What Did you do Today 2022

Hi Neil, thanks for your appreciation.

Regards Nick.

Hi Derek, like all your bowls etc, and your collet chuck backplate looks very neat too.

Regards Nick.

Thank you Nick just been looking at your camera bracket and trying to work out what the screw is in the first photo is for as it does not come through the cork or seem to hold anything

Hi Derek, that is just to blank the hole off, as the piece of ally channel is a piece from a roller conveyor that I had to make new frames for many years ago, so I didn't want the cork to accidentally get pushed through and split. As it happens, it came in handy for holding that piece while spray painting, so it did get a use.

Regards Nick.

A fine display of wood, wool and metal work in the last two pages!

Me today....

Not needed this weekend in the cave finding project I'm involved in, so I spent much of the day at the club, which also meets on Tuesday evenings. I continued replace decayed wooden sleepers on the ground-level track with new ones cut from that brown recycled-plastic bar used for garden furniture.

(Yes the wooden ones had been soaked in preservative but a good many years ago, and being soft wood and not proper creosote, they had rotted eventually.)

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Spent a couple of hours this evening on two projects:

1) For the club, starting two special plastic sleepers for one of the points, extended well out to one side to carry the lever mechanism. This, made by a member sadly long "re-allocated", unusually uses a helical cam formed as a slot in a piece of steel tube. The lever's operating plane is parallel with the track, so also holds a direction-indicator that is a V-shaped, sheet-metal channel whose faces each carry two roundels; red on left, green on right, and vice-versa; visible on the face made vertical by the point setting.

2) For me: painting some small parts for the steam-wagon.

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Oh, and painting a newly-bought garden trellis with very watery green emulsion... oh,. sorry, "fence preservative" says its label. Yes, it was of treated timber, allegedly, with traces of a green tinge. This to support a jasmine and a dog-rose. The rose has a railway link - it had been growing in the wrong place, through a turn-out on a narrow-gauge museum railway, from its parent plant safely in the hedge! So I rescued it and gave it a new home. I like wild roses, but more importantly so do insects, as their open blossoms are much more accessible than a lot of the cultivated ones.

Gardening Leave today!

Trellis erected, jasmine tied up to it; assorted stick-&-string "engineering" to support the tomato and broad-bean plants - the latter have started to develop their fruit.

Oh, and managed a couple of hours or so in the evening, working on the steam-lorry.

Transplanted another GPO slave-clock movement into a vintage station clock for the railway. This one said on the back that it had a British Jerome Movement but that was gone, and parts of the case looked newer than the 1910s - 20s that were supposed to be the period when those movements were in wide use - but the face and hands (I'm told clockers call them 'fingers' looked genuine enough.

I think this is the fourth one I've done. It's a matter of drilling two pairs of 8BA countersunk close-clearance holes in the face on 44,5 and 17,5 centres equispaced around spindle 'ole. In this case I had to take the case to bits as the round furniture-polish-tin sized GPO slave movement was bigger than its rectangular predecessor, and I had to scrollsaw arcs out the hole in the backboard of the face to get it in.

There were a couple of brass adaptors to be made to deal with differences between spindle drive and finger fittings.

The slave movement looks like this:-

The master clock issues a 3V pulse every half-minute, which energises the electromagnet at the bottom and pulls the pad on the lower end of the lever arm down the right-hand side into contact. The spring-loaded pawl at two o'clock position rides over one tooth of the main wheel without moving it. When the electromagnet lets go of the pad, the (beryllium copper?) spring outside the lever arm returns it outward, the pawl catches the tooth it just rode over, and drives the wheel round one tooth, resulting in 1/120th of a turn of the minute hand (or finger ) spindle.

The original GPO minute hand/finger is counterweighted on the underside of its tail - presumably to even out the force required to advance it wherever it might be in its trip around the dial - but the 'vintage' fingers replacing it are not, so I've usually found the movement struggles to lift the minute hand against gravity between about twenty-five-to and ten-to the hour. Obviously it can't be left in that state.

I've found I can fix this by tightening the stop screw in the four o'clock position in the pic, to increase the return force of the spring.

Anyway, I hear the clock's now up on the station wall and working well.

Edited By Mick B1 on 27/06/2022 17:46:43

Which railway Mick? I have a Gents slave movement which I might donate to a worthy cause if you need any more

Today I mended a broken vacuum cleaner by replacing a broken clip with one I designed and 3D printed myself.

All I had to do was:

• Upgrade my computer with a graphics accelerator, second screen and a SpaceMouse
• Buy a 3D printer, memory card, and consumables
• Assemble 3D printer, which was a semi-kit.
• Learn how to operate 3D printer
• Install and learn how to use a 3D-CAD package
• Install and learn how to use slicer software
• Dismantle the vacuum cleaner and measure the unbroken clip (two attempts)
• Recreate the clip in CAD, and find out how to export it as an STL
• Find out how to print a strong clip, done by telling the slicer to output gcode for solid plastic, and also to print the clip sideways so the 'grain' of the plastic layers is at right angles to the bending force
• Remove the plastic structure used to support overhangs while the clip is printed
• Ream the hinge holes so the roll-pin fits without bursting the plastic
• Drill and grind a washer strip to replace the one that couldn't be found because it was still attached to the cleaner
• Find four M4 nuts when the box of metric nuts is missing. (It contains at least 100 M4 nuts...)
• Reassemble vacuum cleaner and test.

Success, except the clip is very hard to release because the top finger lip is a few millimetres short due to the extra fillet material I added for strength.

