Well thats been one hell of a year for you and the family! glad you survived and heres hoping for lots more posts of fancy stuff youve made, even if we dont have a clue what it is!
Photos higher up are the reason why the decision to close Dungeness B was made. It was a remote controlled camera that was inserted instead of one of the control rods, so they could look at the inside of the reactor. The cracks that it found rang the death bell…. Most of the stuff I did in the last 3 years was related to these cracks.
Good on you, JB. I was self-employed for 28 years (meaning that I'm now probably unemployable). The two hardest things were firstly making the actual decision to do it and then surviving the first year. You've done both, so the way ahead is clear.
One of the first things I needed was a decent bandsaw. .These things are the spawn of Satan. I have a very chequered past with them. They are possessed.This would be bandsaw number three for me. The first two never cut a single piece of material in my ownership 🤬
First one was small, cheap and knackered. Turns out the casting was broken. Something the seller failed to mention. So that went into the skip. Second one was bought from two lads who had just started blacksmithing. A big Qualters and Smith that they had bought on a Friday night after partaking in a few too many Adult beverages. It literally took up a quarter of their shop🤣. They got it running,had endless hassles to get it to cut straight,and then one day it died. I bought it for a fair price, had a look at it and soon found out why it had packed in. They had the blade on back to front and had been running it in the wrong direction. All the swarf had collected behind the undriven wheel until it solidified and basically welded the wheel to the frame. It then just tripped the overload. Tripping was a theme in my one day of ownership, I had it on a pallet, took it around to the other side of the industrial estate to pressure wash all the shyte off it, tripped over the uneven tarmac, the pallet truck hit a bit of steel tube protruding from the tarmac,it went over,smashing the guides of the saw. Very calmly walked back to my unit,got the forklift and put it straight into the skip £1000 down the drain 🤬🤬🤬
Little donkey saw from the Museum drafted back into temporary service before that went off to its new home
Next day my mate Alan arrived with Saw number three…He had it languishing in a shed,way too big for him,and knowing I was kind of up shyte creek without a paddle,he let me have the saw at a pittance compared to what it would have cost on the open market. Free delivery too🤣🤣
Old big nose pondering if he should have sold it to me for the price he did…too late now it’s paid for 🤣🤣Unloading commences
Needed a good clean
Got it running….
60mm round bar cut for a sense of scale
Well….it seems as if this machine follows the path of every machine I own,in that it needs repairing before it can be used to its full potential. Every machine I own was bought as a waif or stray , mostly unworking and bought for a fraction of what they are worth in good working order. So far ,every machine I have bought like this ,is now up and running ….well, apart from the Spark Eroder,but that donated parts to other machines and still turned a profit 🤣🤣
So, the one that got away. The Spark Eroder. 😕 Well, to be perfectly honest,it didn’t really get away. I had a big spark erosion job and went down to my mate Tom. He has two machines and mentioned in passing that he knew of a third that wasn’t working and was due to be scrapped. Originally the plan had been to buy it, take the one board out of it that his big machine needed,and scrap the rest. When I collected it,it was in much better shape than advertised. We nicked the board out of it for his machine to do the job, but after it was finished, I managed to repair his original board. A bit of messing around followed and electrically ,I did get the machine I had bought to work. But it had some very strange accuracy issues that at the time I couldn’t fathom out. The decision was made to scrap it. Tom had the boards he wanted plus some other bits, I sold off a lot of it and actually turned a profit. When I finally stripped it all down,the accuracy issue was found, the quill had pit marks in it where it had stood unused,resting on the linear bearings. It must have got wet,or condensation had formed and made the marks The machine would jump as it went past this position. Not huge amounts to the naked eye, but seeing you measure in microns with this machine,the jumping was enough to warrant scrapping it The casting was a huge lump, 36mm thick in most places and it seemed a waste just to weigh it in. So….
Picked up and manoeuvred
Into the bandsaw
Cuts lovely
The offcut 🤣🤣
What I landed up with. Two nice beefy bits of angle, 36mm thick
Something very satisfying about a machine making its own spares. The two pieces will be used to make new jaws for the vice on the bandsaw at some point,as the original moveable one has been replaced with a crappy flame cut one,and the back one has been welded to the base of the machine rendering the bandsaw useless for cutting material on an angle 🙄
I really thought EDM`s would be a thing of the past these days with CNC being what they are now.
Couldn’t be further from the truth. The inherent problem with using rotating tools will always be there,in that you always are left with a radius. Yes,you can minimise it by using a 9 axis Cnc,but at what cost? The new generation edm machines are Cnc anyway with a lot of clever features such as constantly monitoring the spark gap so the machine can then orbit the electrode around to compensate your electrode wear. You can also do crazy features/ undercuts that even a multi axis Cnc mill wouldn’t be able to do.
Some of the features I machined into that camera set up would not be possible even with a 9 axis Cnc mill, eg machining a feature 270mm down a 17mm hole. Edm will always have a niche in toolmaking, aside from disintegration of broken drills and taps.
Some of you might have wondered about the “ Idea “and “Gear”, in the title…Well, here goes….
These are all parts I have made or need to make. And herein lies my problem. Gear and spline cutting. It seems in the U.K., Gearcutters do not belong in the realms of engineers. They seem to think they are celebrities or footballers, and require remuneration to suit…in short , I am sick and tired of doing the hard graft only to have to give 90% of the profit on a job to someone to glue some teeth onto a blank. So, how hard can it be to cut gears and splines without a dedicated gearshaper or gearhobber? Surely there are ways you can do these in house in a reasonable amount of time ? Only one way to find out……
Excellent, more fancy stuff made out of nothing but skill!
Not quite correct should read 'Nothing but Skill & Tea'
Actually your both wrong 🤣🤣 I don’t tea apart from Bran Tea… Im a coffee man. Grew up on a farm that was a wart on a pimple on the rrs end of nowhere. Mom used to work nights at the hospital so we had a “ Houseboy” to look after us in the mornings and get us ready for school. Basically a willing Slave . His idea of how tea should be made worked on the principle of you added sugar until you could stand a teaspoon up in it, and then added as much Cowjuice as possible. Totally killed it for me. Don’t drink Tea, or Milk for that matter…..