Member postings for Nigel Graham 2

Ooh. Thankyou.

I'll try to retrieve one of those I cut down.

If it does prove Japanese Knotweed I really don't know where to go from there because I was in effect trespassing in a derelict garden whose owner has died, and I do not know his relatives or where they they live.

I've just examined what Wikipedia tells me about it. At first reading it does not seem to be Knotweed but the plant is also easily mis-identified among several other species including at least one (Himalayan Balsam) also considered an invasive pest.

I have a friend who is a professional horticulturalist, owning a wholesale plant nursery, and may be able to help me although he lives nearly 70 miles away.

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If it is this Hogweed it could make life even harder for the family. Not only is the garden becoming impenetrable, but the entire back of the house is a luxurious ivy and vine thicket right to chimney-top level. The birds love it, even pigeons roost and possibly nest in it, but is hiding the state of the building, where a few visible patches suggest needing a lot of re-pointing and other work.

I completed an open-topped assembly-bench and ramp, with trailer-winch, for working on my steam-wagon without having to grovel on a ground that seems closer than it used to be but harder to descend to in a controlled fashion, but much further away when I try to get up again.

Last task on that this evening was securing the vehicle on the bench and sheeting it down.

Last task while it was still vaguely light was going into my late neighbour's overgrown garden to cut down some enormous weeds I did not want seeding over the wall (down prevailing wind) into mine and my other neighbour's. Their stems, some approaching an inch thick at the base below the first branches, and up to about six feet tall, were soft enough for secateurs. I am no botanist so I don't know what they are, but I hope they are not some notifiable species or armed with something yet to get me. Triffids, probably.

(Late neighbour - a man living alone, found fatally collapsed in the street elsewhere in the village, two or three months ago. He had partially cleared his garden but it is now a jungle and his relatives, although local, have done nothing with it. I don't think they've even finished clearing his belongings out, but I might be wrong. I've only seen them there once. His small front garden like mine, is mainly a shrubbery and I've taken it on myself to trim the bushes back to the wall, along with mine, when they start to overhang the pavement. )

Then indoors, brew, reply to a private seller on this very forum.

I was faced with similar problems setting up my workshop after I'd moved home, and solved it by making lifting-frames with scaffolding tubes and clips to suspend lifting-tackle.

if you use a hoist or block-and-tackle you need be sure where you can suspend the machine safely, and it is very dangerous to improvise things like lifting-slings unless you really know ropes and knots.

An engine-crane may work but the usual sort with two splayed legs is a right cussed thing if you can't arrange a straight lift and push in. It depends on whether you have room to manoeuvre it, and the headroom given that the height of the lifting equipment between hook and load can be significant.

It would seem your best bet is a manual lift provided all are reasonably tall and they know how to lift heavy weights properly and reasonably safely. (Many people do not!)

Before you start, ensure as much working space as possible, no slip / trip hazards, nothing loose that can be knocked over or off a bench.

No doubt an irrelevant ad in any of the series, not just ME; but at least the advertising does book-end the publication, not break up the articles.

I wonder if it's a sign of the bigger traders able to pay hefty paper-rent moving more to their own web-sites, which would be bad news for any journal partly relying on that income.

Good news about your Red Kite, Jason!

I gather these birds are now spreading quite widely.

... even without people devoting their workshops to fabricating high-precision bird-feeders.

Thank you but if you look back through this you will find it was pretty well covered! I had wanted some guidance on steering ratios.

Hindleys did not trouble too much about niceties on a steam-wagon not likely to have reached even 8mph on whatever asphalted road it was lucky to find, and I copied a set of photos giving better views than that Dorset Year Book 1977 illustration in the query about pumps.

I also referred to reprints of contemporary manuals for operating and servicing steam road vehicles, not modern motorway cruisers.

I have given the track-rod put a fair amount of toe-adjustment, presently toeing inwards to the front. The whole thing did look all-square with long king-pins and no obvious camber or castor angles. The most I can do now is taper the axle-to-spring spacer blocks, to give the steering a modest castor.

