Member postings for Nigel Graham 2

The small tank looks to me like a displacement- lubricator.

If I am right, the top cap should unscrew to reveal a tube open cloe to the underside of the cap, and communicating with the branch entering the valve-chest. It's feasible the same function was achieved by a port and passage in the lubricator's wall.

The screw at the bottom is indeed for draining the condensate that had floated the oil up to the passage into the valve-chest.

When I worked as the metals-storekeeper for a company making screen printing machines, most of the millers made similar stops by cutting a slot in a piece of b.m.s. angle held to the vice by a screw tapped into the casting behind the fixed jaw.

They were working on batches that could be anything from a few to maybe 50-off, perhaps even up to 100, components.

It's lovely! A work of art as well a very functional and practical tool.

Yes - it's heartening to see an old machine such as this overhauled and put back into service!

Ian Johnson-

Printer ink stains.

This seems a daft question, but did you try just water (and soap) to remove the ink from your hands?

Some ink-jet inks are soluble in water rather than mineral-oils - I have used this to destroy sensitive documents before I bought a shredder!

Having opened the thing up, does the battery not tell you the voltage on its own label?

That looks a fine machine!

To answer the question... I advise continue using the Clarkson. As I believe someone noted on another thread recently, it gives a strong grip and positive end-location for the cutter. (A back-stop, yet!) Milling-cutters and FC3 cutter-holders have that tail-end thread for a very good reason.

A through-collet has some risk, albeit fairly low, of the cutter slipping back. That would not help machining accuracy though at least the resulting depth error is usually on the safe side so can be corrected. Worse though, slipping cutter shanks and the likely resulting hefty re-tightening are not good for the health of precision-ground collets and collet-chucks.

A cutter held by friction alone in a spring-collet can in certain circumstances, slip by winding itself down into the work... and perhaps even through the packing and into the machine table until the changing swarf suggests summat up. (Ummm, yes..., on my previous, Warco mill-drill; despite using the Autolock; but because I had unwittingly failed to engage the cutter thread.)

I have had cutters slip in R8 collets on my Myford VMC, luckily upwards, so now normally use those collets only for very small cutters, alignment tools and centre-drills.

Trying to maintain accessory interchangeability between machine-tools is an entirely laudable aim, but needs considerable discretion. Tool- and work- holders are designed the way they are for a reason. Whilst I accept they are used as cutter-holders and no doubt by far better craftsmen than me, I regard the ER collet and similar (e.g. the Myford spindle-collets) as a work-holder for small-diameter turning and dividing.

I can't see that collet as illustrated having much holding power at all. The grip on an R8 collet is given by the portion of the taper within the spindle, and it's hard to see what that protruding section can really achieve.

I prefer the Autolock for most work, keeping the R8 collets only for small diameter cutters, centre-drills and the wiggler.

With a colleague, attended the boiler-testing seminar hosted by Cardiff MES - we were very impressed by the track and club-house - and by the catering!

A valuable session, learnt a lot.

Many thanks to all.

A tip for making V-pulleys I have seen on commercial items, and helping ensuring a symmetrical result, is to machine them as a pair of discs faced at the appropriate angle, rather than trying to cut a hefty V-groove. The two discs are then riveted or screwed together.

The one likely problem with turning a very shallow cone, as here, is the compound-slide not rotating sufficiently far. On the Myford ML7 you are lucky to reach the 45º limit; on my Harrison the slide will probably turn past 90º if it were not for the hand-wheels meeting!

I see the gap as an asset even if used once in a blue moon.

I would not worry about the bed's rigidity on a properly-made lathe, as the bed will have been designed to cope with the gap both with and without the filler. If removing and refitting the filler compromises the bed's overall accuracy, as Andrew has observed, that seems to me a poorly-designed machine!

If the removed filler is held by screws tapped vertically in the bed (as on my Harrison L5), plug the holes with short screws, as swarf likes burrows.

Mick B1:

You remind me I should examine my L5's gap-filler L5. It does put a tiny step in the V-way, but that might not be the filler's fault. It is made to be easy to remove and replace, being located by two stubby dowels and held by two set-screws, albeit a bit awkward to reach. The mating faces still show their planing-marks, and no damage, so I think bed wear close to the chuck the more likely reason for the step.

The faceplate on that machine will just clear the V on the filler, I think.

That method - air-supply to the steam blower - ought work well, and be relatively easy to arrange on a locomotive. And you don't end up with a blower-fan full of muck.

Some owners have used induced-draught arrangements in which the fan supplies air to a nozzle in a Venturi choke inside an extension chimney.

I have seen the compressed-air method used on a miniature traction, but it's not so easy to be discreet there! The particular engine was a freelance, of roughly 3"-4" scale overall size, and played fast-and-loose enough with prototypical practice for the extra little bit of pipe-work to be almost un-noticeable.

From what I've seen on the rally field, many owners of the larger-scale miniatures don't use a fan blower, but simply a high extension-chimney. This is slow but has the advantage of warming the boiler gently. On the other hand, looking at the typical smoke plumes, I wonder if it soots the tubes more than a stronger draught would, by not bringing enough extra air to burn the soot while its still above the fire.

++

The blower-in-extension way calls to mind an old book for children I saw in a second-hand shop window, some years ago now; apparently one of those compendia of boys' stories. It was the dust-jacket painting that had caught my attention. It showed a miniature locomotive being prepared on a raised-track steaming-bay, complete with electric fan and extension chimney; with an audience of two or three boys presumably of the book's target market demographic - as they say these days. The unknown artist had evidently understood the scene as he had depicted it very realistically - he may even have been a model-engineer himself, or perhaps lived next to a club track somewhere.

