One wot I broke earlier

I was reading a thread on here last week and somebody remarked that it was "refreshing to see somebody admit a mistake". Well in all honesty, I never make a mistake. It is generally agreed that when I cock it up it is usually no longer fit for purpose. Some of these "mistakes" have been of Titanic proportions

I usually average one a week in one form or another and as one of these errors was only yesterday i'm am a bit apprehensive about the rest of the week!

Anyhow, first up is last week's disaster. I decided to make myself a Saddle Stop for the lathe. A quick scoot about on the net brought up several designs and I decided to go with one that would hold a clock gauge. Naturally, the second to last operation - drilling and tapping for a screw to clamp the gauge anded up with the drill snapping (first time in a long time, these things are very patient) so, undeterred I decided I would make the slot anyway, because the drill had snapped off quite deep, hadn't it? So that exercise destroyed one of my favourite slitting saws. So I thought, I know what, I will drill the other side and tap that then turn it upside down, drill a bigger hole underneath the snapped drill and hammer it out. I snapped the pin punch. So with about thirty quids worth of tooling in this piece of scrap ally, I called it a day and drilled and tapped 6mm and put a cap screw in there. Works fine!

More to follow

graham.

Edit: Spilling

Edited By Oompa Lumpa on 17/03/2015 21:06:02

I like the saying 'The man who never made a mistake never made anything' also 'I was wrong once, I thought I had made a mistake'.

Mike

My reply to 'what do you do' is now 'I make a lot of aluminium swarf and come up with inivitive methods of getting over my engineering cock ups' 😀

Sometimes I just wish I had not got out of bed. Still, the mark of a good engineer is how well he/she gets out of a mess-up.

I tend to work it the other way round. I never get anything right.

Change your name to Oopsa Daisy and see how you get on then mate.

My latest was in modifying that pack of drills I bought at the Sunday Market. These things were supposed to be of German origin, my arse! Let me explain. Each drill had a hexagonal sleeve to engage, I suppose, in a fancy snap in drill chuck .

The draw back was that the tip of each drill scribed an orbit depending on how well the piece had been assembled with it's hexagonal sleeve. Fine I suppose if you wish to drill and bore small holes of no particular size at one in the same time!

The Remedy! I popped one in the lathe and chewed the offending soft hexagonal sleeve away to see what lay beneath. Aha! An ordinary twist drill lay naked before my eyes. I pressed on the £3.00 purchase would after all be an investment instead of a waste. WRONG! The lathe tool dug in and since I have replaced the bearings in the lathe with taper rollers something else had to give. It was the cutting tool of course and like a true burke I tried another one just convince myself that what had happened was caused by the wobbly sleeve and not due to any movement of the lathe.

I was right again dag nav it!! Now given an hour or two on the 6" grinder I may be able to reshape the tips and salvage the day but like they say a reject costs twice as much as a first time good-un.

I think I'll change my avatar to Bits and Pieces.

Well, this was Mondays disaster (lesson to be learned here).

Quite often I have to make a tool or device in order to dissemble some of the bits I work on. The job on Monday requires I remove a Brass Plug from a steel tube - and they are tight! So, let's make a tool I thought. Set a piece of 6mm plate in the Mill and bored a hole in one end of it a really good fit to the circumference of the brass plug. Then, exactly across the centre drilled two 3.5 mm holes. These were to take two silver steel pins to go into the two holes already bored into the brass plug. Set the whole thing in the vice, slip the collar over the plug, insert the two pins and I could swing on it. Worked an absolute charm.

The piece of plate, two and a bit inches across and about twelve long really didn't look like a "specialist tool" so as I was in the Fab shop anyway (they have oxy acetylene, much better for heating stuff up. Well you don't think I did it cold do you?) and as I had to pass the guillotine on the way out I thought "I know, I will shape it like a spanner"

So I cropped the two corners off and tapered one of the long sides. Now we have all done this, okay? The piece was getting a bit narrow and the clamp before the blade had nothing to grab so I took a piece of 4mm plate, placed it along the long side and balanced it so the clamp, when it came down, would put pressure in the centre of this bit, one end would be on the table and the other end on the work. Press the go pedal, the blade came down, the clamp descended, there was a bit of grease on the thing, zzzzT! and it slipped right under the blade - cutting it perfectly through the centre of the hole. I couldn't have measured it better.

The only upside is there are plenty of Mig sets and a bit of hot glue put it back together. Just isn't the same though

graham.