I made the channel beam axle by welding two lengths of folded 2mm thick channel back-to-back and dressing the welds smooth, so it holds insufficient steel to accommodate tapers itself.

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Despite the apparently poor steering layout, Commercial Motor reviewers of the time (1908) considered it an easily-manoeuverable vehicle to drive, in their road test that involved driving one several times round Finsbury Circus, from E.S. Hindley & Sons' London show-room. Perhaps it was, compared to some of the lumps the magazine was probably offered for review.

Hindley built quite a number of the mid-engined "Light", and the bigger undertype "Standard" and its heavy-duty "Colonial" equivalent, steam-wagons. Hauliers and house-rermovers Pickfords owned a fair-sized fleet of the "Standards" before abruptly moving to another maker, Foden I think.

The Hindley wagon catalogue also reckoned it so simple that any ordinary man can learn to drive it in a short time - so I think I'm in with a chance!

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 26/06/2023 14:23:25

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 26/06/2023 14:24:27

Squirting someone would seem a certain way to know the pump is working!

Hidden on that historical photo, the tank is tucked away behind the rear axle. I have given my model a hand-pump in the tank, and its handle needs a large slot with coaming in the lid. As this needs be readily accessible from the driving platform, the sensible, and simple, approach is place the bypass outlet visibly just below the rim of the slot, as on many miniature locomotive tenders.

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Charles Maloney's businesses were evidently successful and perhaps he liked to treat his employees well, for all the Hindley publicity suggests the canopy was an optional extra I am copying. Bling too, as few if any other photographed examples show a polished capuchon: I have replicated the standard chimney's half-round beading, all painted. The side-lamps are Hindley standard, but that big headlamp on a crude wooden frame looks like an owner's modification.

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(I have built a plain, flat-bed platform for static display. Held by 6 M6 coach bolts that are not too intrusive or unlikely, it is reasonably realistic with separate planks on a wooden frame. I gauged likely plank and frame sizes from examining preserved and modern goods vehicles, and dividing by three.

I painted it, but later realised it would look better if I removed the paint on the floor area and replaced it with timber preservative. A coarse sanding-disc left shallow arcs, which l kept, so that the treated floor resembles the circular-sawn, creosoted planks likely to have been fitted to the originals built >100 years ago.

The frame and head-board stay painted, as appears common on preserved full-size lorries)

I like that space-saving idea of the compressor and saw sharing a trolley.

I would go a little further than filters though, and also find or make a dust-cover for the compressor and fan when they are not in use.

I've been pondering something similar combined with a static storage area and the overhead travelling-hoist for the smaller machines I have in my over-crowded workshop. I am part-way there having built a hefty, two-feet square bench with a 10mm thick steel plate top drilled and tapped to take each of the hand-shaper, bar-bender and vice, separately.

Thankyou Paul!

The original vehicles were basically flat-beds but other body styles could be fitted, and the photo below from the Dorset Year Book 1977 is the one that inspired me. The cab, such as it is, was an optional extra!

The boiler-testers in my club tend to prove if a pump actually is putting water in the boiler is working by very carefully feeling its temperature! Fine on a traction-engine but not so easy on a locomotive unless tested on a rolling-road.

Otherwise it is very much a matter of watching the water-gauge and pressure-gauge.

Thank you gentlemen!

Geared-down and full-length bypass it is then.

I will have anyway to make a functional driving-platform very different from the static "show" load platform that looks like a lorry platform, so arranging some way to view the bypass outlet will not be difficult.

The pump will not be attached to the boiler, but to either the chassis or the engine enclosure.

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Paul -

It is a representative rather than fine-scale, 4" -scale Hindley "Light Delivery Van" , to use the manufacturer's own brand name for this relatively small vehicle. The originals had a capacity of about 2 or 3 tons.

Its particularly unique features are a locomotive-type boiler but with vertical-cylindrical firebox (I believe some Shay locos and a French make of portable engine had similar); and an enclosed inverted-vertical engine standing through the chassis between the crew seats.

