Universal Grinding machine construction series?

OK just sit and await then

Thank you Diane for clarification from your viewpoint.

Hi John,

You have my admiration for doing such a project. It is bound to be of interest to many. When I did the Stepperhead articles, I first thought just a description would be enough, but later on some people wanted a construction series and that is a lot more work. I drew about 68 drawings of about 180 components and only described the more difficult parts as to how I made them. Even this was considered by some as an overlong series. What else can you do? The magazines seem to want short interesting articles that will only occupy an few issues of the magazine. The alternative to long articles seems to be a proliferation of similar subjects like sharpening drills and end mills, or make a lathe bed stop. This can only be of interest to the new reader, the long in the tooth reader (me perhaps) has seen these articles repeated in various forms and only of a passing interest. Anyway more power to you John and good luck with all those drawings , who will check them?

Best Regards

Alan

Isn't that why it should be in MEW, plus the website?

Edited By V8Eng on 01/10/2015 19:38:23

Edited By V8Eng on 01/10/2015 19:39:28

Personally, I am too busy to give each magazine more than a quick glance, so I am not really in a position to comment, However, I have been prompted to estimate from John's details of the article just how many pages would be required. Of course, not seeing the drawings makes estimating the pages for these somewhat hit and miss. Even so, drawings in the magazine are printed larger these days which is good making them easier to read, especially with the amount of white space often used.

So at

1600 words per page-------------------- 31 pages

Two A4 drawings per page ------------110pages

10 Photos per page------------------------23pages

Total 164 pages making, at 4 pages per issue, 41 issues, just over 3 years for MEW and I have made no allowance for the large headings used. This is nearly twice the size of the Stepperhead construction series.

It has been suggested that some of the date could be added to this forum, may work but can it be guaranteed that the data will still be available for someone reading the article in say 20 years time, I am not sure.

Harold

Why not have a longish single article describing the machine and its features with a link to a self published book.

Simple.

Regards.

David.

The build of large traction engines or trains often spans over many issues and can be repetitive from project to project so I`m not sure why this should be a problem for tooling.

This sounds like an advanced project so maybe the more basic setting up and machining steps could be missed out with only reference to how each feature needs to relate to the other and only the tricky parts detailed for each part?

For me such a series would be well accepted if the design and description includes the details needed to produce a high precision machine. By this I mean the sizing of parts with material and stiffness considerations e.t.c, dimensional and geometric tolerances, bearing alignments and preloads e.t.c. If this machine is capable of doing precise work then it will be high up on my list of tooling projects.

The discussion of which mag this goes in to seems obvious to me...

Hi Harold

I always allowed 2000 words per page and 8 photos per page. Drawings I allowed 8 per page (individual components) but obviously A4 drawings might take more room. Depending whether they were original components or assembly drawings.

It does look like the series is too long to publish.

Definitely too long for MEW, it needs to be done in months, not years.

Ian S C

I'm sure these things have been thought of.. depending on the publishers economics. Either a USB flash drive with detail pics and the overview and notes in a serialised form..or even a pull-out supplement for a few issues to give a nice tidy bundle of construct.

Hi there,

John Mac ,you were spot on with the style of construction even down
to the thickness of some of the parts.The largest part of the machine
the base has only 11 basic parts and requires little more than
cut off bandsaw and a mill /drill to see a basic assembly.In
some ways designing and building a machine such as this not only
involves making a working machine but some considerations need to
be taken into account that it is being made in a model engineers
workshop enviroment.As this part weighs in as something like 65 kg
some provision has to be made to be able for instance to be able to
move this item around and to get it off and on the mill safely.If your workshop
is anything like mine some times this sort of thing can be a real headache.
However some provision has been made within the article get over
these sort of events and many others,its just part of the build.

Alan, i was close on the number of drawings for your Stepperhead machine
but suprised that there are only 180 components.I had the opportunity
to see this wonderful machine of yours in some detail at the 2012 Mex.
I was on the Smee stand opposite with the cnc cutter grinder.The part
count on this machine of mine included only parts that had to be machined,
parts such as nuts, bolts, screws , bearings , springs ,belts and other
bought in parts were excluded from that count.I know that Mark C had
queried this earlier. I know from looking at the photo's you would think
well where are they ,i do the same but nevertheless they are all there.
Some of these hide in places that can't be seen and have already
been in MEW and also ME ,on page 9 of MEW 232 is a photo
of the workhead drive gearbox and in ME 4494 and 4496 the
hydraulic counterbalance mechanism for the wheelhead.

To some extent proliferation of short articles will reach a saturation
point and leave void of new stuff to read ,people who write maybe
long articles would wary of doing so for fear of them not being
published.I have already reached this point as another article that i
was working on, a shorter construction article also like this grinder
that had not been done before i have abandoned ,the build and
the drawings will continue but the article is dead.

Earlier on in this thread Roger Vane had some comments that were
spot on in the amount of time and effort required to produce a
lengthy article and are worth re-reading.

I have spent a very long time on this both the build and the article ,
at my time of life it is not likely i would wish to spend more time re-writing
to accommodate a different format however "simple" this may seem .
The job is done , or very soon will be and the article as it is would have
to be very much a take or leave it situation.
Time moves on and i have other things i wish to do.

John

John without giving too much away it would be intertesting to know what machines you had available to make this grinder. If you have say a Bridgeport with long table and a large Colchester that will reduce the number of readers who could take one on if they only have an ML7 and vertical slide.

.

An open question to John and Diane if I may ...

Would it be practical to publish this 'series' as a set of magazine-size 'specials' ?

