Cheap surface plate ?

Just been to ALDI and noticed they have granite "worktop savers" for about £8.00. Look to be about 20mm thick,and i thought they may be ok as a makeshift surface plate.

Cheers Derek.

P.S. merry christmas,and happy new year to everyone.

been using one for the last 6 months or so
got mine from Morrisons, think a tenner was paid for it

i seen the ones in Aldi yesterday, they are the dead same thing

certainly good enough for the crap i turn out

An Old mirror makes a good surface plate

Best wishes Martin

Do we have any knowledge under what kind of circumstances these cheap goods are made. If they are produced under similar working conditions as other cheap imports from China, India etc., than we have to ask ourselves do we want to buy them.

Niko.

I tried a Morrison "worktop saver" as a more mobile plate (the iron one is really heavy), but it was far from flat, so has been dumped.

Go to your local glass works and search for an offcut of thick float glass, but have the edges ground!

My granite chopping board (I forget where it came from) wasn't acceptably flat, so I went to a local supplier of made-to-order granite worktops, and asked if I could buy an offcut like a sink cutout to use as a surface plate. They took me to the skip, and let me help myself for nothing. I got two likely looking bits, and sliding my DTI around on its stand shows no more than half a thou deviation anywhere, which is good enough for my purposes.

Andy

Hi Folks

I also got a piece of polished black granite from a worktop manufacturers (sink cutout) 20" x18" x 1" free gratis.. ran my digital DTI over it & like Andyf it showed maximum deviation at one corner of half a thou'.. I aint arguing over that, more than good enough for model engineering needs.

Merry Xmas folks

George.

Got my polished granite slab 12" x 14" x 2.5" from the local monumental masons for about £5

Regards Mark P.

Derek,

What size are the Aldi specials - approx LxW?

PhilH

Phil.

Sorry, but i was being hurried round by my much better half so i did not have time for a propper look, but i would think they are about 18" x 15".

Cheers Derek

They are also sold at Argos for £7.99. I bought one two weeks ago. I'm hoping it will be flat enough for my needs, but haven't checked it yet. Got the idea from a previous thread on here.

Gary

How about this for a 'show off'. I used to use some laminated glass samples that were sent in for the TSR2 windscreen tests. They were made of 6mm toughened glass,18mm silicone layer and a gold flashed 4mm glass sandwich. Must have cost a pretty penny, but I found out that they were probably bullet proof, but did not survive the drop test on the concrete workshop floor.

Shop window plate glass is good - get some offcuts from a big glass merchant for free.

I still have a large sheet of plate glass about the size of one of my benches, came off a computer cabinet ( that's when computers were about 5 foot tall and stored a very small amount of data compared to today in very large platters).
Bob

I use a piece of plate glass from the front of an old TV. It is tough and all the edges are ground. Fits nicely on the bench and just slides down by the side when not in use.

I too bought a granite board from Argos I think, but soon found it was not flat: it has now been relegated to kitchen use. So I am back to using the piece of float glass.

Ray,

I'm intrigued - all the TV screens I have seen are curved, certainly on the outside anyway, do not know about the inside. Could you elaborate a bit more please as there are lots of redundant TV's about.

Regards,

Peter G. Shaw

Only problem with that Ray is that you have to keep remaking things that you measured on the plate glass because all the repeats keep coming out the TV glass.

I would guess that the glass TV screen is from a "Flat Screen" Plasma or LCD TV and not a old CRT. (Unless it had a sheet of plain glass in the front.

Dave

Hi the last TV I had with a CRT was a 32" Panasonic, and this was a flat CRT screen. These needed extra circuitry in them apparantly, to give the picture the correct shape. This is what the TV engineer told me when he came out to look at a picture fault and it had to go back to a workshop to be fixed. They supplied me with a replacement TV of the same model from one of their other depots, I was renting my TV in them days.

I don't know how truely flat the glass was though.

Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 26/12/2012 08:40:35

Dave,

Back in the old days, CRT's were sometimes behind a "safety panel" of toughened, or laminated, glass.

MichaelG.

I thought all CRT TV's had a thick, 20mm or so, protective front to protect against the danger of implosion from a breaking tube. My oscilloscopes don't have a separate protector, but they do appear to have a very thick front screen, 10mm or so.

I would certainly have expected Ray's old TV to have been a CRT. LED, LCD, Plasma as far as I know don't need the same sort of protection as there is no danger of a tube implosion spraying glass everywhere.

Peter G. Shaw