A layout giving some very odd, unexpected design problems, since I have no original drawings for it, and as far as is known, none exist. Just contemporary advertising photographs and a few dimensions by the builder and by trade-magazine reviewers .

The model is about five feet long and a shade under two feet wide: scaled as best I could from photographs, and slimmed slightly so it would fit through my - and its - first home's front door.

They may very well be of use once identified!

No they are not ER 'number-C' collets. They look more like ones made for a lathe, rather than milling-machine, collet-chuck.

If your measurements are more accurate than you claim, the distinctly different sizes suggest two sets mixed up! I'll examine my set, which looks of similar size.

Normal practice on both full-size and miniature road steam vehicles is a feed-pump driven from the crankshaft, but how reliable is this on a fast running engine (say, 400 rpm)?

I was discussing this with a friend who'd been steaming his 3" scale traction-engine, and he said it does run noticeably faster than a 4" engine.

Also, the pump eccentric was quite unevenly worn, due, we concluded, to the way it is loaded, especially when feeding water against boiler pressure.

So, Q1: if the engine itself is designed to run at high speed does the pump become inefficient if directly driven, so better driven via a reduction gear?

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Q2: A traction-engine needs only a short bypass pipe as the pump is above the tank. If the tank is a long way away, on a wagon, does the bypass pipe need go all the way back there or can it simply go to a Tee-piece on the suction pipe and just circulate the water locally?

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I add that I have installed a hand-pump in the tank at the rear of the vehicle; but will be supplying the injector and feed-pump through a common 15mm pipe (domestic plumbing material) from the tank to a Tee-piece and 15mm - 1/4" pipe adaptors; near the two devices a little aft of the front axle.

I have not yet determined the eventual location of the pump on the model, and have no idea where it was on the original wagons.

My first own home was an 1850s 2-up-2-down with a small kitchen extension, terraced home. The Warco milling-machine was in the kitchen, the EW lathe, Denbigh horizontal mill and other such were in the very dark middle room, the front room was dominated by my steam-wagon chassis and an enormous drawing-board. The big lathe I had then, lived under a lean-to in the small back yard.

Access to which, and to the back doors of both neighbours, was communal with intervening gates.

Neighbour had a collie - not the place for such a dog, and one very lonely dog when its owner was at work. It would bark and bark at me through the lattice-work gate until eventually I let it in to be made a bit of fuss of. It worked. The dog stopped barking and settled down. Then saw the back door was open (to keep the house cool), and happily trotted in to explore my home.

I didn't mind, just kept on machining away. Until later I went upstairs and found a very unwelcoming "calling-card" on the landing!

Managing not to wretch too much I cleaned and disinfected the carpet.

A week or so later, thinking it wouldn't do it twice.... It did. Exactly the same spot.

After that I placed a stop-board across the doorway (no door) from the kitchen inwards. The collie studied this then turned and gave me such a reproving look.

I wonder if it's done to cope with homes that have had carpets fitted so thick that they interfere with using sockets placed in skirting-boards!

Fulmen -

Submarines and submersibles normally work at atmospheric pressure inside.

The object of the design is to make the pressure-hull withstand the external pressure, which increases at the rate of 1 Atmosphere for every 10m depth, with a factor of safety - and repeatably.

It was only civil-engineering caissons that were pressurised internally, and it was using these that caused the first cases of "the bends". ( I don't know if they are still used, though obviously with much more stringent practices and precautions).

On the point about hull compression raising the internal air pressure, the normal volume change hence air-pressure rise by shell compression should be minute, provided the material's movement is within its elastic limit.

It it is not, the shell is collapsing anyway.

I don't know how long an emergency ascent from 3000m would take but even then the consequent reduction to ambient air pressure will be as small as its increase was, and relatively slow. So I would not think "the bends" any likely hazard.

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The Bends cited by Hopper, or Decompression-sickness, was originally called "Caisson Disease" as it was first identified among civil-engineering labourers working in sub-estuarine caissons for building bridge piers*. It is not directly an an effect of water at high-pressure on the body.

