traced to a number of hidden characters within the data strings and which in the absence of a Hex dump remained out of sight. Problem was overcome by setting a trap for all characters within the range <CHR$(32 and >CHR$(126) all became sweetness and light!

To answer a previous question I am runing a DOS version of Borland Turbo Basic (8 chars max filenames) under Windows XP

Carrying out further tests I have come to the conclusion that the insertion of a new line is a function more of the print command rather than an embedded LF/CR within the data string. - just a thought

Have not tried using the Hexdump approach yet but have tried checking the LEN of a string containing a known of characters without any indication of hidden characters.

E.g TEST$="123456789" N%=LEN(TEST$) PRINT N% gives a value of 9

Hi Dave - This is my problem. Inserting a comma (or semicolon) as shown in you example above does not have the desired effect in TurboBasic. Printing out from an string array places a new line between each record with or without the comma or semi.

Reg

Hi All - Can anyone suggest a way of printing strings in Turbo Basic without having an unwanted new line following the string. I have tried adding a comma and a semicolon at the end of the print statement which I gather does work with QBasic and GW-Basic but neither appear to work with Turbo Baisc. Any helpful suggestions would be much appreciated.

Hi - Is anyone aware of or have had any experience with the CompUcut CAM system which was designed to run under DOS and then at a later stage, under early versions of Windows? It appeared on the market around 20 years or so ago and aimed at the model engineer and the small garage workshop environment. It had I believe established a dedicated following in its day and it would be interesting to know if it was still in common use.

Hi not done it yet - Brush application at the cutting edge is all that is necessary to give a lovely finish.

A rarely mentioned cutting fluid option these days but one which I have used with great success for turning silver steel is a 50% mixture of Neats Foot oil and paraffin and does lead to a superb finish. The only minor downside is that like all animal based oils in will oxidised over time which can lead to surface staining of the lathe bed. If you have access to the oil available from any horsey outlet it is well worth giving it a go.

Have just checked out access to my 2017 version of DraftsSght and nothing appears to have changed. All my drawing files seem to be readily accessible as before. I thought we were supposed to have had a problem come the new year?

I have just checked out the mating allen key and it is 3/16" A/F not 7/32" as originally posted. Apologies for that. It now seems certain that my screws are in fact 0BA. Thanks for putting me right on this one.