The milling-machine looks like a Denbigh. H _ not sure of the variant off-hand, but it is very similar to my own.

If it is, the name and trade-mark (the Staffordshire Knot) should be embossed on the casting somewhere, perhaps on the downwards face as we see it there.

I don't know the particular lathes, I'm afraid but can offer this:

The half-nut control is very unlikely to have relied on friction to hold its selected position.

If the half-nut control relied on a sprung detent that has absconded, there ought be traces such as hemi-spherical drillings, probably somewhere on the apron, to accept the sprung ball or plunger.

I have just a quick shufti in the Fount of Knowledge - Tony Griffiths' 'Lathes.co' web-site - and unless another contributor can answer directly, I suggest seeing if the Perfecto "chapter" therein gives any useful details. Its photos of restored Perfecto lathes clearly show the clasp-nut lever sprouting from a large disc, and I suspect as you do, that this disc holds a detent working in aforementioned drillings. Or would, if not missing from the lathe receiving attention.

Examine the part of the outer face of the apron normally covered by the disc, and see if it has any features that match ones on the inner face of the disc. The missing bits might be as simple as a short coil-spring and a ball or short pin, housed in a blind hole in either the disc or apron, and mating with said hollows in the other.

I did not search further, but Mr. Griffiths may have facsimiles of the Perfecto lathe manual for sale. I have bought corresponding ones for my machine-tools, from him.

The business model of the IT trade led by near-monopolies like Microsoft is "It if ain't broke, break it!"

They forget, fail to realise or wilfully ignore the simple fact that if the uses and requirements of the machine do not change, there is no need to change the machine. Do I need an up-to-the-mark CNC machining-centre in place of my conventional machines, to make the same parts for a model steam-engine? Hardly. The task has not changed and both would handle the work, in their own ways. MS though strives to make you change everything every couple of years or so, for identical tasks.

Also, having used MS systems from MS-DOS to (briefly (WIN-10) at work and later, at home, XP and the MS Office programmes allied to it, marked MS' peak of usefulness and quality, and even then they were by no means perfect.

WIN 7 is not too bad, 8 was very unpopular although really only WIN-7 with pictures instead of names on the desk-top (according to the dealer trying to sell it!).

W10 looked and proved, cheap, gimmicky and messy. I had been careful to use the "Custom install" with the small virtual button rather than "FULL" or whatever it labelled the BIG one that gives MS full access to your computer use. I soon took MS' offer to revert to 7, but it took me the evening to recover the half-dozen or so web-site registrations 10 had deleted.

Sometimes I wonder what real differences there are from one edition or so-called "up-grade" to the next. After all, a computer can only work in a certain way to perform a given task, and most so-called "improvements" or "up-grades" seem only to be tinkering with the screen layout and hiding menus, to annoy the users.

Have you consulted The Oracles (Tony Griffiths' 'Lathes.co' site)?

It might tell you what tapers were used on "old" Southbends, if you can match your lathe to the information given.

When Microsoft introduced Windows 10 it insisted it had no plans to produce any further WIN-number systems, but only to "up-grade" that one system ( "up-date" is more accurate!).

I have not seen anything to indicate that will change, but I know many users have found the automatic process very frustrating.

I think a more serious problem would arise if MS starts to make us rent the software rather than buy it outright. Adobe already does that with its Win-ZIP and pdf-converter; and I think some CAD publishers do too.

'

Having had previous, and very bad, experience with WIN-10 I do not want it. If forced though, would I still be able to use Word, Excel and possibly Access files going back over many years, or continue to use software such as TurboCAD and some photo-faffing and other third-party programmes, or indeed the MS-'Office' set I had with WIN-XP?

I may be wrong but I gained an impression that the Office-type programmes allied to W10 are very stripped-down; with MS favouring the "smart"-phone based entertainments and Facebook market, over using the computer for serious purposes.

"Block, Terminal"... or I think sometimes just "BT". (That organisation of that name being far off hence.)

The noun-adjective-adjective system is common elsewhere. It can be very useful, too, as this shows:.

I am trying to teach myself TurboCAD, but have had to Come To An Arrangement that if I avoid the mysteries like Layers or its Dark Side (3D), it won't bite me. It does have an on-line "Help", which invokes a document called a "Manual"; but like many software "Help" sites, Helping users is not in the designers' remit.

The difficulty with this document (apart from it not giving too much information away) is its sketchy, rather random layout, reflected in a Contents list but no index.

However...

Surprisingly for a pdf file, I found I could copy the Contents into 'Word'. (Usually, pdf image files insist I rent Adobe's converter at over £30 a month. Do they think I'm made of money?)

The layout used long lines of "......." to join words to page-numbers. Laboriously, l replaced them all, line by line, with single commas. If you use 'Excel' you'll now be ahead of me.

Next, after tea, I re-wrote the titles in GPO / Military noun-adjective-adjective style.

My punctuation changing allowed Excel to read the plain-text 'Word' file as a .csv (comma-separated-variables) file, hence 2-column spread-sheet: Titles and Pages. Now, I could Sort it alphabetically, correct and refine, re-Sort... eventually reaching a full, proper Index I could print.

I keep the print to hand so it leads me straight to topic, detail and page number when using the on-line document. Some hours of work, but using that GPO-style title format has paid off.

At work, the establishment's Intranet directory of Safety Data sheets and the like was a mess, with a lot of duplication making it hard to search, partly because no-one had had the forethought or indeed experience to use the n-a-a system.

Could having too many hammers become a thor point?

Thorry!

Damn and blast. Typed it then accidentally hit something - the panel went blank so I have no idea if I posted it or not, and won't know without posting this, and looking next time I open the forum.