Instead it is an effect of breathing compressed-air at pressures equivalent to ambient even at quite modest pressures, depending on time. The bridge-builders were working hard, surrounded by high-pressure air, for some hours at a time.

In these conditions the blood absorbs nitrogen, and if the pressure is released too rapidly it cannot come out of solution in a gentle manner, but effervesces slightly, creating bubbles that typically lodge in the joints, causing great pain.

Treatment is by putting the patient in a decompression-chamber in which the air pressure is raised to the diving depth then released at a very slow, controlled rate over as many hours as calculated for the case.

SCUBA Divers usually stay within fairly shallow depths but if venturing deeper, especially to 30+m with some time at depth, take enormous care over gas-mixtures, the potentially toxic or narcotic effects of atmospheric gases at high pressure, times at depth, ascent decompression-stops, short decompression-oxygen breathing, etc. Even then things can go wrong. The complications are multiplied greatly if the dive profile (depth, distance and time) is not a single dive to a steady depth but rises and falls like a switchback, even alternating from open air to considerable depths a few times - but this is normally only met in cave-diving, not the sea.

So air-pressure change by a submarine's hull compression is not going to lead to The Bends. I would expect the shell to contract slightly, but if enough to raise the internal pressure significantly, it is passing beyond its elastic limit....

... and that is a design consideration. As are the mind-bogglingly complicated stress and strain calculations for external pressures on a shell that although basically cylindrical, is not of single material and contains shape-changers like interpenetrations and mountings.

I have seen a video of a plain cylinder collapsing, in a hydrostatic test-tank. It was a fairly small container intended for marine electronic equipment, but failed well within its intended working-pressure for some reason, while undergoing the test as specified. It gave no visible warning such as slow buckling, but ruptured suddenly and implosively.

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*I believe the first cases questioned, against considerable medical and commercial opposition, were among the men building the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York.

Well, Rush paid for his cavalier approach that seems emerging, with his life - but he took four others with him.

I am surprised he even came out with statements about using sounds from the stressed components as warning signals. Whowever conducts the enquiry and how, given the complexity, it will no doubt elicit a lot of failures.

Designing manually-operated deep-water submersibles is not in in its infancy, and nor is materials science. This was not some pioneering project, but two aspects that made Titan differ from tried and tested vehicles were its cylindrical rather than spherical accommodation (to take more passengers) and of inhomogenous construction.

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The reference to early, manned space flights someone made further back misses the point that that was all still new engineering, but NASA did approach it properly. Also the pressure-hull comparison is wrong. A spacecraft has to hold a pressure of only 1 Bar, yes; but internally. A submersible or a submarine has to withstand 1 bar for every 10 metres depth, and externally. That difference in direction of load alone is crucial, even before you think of the pressure itself.

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Buffer reminds us of the desperately overloaded fishing-boat sinking with all those migrants in the Mediterranean.

They have not been forgotten despite all the reporting surrounding the Titan's loss; and what we are beginning to learn about how abominably the traffickers treated their passengers, is adding even more to the horror.

I heard, but not properly, an interviewee on the radio this evening apparently asking of the possibility of recovering the vessel and the bodies. Sadly this may not be possible. I don't know in which region of it the boat sank, but much of the Mediterranean is generally over 2500m deep. My atlas gives a spot depth of 3065m in the Ionian, South of the "heel" of Italy.

Oh, it won't be the racquet stringing itself we'll be reading about, but the machine someone has built to carry that out....

In fact the "occasional short articles" on what might be called "Domestic Engineering" would be in the spirit of when Model Engineer was the Model Engineer & Electrician.

I have a couple of bound volumes now a bit over 100 years old (no they were not new to me), and include a method for re-seating the scullery water-tap, a link-motion device that plots your pulse from the wrist, and a trigger-focus hand-torch!

The tap was unscrewed from the pipe, dismantled and mounted on an improvised, wooden Keats plate on the lathe's faceplate. A later item in the volume cites that, and shows how to make a simple tool to reseat a ball-cock without needing remove it from the lead pipe to which it had been soldered - adding a wry comment about the cost of engaging a plumber. Nowt new there then.

