New member from Ireland

Hi All, Steve, living just nortth of Dublin in Ireland, a long time lurker, but it's time to start getting sensibly involved with using some of the kit I have here.

Interests are mainly garden railway (SM32), but I've done a few other things over the years. I started with engineering a long time ago, repairing things like adding machines, calculators and accounting machines, then computerisation came along, and I had to expand into electronic systems, which in the early days were still very much mechanical keyboards and printers, and that progressed into things like matrix printers and the like. Eventually, I moved into more of the software side of things, but never really got away from repair and maintenance work. Part time, I also spent a lot of time doing vehicle maintenance,

So, the (double garage ) workshop at present has a wide range of hand and power tools, and then a Myford ML7, a passable pillar drill, a decent Mig welder, Oxy Propane welding and cutting, and a plasma cutter.

I've come to the conclusion that to do what I want to do going forward, I will need some sort of mill, and deciding which way to go is going to be challenging, in that there's not much surplus machinery here in Ireland, and bringing things over from the UK has now become much more complex and expensive as a result of Brexit,

I'm almost retired, age wise I should have retired a few years ago, and there were things to do, but Covid has made me stop and think what I want to achieve with the time I have left. In some respects crazy. I've a hankering to build an SM32 (16mm) model of a Beyer Garrett NGG16, which will be a big model, even on O gauge, and to do a sensible job of that will need the accuracy of a mill to get the holes in the right places on multiple plates, and I don't fancy trying to do some of the things I will need on the Myford, I think I will be better to get a mill than spend a lot of money on extras for the lathe.

I don't have a garden railway track right now, I have the track, a Roundhouse Fowler and some much modified Mamod locomotives, and a selection of rolling stock, but there's a massive flood relief scheme going through (literally) our garden at the moment, so where I want to put the railway is a construction site at the moment, the frustration being that the flood relief scheme was meant to be started and finished in 2016, and if we are lucky, and there's no more delays, it will be the end of the year before the civll works are complete, and we've then to get the garden back into some sort of state of order..

So, that's me and my background,we'll see where this goes

Welcome along Steve, sounds like your future is laid out. I get over to Ireland a couple of times a year but nearly always to the north. The motorcycle road racing is the pull for me.

Welcome to the forum

H

Correct, there is little or no machinery to be had here.

Hello Steve and welcome. Sounds like you are going to be busy (or held up) for some time to come.

Hope it's all sorted soon.

Brian (very near to the centre of England)

Welcome Steve. Good luck with your projects etc. Was it a large old type mill you need or the smaller versions.

Steve.

Welcome to the forum from another Ireland based metal basher. West Cork in my case.

How persuasive are are you? Or, do you have the gift of the gab? If you are looking for a larger milling machine (about 1-1/4 tonnes) I may be able to put you in touch with someone in Co. Carlow.

Dave
The Emerald Isle

Hi Steve. Good to hear from you. I'm based in Skerries so it sounds like we're in the same neck of the woods! I'm new to all this and in the process of building a workshop. I have an old mini lathe which I picked up about 20 years ago in the UK. I've played with it but want to become more skilled. I've recently picked up a mini mill (in Ireland) but it took a long time watching the likes of ebay, facebook market place and donedeal.

Anyway, all the best and give me a shout if I can help in anyway. My mill is likely too small for your needs but you're welcome to use it if it did.

David

Hi Steve, Not exactly up your neck of the neck of the woods,[being buried in the sticks in Wexford ] but still nice to hear from you ,not too many of us around over here.

Not into model making myself but really more of a metal butcher, but so what ? it,s great fun !

As they say "Welcome aboard" You dont have to be mad to fit in here, but it helps !

Hi Steve. Welcome to the forum. I hope you can get your layout sorted soon. I have some pictures of mechanical calculators in my album. Are they the kind of things you used to work on ? I have quite a collection of these and to find someone on here with a little knowledge of them is great.

Enjoy what the forum has to offer. Most if not all of your questions will get a lot of good answers here.

regards

Well, that's a nice surprise. Thanks for the welcomes and the specific comments, that's the sort of thing I wasn't expecting so soon.

To answer the questions above. I can accomodate a large machine if one comes up at the right price, and with some of the things I'd like to do, it might be easier on an older and larger machine, the really small mill/drill type machines are likely to struggle on some of the things I'd like to do over the next while. Having said that, a small mill might work for me, in that I know that trying to do some of the things I wnat to make is going to be almost impossible to mill on a myford, so I have to get something, the full size NGG 16 is nearly 50 Ft long, so in SM32, that will mean a locomotive that's 800 mm, or 32" in old money, which is NOT a small model!

Steamdave, if the machine in Carlow is reasonable, then yes, I could be interested, the garage should be big enough to get it in, so let's see what's out there. I don't mind doing a bit of cleaning and adjusting if it needs it, and I should be able to borrow a trailer etc to move it if necessary.

OldIron, the background with things mechanical started with a company that specialised in adding and accounting machines, Burroughs, and they did a whole range of mechanical (electric motor operated) machines, and even some pure mechanical crank handle operated machines, as well as all sorts of fancy machines that were used in the banks for putting numbers on cheques, using magnetic ink. That was nearly 50 years ago, series P, and J, and then I moved on to the L series of computers, 20 Character per second golf ball printers, used a nightmare mechanical clutch system to tilt and rotate the golf ball, and then over time, they progressed to multi pin dot matrix printers, before then introducing line printers. I could probably still rebuild a decoder if I had to, 8 clutches running in an Oil bath, and the tolerances were pretty tight to get them to work right, using metallic tapes wrapped round pulleys to do the moving. Burroughs also did other mechanical accounting machines that could do all sorts of fancy calculations using a variable tappet panel that moved with the carriage, but I never trained on them, and they were complex, but a dying breed when I started workijg with Burroughs in the early 70's just before decimalisation, which killed the older machines off, as the electronic machines were ideally suited to the new decimal currency working.

Well, that was another nice surprise, we were out all day yesterday, visitng my son and his family, who we're not seen for close on 8 months as a result of the Covid lockdowns, he's 3 hours away, so it made for a long day. While we were out, I'd put a E-Bay delayed bid on to a Sieg SX2P mill, without too much hope of winning it, as an old Ajax earlier in the week nearly doubled in price in the last few hours before it sold for close on £1300, and there's been full size Bridgeport mills for not much more, if you discount the fraudulent item that keeps coming back on a regular basis.

So, we got home at just before midnight, and to my surprise, I am now the happy owner of a reasonably well equipped SIeg mill, though I will have to contain my impatience for a few weeks as getting it from the UK to Ireland is no longer the easy exercise that is used to be before the Brexit nonsense happened, so it's going to have to sit in my brother's garage until we can get over to bring it home. I wasn't expecting to find a suitable mill this soon, but I am well happy to have done so, even if the learning curve is going to be a little steep for a while.

An earlier model Sieg is being offered for a starting price of more than I've paid for a more recent and improved design, so I'm well pleased, and there's a reasonable selection of extras with it, so hopefully, not too much extra expense to make it usable for some of the things I have in mind..

Now I need to get things set up again, and start working on the drawings I will need for the NGG16, it's going to be a challenge, but hopefully worth doing.