If there were [say] six issues in the set, then readers could buy the first one, and then choose whether or not they wished to subscribe to the remaining five. Publication could be paper and/or digital [as demonstrated by the MEW 25year special, this seems to be a viable arrangement for MTM to use]

The advantages are:

1. only those who are seriously interested need purchase the full set
2. those 'undecided' would only commit to one issue
3. those 'not interested' would not have their magazine padded with 'inappropriate' material.
4. the set would be available to anyone [not just subscribers to one magazine]
5. the set would build into a contiguous 'book'

If this proved successful; I could see it as a model for publication of any 'big' project.

MichaelG.

The cost of paying the author for this project would be about £8000. This would rule it out for the web or a special

I suppose the biggest problem with that Michael is cost. As the specilas would have a limited number of sales the £50 a page would have to be covered by fewer people so the cost of the special would be a lot higher. Also there may not be as many adverts which would counter some of teh production costs.

Its a similar situation if part or all were put on the website, would an author be happy to have work on the website that they are unlikely to get paid for? Generally the mag only pays per printed page.

J

EDIT DC was thinking the same way that I was

Edited By JasonB on 02/10/2015 12:46:07

Hi John Pace
I sent you a Private Message

Regards
John Mac

Thanks David for the information.

Now with David's figure of 8 drawings of individual parts per page and with there being 1600 machined components that equates to 200 pages. With there being a few less pages of text (compared to my original estimate) and a few more pages of photographs the total becomes 253 pages. At four pages per issue that becomes 63 issues nearly five years of MEW.

If, John, you want to get your efforts into the public domain then creating your own website for it would seem to be the way forward and can be very rewarding personally. There would of course be some cost in having the website hosted, probably around £50 per year.

Some have suggested this forum could host the project but it would be very time consuming for the owners to add the pages to the site for which they would get little reward. And then, who would be responsible for receiving the inevitable questions that an article of this magnitude would produce.

Harold

Jason B,

"would an author be happy to have work on the website that they are unlikely to get paid for?" yes, I would. I don't know about anyone else but if I have something drawn up that might be of use then I am happy to let others use it. I design/build machines for a living but for something involved in my hobby time (also designing and building things, must be a sad person? ) I would simply make it available to others as long as they are not making them for profit. Perhaps that is just me, but it just seems like the right sort of thing to do to me, others may think otherwise.

Mark

ME has always carried the occasional tool build and while I am sure some readers of MEW might like to see those articles in MEW, that would mean losing other content that might then have not appear at all.

One of the distinctions between the two magazines is that ME carries a high proportion of longer series, whereas most series in MEW are two or three parts at most. It's part of the distinct character of the two magazines which do, in fact, have distinct readership profiles.

The text and photos for John's article alone would take about a year to publish in MEW, even if we did not include any drawings. I would guess that this could u double if all drawings were published. ME can put articles in alternate issues and still keep things moving but such a series would dominate MEW for a long time.

I'm currently working with an author on a series, that if it goes ahead will be six parts, and I must admit I am looking at ways of shortening it or breaking it up into smaller chunks.

This is very much about the practicalities of publishing long series, and no reflection on John's work - attentive readers will have seen a number of articles by John during my tenure, and I have more lined up waiting their turn.

Neil

Whilst this machine and Alan Jacksons Stepperhead machine are very interesting and have some very novel features they are complex which leads on to the next question ?

Would or in Alan's case are, any being built give the range of machines needed, costs and material and cost importantly, time ?

We are at a point in time where, as an example the Polly Models loco's are more than accepted. Something that 10 years ago would ave got you kicked out of a club for arriving with a, heaven's above, kit loco.

Fast forward to today and many tracks even run Polly running days. Whilst surface grinders are not that rare, cylindrical grinders in a home shop are. For a start other than tooling not much is made from hardened material on models but we now have tips that can handle quite hard materials. I have some that will easily handle 65 Rockwell which was the domain of the grinder at one time.

Interesting machine and well worth a few part article to whet someone's appetite but I do question is a build article would ever be followed in metal ?

Edit

Formatting has lost a paragraph and should have questioned after the polly model example whether chequebook engineering and just buy a small machine.

A Myford MG7 can actually be bench mounted and they regularly change hands for sub £500

Edited By John Stevenson on 02/10/2015 20:22:37

Jason when i built this machine it was made using the maximum
capacity of the equipment i have .Many of these machines have been
seen in past MEW articles.I have a Warco Mill an A2f which is no longer
sold by Warco .Chester still sells this machine as 830VS-R turret mill.
The machine that i have has been modified ,the table travel has been
increased to nearly 23 inches and a raising block for the head will
see 24 inches from spindle to table ,the machine is part cnc
and manual operation.
A Warco lathe GH 1000 , 6 5/8 inch centre height 40 inch between
centres converted to part cnc . Was an article in MEW from 207 to 212
even had its own forum thread.
Much modified Dore Westbury milling machine converted to
cnc only MEW 179 short descriptive article.
Cnc cutter grinder MEW 143 to 147 construction article,i think you
have seen this machine at MEX 2012 i believe you stopped and spoke
to me on the SMEE stand.
Cut off band saw 4 1/2 inch.
Quorn grinder.
Myford 7 also part cnc operation.
Gear hobbing unit MEW 193 Descriptive article.
A thread milling attachment which is currently with MEW as an
unpublished article.
Several other pieces of home made kit for cutting racks, toothed
belt pullies , adjustable angle plates and the usual workshop
paraphernalia.
All of these have been instrumental in some way in the completion of
the machine.
Hope this helps.

John