Tools used: pen, paper, calculator, computer, laser printer, 3d printer, steel rule, digital caliper, Dremel, dremel cutting discs, hand-drill, 4mm and 5.5mm twist drills, pin vice, H7 reamer, coarse file, rat-tailed needle file, hammer, bench vice, bench, pliers, box-spanner, T-handled allen key, carpet knife, flat screw driver, junior hacksaw and centre-punch. Approximate cost, £1800, plus labour, and a minor slip spilled some blood.

But think of the money saved. I might have wasted £39.98 on a new one!

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 03/07/2022 17:51:45

I completed the pootatuck shaper I took over finishing after my friends demise.I have a 1" pulley to 5"on the primery drive a 3/4/5" pulley on the other end of the counter shaft driving the same on the pinion drive which is a 20 tooth gear driving a 100 toothe final drive. This is giving a stroke of 56 per minute is this acceptable,I am using the 3" to 5" pulley on the intermediate drive.This has been a lot of work and the machine is heavy my friend was going to help me move it into it's final position but last night on moving it on the bench it tipped over the edge of the bench.I caught itbut it ripped the skin of my arm otherwise I would have had broken legs .A little trip to the after hours service to get repaired.This made me change my mind about using a friend for lifting as we are both old men,so I stripped it into three lumps the heaviest about 3/4 of a cwt ,I have it back together but I would like advice on the speeds and pulley arrangements I have.I am taking a rest after the lifting.

Frank

What did I do yesterday, I set about restoring the surface finish on a bracket that holds the filter unit used when replenishing the water in my Koi pond. The bracket has been outside for about three years now and has started to corrode badly from the edges. The bracket was obviously finished with a powder coated paint process and anywhere there was a change in section of the metal, ie a sharp corner, then corrosion was forming. Why do manufacturers use powder coating finishes when they obviously cannot contend with weather outside. In the photos, the first one shows the bracket before I stripped the finish off, the second shows the bracket with the finish stripped and shows the extent of the corrosion. The finish was removed using Nitromors paint remover, a horrible process especially when the Nitromors has a tendency to penetrate through Nitrile gloves. Todays job is to neutralise the corrosion as best I can and then etch prime ready for a finish topcoat. My personal opinion is that powder coating should be banned and we should revert to decent spray applied finishing processes.

Hi, I've had these clamps since the 70's, the top and bottom set don't have any manufacturer on them, the two in the middle have "Futter London Limited" stamped on them, but I seem to have lost or mislaid the middle size one. While the top five are steel, the bottom set is an aluminium alloy. They were not very expensive but the quality shows that but they are useful at times and I use the little ones quite often, but never seem to have enough and the larger ones get in the way. So! I decided to make some little ones early last week and having found a short piece of rusty 25 X 6mm black flat bar and cleaned it up in some washing soda solution and a bit of elec-trickery from my car battery charger, I milled the edges flat and marked out for eight to be made and using my DRO on my mini mill, drilled and tapped eight holes about 10mm deep for M4 socket head set bolts.

When these were all done, the bar was then put in the vice with the flat sides and holes for making a gap were marked with a centre drill, again using the DRO to get them in the right place.

These were then drilled 7/16" on a drilling machine.

This was then mounted back in the vice with the tapped holes downward and with the first gap to be cut sticking out of the right hand side and with a couple of slitting saws ganged up, cut the gap.

Once cut the bar was taken out and the first clamp hacksawed off and the bar was put back in the milling machine vice for the next gap to be cut, but some wally put the wrong end facing the cutters, oh! that must have been myself big mistake.

I left the mistake on so that I didn't do it again and just carried on cutting the next gap. After cutting two or three more I though to go and look for another shortish bit to make up eight, but found a bit of scrap off cut of angle iron and cut a piece out that would make two more.

I trimmed the new piece up as before and drilled and taped it as before, but did them opposite hands.

Then when I only had one more gap to cut, I wondered if I could save the one that I cut wrong and so turning to that scrap piece I trimmed a bit more off it and milled a couple of channels on each side, a quarter of the metal thickness deep.

I then slotted the bad end half the thickness in the middle position

These two fitted together very nicely and I drilled and pinned the two slotted sections and and after cutting the last good one off, I silver soldered the joints, this was then cleaned and trimmed and the gap cut.

Today I finished filing a small radius to the inside corners of all the clamps and put all the bolts in.

This is the one I silver soldered a repair and all the bolts had a slight dome filed on the end of their threads.

OK, they are not exactly show pieces, but they work and will do the jobs.

Regards Nick.

Good job on the clamps Nick somewhere in the depths of the workshop I have some of these used a lot when making the wooden models

I'm redecorating (rebuilding) the bathroom in between working.

Tonight I grouted the first two walls, fitted a towel rail to replace a radiator (not plumbed in yet) and fitted a new toilet roll holder!

Neil

when What did you do today 2022 is selected why doesn't the current page load?

A few photos of progress on the Rob Roy.

Wheels and axles now fitted

Connecting rods made

Coupling rods before I messed one up

After making a mess of one of the coupling rods I took time out and made the sliding valves. I am sure that will not be the last mistake but will try not to do any more.

You need to be logged in and set ';latest posts' in your preferences.

Neil

Where do I find 'Preferences' ? I've found 'Settings' OK, but it's not there.

Found it Bob ,Go to settings then my account its at the top of page change selection and hit update preferences.

Set up dual wide-screens, so I can have a reference on one side, and a 2D or 3D program on the other side.

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