The pulse-plotter uses a smoked-glass plate I think, and the writer gives the equation for the pulse: lots of trigonometry.

The torch, of right-angled pattern, uses the trigger to alter the distance between the bulb and convex lens.

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This same volume also gives the description of a miniature traction-engine, apparently freelance but looking in the photo of roughly 4" inch scale size, with a dryback firebox. The author is a Mr. Briggs. I wonder... was this the original Briggs Boiler?

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There are also darker items in ME&E of that time... It was in 1917, still in World War One, and many model-engineers used their skills as out-workers for armaments production, making shell-case components. Various articles give ideas for the techniques.

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One former fellow club-member, a sidesman in his local church, used our society workshop to repair a processional cross damaged by over-enthusiastic brass-cleaners; and to make acrylic replacement centres for ornamental roses stolen from an altar cross. The thief must have thought the red glass originals were rubys! We decided the society needed an extra "E" , not for "Experimental" but "Ecclesiastical" .

I have made odd pieces of caving equipment, the last being a manual winch whose reel side-frame parts were cut from scrapped miniature-railway bar-rail.

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Now, what natty little number shall I wear to the club track tomorrow? One must look one's best when replacing sleepers.

Edited By Nigel Graham 2 on 23/06/2023 23:20:45

There is a way of making Vee-grooved pulleys if you can turn the top-slide at a sufficiently high angle, and that is to make it in two halves screwed or rivetted together. That removes the need for a form-tool, and the two halves are equal provided the chamfer meets the rim at the correct axial point.

Some commercial pulleys are made like that.

The only problem may be whether you can turn such a wide angle on the lathe you have: it might not be possible on my Myford ML7 for example.

A good step forwards having sorted the initial problem!

Well, now we know, though I am not sure if dying by anoxia would be better than the collapse of the hull. The assessments of oxygen supply led me to think that had the submersible been intact, the occupants would more likely have succumbed to the cold; and one effect of approaching hypothermia is the loss of mental faculties making it very hard to make the right choices or react to other people properly, even in critical situations. (The ocean floor temperature is about 4ºC.)

Looking back up the thread, which I'd not previously spotted,

- The remark about the claim that the Titanic was "unsinkable" is so crassly repeated over and over again. No-one at the time who actually knew anything about ships ever said that! It was a foolish mis-interpretation by some newspaper hack, of a far more measured and qualified hope in a professional engineering journal. So comments on here about "hubris" are as wrong and out of place as others denigrating people's wealth - and let's not forget most of those who died or survived on the Titanic were not particularly wealthy by 1912 standards, but even if they were, water and cold respect no riches.

- Yes, the ship became a grave; as now has that submersible, but there are no human remains from the original disaster down there. Just pairs of shoes.... (Dr. Ballard's original explorations of the wreck photographed some.) I am less worried about expeditions to view wrecks like the liner, or the Hood and Bismark, than I am about taking anything from them.

- The search area had to be wide both on the surface and on the sea-bed. It was a small object in a vast area of both. Apart from the darkness and natural sediment in the water limiting lamp range, and the difficulties in searching a very wide area of deep, noisy ocean by sonar, there is a slow current across the site so searching for the submersible would have needed to consider it drifting.

- I had wondered what emergency ballast / buoyancy methods this thing had. Jacque Pickard's Trieste bathyscaphe with which he descended to the floor of the Marianas Trench - some three times deeper than the Titanic's site - had pig-iron ballast held, or latched, by an electromagnet so fail-safe, so presumably it was buoyant anyway.

- It may be that we will never know how this vessel was lost, unless the wreckage is raised for analysis and to give the victims proper funerals. I do not know if that is intended, or if it will be left as a grave. That should be for the families to decide.

There are few areas of ocean that are not graves; but at least the locations of the Titanic, the Lusitania, the Hood and the Bismark, are known. Many more are unknown.