What Did You Do Today (2017)

This stuff is solid - as in "engineered" ie blocks glued together. The upstand is lengths of 400-600mm typically, glued together with those sawtooth joins. The worktop is similarly made up of glued together blocks (see pic). Much better than those nasty chipboard worktops that turn into sponge at the slightest hint of moisture.

I suppose you could call this a woman's workshop if you were chauvinistic. Ready for the washing machines to move back in from the upstairs bathroom.

Murray

Muzzer,

you should have gone for Granite, would have made a nice layout table.

Heheh yes but I'd end up with damp clothes on my precious work. Damned heavy stuff too - the kitchen worktops are granite and lifting them is a multiple-man job.

Just been out there again (wife was still asleep) and programmed in a simple demo program (circular pocket) and it works! I don't have the spindle belt fitted or compressed air ATM, so it gets a bit confused about the lack of spindle speed or range selection but that doesn't seem to stop it doing all the X, Y and Z movements. Turned the feed override up to 150% and it seems happy.

Another X cap went up in smoke. Nasty smell. That's the second X or Y cap that's gone up. They are decent quality Rifa PME271 caps but I guess humidity has got in there. I've removed some of them now but at least 3 remain, ready to catch me out. Lovely fizzy sound, filthy acrid smoke but everything continues to work of course. All part of the fun....

Merry

Went up to the track for the planned clear up day and was all alone Maybe someone without a gate key had tried earlier. It was only light drizzle so spent an hour raking leaves. Sigh There are so many joblets to do up there.

Are you within range of Great Barr Sawmills? They're simple, reasonably priced and helpful. I've started using them after the two decent timber merchants in Rugby turned themselves into low grade builders merchants.

Grrr.

My iPhone 6 won't take any more pics or vids because it is full. Obviously it's "just" a question of copying them off the phone and then deleting them from the phone to free up space. If you simply delete them from the iphone they will also disappear from the icloud folders, so you have to copy them off before deleting them, either fromthe iPhone itelf or from the iCloud folder.

It gets really messy here. If you connect the usb cable, hoping to see the image files and simply copy them in file manager you will be disappointed, as only a few of them show up (something like 40 out of the 500 I know are there). WTF?? Alternatively you can use the Windows Photo program (in W10) to grab the photos and then copy them from there. But the same issue happens - you only get to see a fraction of the total. WTF?

It gets worse. Apple have a sort of browser called "iCloud Photos" that allows to you see the photos that have been already (automatically) uploaded to the iCloud server. But this is really clunky, like REALLY clunky. It doesn't allow you to see the names of the files or sort them by date, name, size etc etc. And if you want to select files for download, the ONLY way you can select them is by holding down Control and clicking every single one of them individually. Yes, all 500 of them. And if you accidentally click outside of any one of the thumbnails, all the files you have selected become unselected. WTF? As for "normal" shortcuts like Control+A (to select all) or holding the shift button and selecting the first and last files, that isn't implemented. Nor can you simply select a whole folder for download. Somewhere in Apple is a team of "developers" that decided that this was the right way to go about it. This is infuriating, even by iTunes standards. Even Microsoft haven't managed to come up with anything quite as unusable. Given that the iPhone and Windows 10 are the most commonplace phone and OS respectively, they have done themselves proud here by managing to come up with such an insurmountable problem.

So I've had to manually download all 500+ files in batches, with no clear idea which photos I have successfully managed to download. What a nightmare. I honestly doubt I could have made the operation any more difficult and frustrating if I'd tried.

Grrr.

Spent the past hour working on the family tree and now realise how similar it is to our hobby. Where a 'component' does not fit, it would be very tempting to tweak it until it does. Wonder how often it happens? Especially when you share a name with a famous person.

Yes, but Tamworth is 20 closer for me and has a big sawmill in Fradley.

Neil

My daughter has suffered similar issues, in fact her iphone decided to 'lose' a huge number of pictures permanently.

I have problems with people sending me photos for articles from iphones - Apple are convinced people only want to see the images on their phones and automatically downsample them

Hi, quite agree that some people seem to tweak things to fit their tree nice and neatly. I've been doing my family tree online for some time now, with a well known web site, which also allows you to view other public trees. One of my great grandmothers in someone else's tree seems to be a bigamist and apart from having fifteen children between her two husbands, four of them were in four consecutive years and in the 1911 census she was in two different addresses on the same day. While both these ladies had the same married name and were the same age and came from the same county they were both born in different places and had different maiden names. One of my great, great grandfathers seem to have a similar problem in someone else's tree also, alas, he had only a first and last name and there were a few others in different parts of the country who had exactly the same name in the same period and with a wife with the same first name also. It's important to do your research intensively in this field and check everybody's background and get the documentation about births etc. before committing pen to paper, which takes an awful lot of time, which some people just don't seem to do and some of them seem to just copy other peoples mistakes. Having said that, I find it a very interesting venture and very rewarding when you find the truth, even though there maybe the odd skeleton in the cupboard, luckily my pedigree is all in order as far back as I've been able to go so far.

Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 12/02/2017 22:24:56

Cheating is so much easier than the time consuming practice of accepting nothing without three different sources which can be independently verified.

Here in Ireland we suffer from a great lack of such information with the destruction of much of the birth, death and marriage and other records in the early 1920s.

I have spent many happy? hours in the past looking at my family tree. If you do so expect anything, there are things worse than madness and bastards. Try bestiality for a start. You should realize the interesting stuff is not on the internet but in county and national archives.

I have now got most of the ancestry business out of my scheme, thankfully.

JA

Neil, have you discovered Harlows in Long Whatton? Not too far from you, I used them a lot when I built my narrowboat 20 years ago, they are still there.

Regards,

John.

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Took delivery of some new signage for my lathe.

Nick

So we won't be seeing much production from your workshop now

Presumably you don't have children or grandchildren visiting you in your workshop.

The interesting bit of your picture, to me, is not the exotic industrial looking (collet?) chuck on the spindle, but the fact that it holds the work about 6" outboard of the headstock bearing. What is the bulk of that length doing?

Ian P

It's a Burnerd Multisize collet chuck, although only the 2 shiny parts of the body belong to the chuck. The bit on the left with the square hole is the spindle nose. Given that the collets are pretty large, it's actually about as compact as it can be and more rigid than a 3 or 4 jaw. Fine pieces of kit but a good £400 or so typically, if you get the full set of 13(?) collets.

Nick's even posted a video of it.

Today I received my Christmas present to myself from the US. It's a kit to build a Star Hit and Miss engine, supplied by Debolt Machine Inc. Here is what I hope it will look like one day: But don't hold your breaths, folks, as I'm the world's slowest model maker. Has anyone out there built one of these? B

I have not done that particular one but the other Debolt engines I have done have had good castings and drawings so you should be OK.

One of the forums with more US members would be the place to ask if you have queries such as the model section on Smokstak