Hello from Cornwall

Happy New Year to all.

To introduce myself, I brought down the curtain on my second career in early 2020 and am now finally looking forward to an active retirement. I have always enjoyed playing with old cars but have never done any engineering per se. I discovered model engineering some years ago, via a detour into model railways, which had been a childhood interest.

Whilst still working I built a workshop, bought some old British machine tools and joined my local ME club. However, to date I haven’t done much beyond trying to ‘improve’ my lathe [Myford 254+] and mill [Tom Senior E-Type].

I have fitted DROs and VFD controlled 3-phase motors to both the 254 and the E-Type. Both machines also now have Hall effect tachometers, and I was able to renew the mill spindle bearings by following Glenn Bunt’s guidance in MEW 258.

My next goal is a stepper motor power feed for the mill x-axis and I also hope to start properly on the ubiquitous Stuart 10v before too long. Ultimately, I plan to attempt some modifications to the cylinders, pistons and valves of a rather asthmatic second hand 5-inch gauge loco. Given my lack of relevant experience I’m afraid that all of these aspirations are likely to generate questions for other members of these forums ….

Jonathan Richards

Hey Jonathan, I've just sent you another PM

For others reading this - I'm in Cornwall too, and I did respond to this post via PM, which went undetected for a bit ...

Perhaps this (brilliant) forum should have email notifications on by default for PMs?

Welcome to the forum.

The forum migrated recently to a new platform after ME and MEW were sold by MyTimeMedia to another publisher (Mortons). The transfer went well apart from a few ongoing bugs one of which is email notifications aren't working. It's being investigated.

Why is nothing ever easy...

Dave