Rang out 2018, chimed midnight and fired in 2019 on Rochester cathedral bells.

I also repaired one of our handbells so our visiting friends could do some ringing with us.

Tried out the little Unimat that I got last Saturday, ran it on bottom speed on the standard two belt banjo, OK for up to 20 mm, it's quite quick(must put the tacho on it), I have the low speed /three belt banjo and I'll try that.

Ian S C

Well last year, yesterday to be precise. The gliding club needed to get the motor glider up to Crowland (gliding site about 10 miles north of Peterborough) for annual maintenance. Apparently it's a PITA place to get to by road from Cambridge, so I agreed to fly the tug up in formation and bring the pilot back. Actually it was the pilot and his partner – no problem the tug has four seats.

The weather was a bit icky on the way up; the highest we got was 1500ft and we got rained on once. The motor glider cruises at 75kts flat out. At that speed the tug is tiddling along at 2000rpm straight and level. To avoid carb icing I flew a bit faster (more rpm) and threw the odd 360 degree turn to look at the countryside and then catch up the motor glider. Navigation was straightforward, although the Fens can be a bit tricky as there's a lot of detail but no big features that stand out. The runway at Crowland was quite short, about 460 metres, but I used less than half, and less than the motor glider. Felt a bit strange as I rarely fly the tug without a glider, and a 180ft rope, on the back. We derigged the motor glider and loaded up the tug for the trip back. I got confused about where the runway was; after all the Fens are flat, flat, flat and it's difficult to distinguish grass from the surrounding fields when it's all exactly the same level. After that hiccup we took off in about half the runway length and had a simple journey back at 95 to 100kts and half the outward journey time.

So far so straightfoward, although I'd never been to the site before, so there's always a frisson of excitement at an unfamiliar site. The strange thing is that the partner of the motor glider pilot took her dog with her. So on the way back we had 3 persons on board, plus a dog. First time I've flown with a dog as a passenger! Good job air traffic didn't ask about persons on board; 3 POB and a dog may have caused some confusion.

Andrew

Got fed up channel-hopping trying to find something to watch that wasn't a repeat and decided to take my home-brewed boring and facing head to bits with the intention of heat treating the bits that hit each other and doing a couple of tweaks so that it runs more smoothly. I've identified the parts that need modification (only a few metric thou here and there ) and tonight I'll have a YouTube sesion to bone up on hardening and tempering. That'll be a first for me. I just hope my propane blowlamp is up to the job! Should be; the parts are pretty small.

John

Spent the last of the old year and the start of the new feeling sorry for myself due to a severe case of 'man flu'. Frustrated, because I've got some chiseling of holes in walls and re-wiring to do in the cupboard under the stairs. I don't want to be filling my lungs full of plaster dust when I'm already having trouble breathing and swallowing.

I made some more of my coupling rods for my Brit.

4 of us went to a steam up at Whissendine by the Melton Mowbray Model Engineering Club. Had a very pleasant couple of hours and looked at and got invited to drive some lovely locos. Many thanks to the very friendly people especially the ladies keeping the supply of cups of tea and bacon butties coming. See you all in 2019.

Started on my Dynamic Toolpost Grinder Kit from Heminway:-

(More immages in my "Dynamic Toolpost Grinder" Album)

I'll post progress on here and update the Album at the same time.

Nick.

Edited By Nick Hughes on 01/01/2019 23:15:42

Yesterday actually; Was sorting out garage / workshop & going through measurement tooling & for some reason looked at my Wixey digi angle gauge & thought I don't have angle gauges per se. I remember seeing some on the forum some time ago, or was it YouTube ?, any how decided to have a go at making some, but using trigonometry to get the angle as I have seen from various other posters & videos.

Had a look at what stock I had & found some 5 mm aluminium plate, that will do nicely methinks so started out with the simplest – 45* & if it works out will make myself a basic set of 30* – 25* – 15*. Started off marking out from two square edges & located two centre points for drilling & reaming for supporting the hypotenuse edge in the mill. I used two 3mm milling cutter shanks as precision fit into 2 x 6 mm reamed I know that as 45* is the simplest to mark out so using the 2" square I marked out would simply mean joining two corners ( side a & side b ) with a diagonal would give the required 45*, but often the case that eyesight, slight movement of rule etc would not hit the exact corners so wanted to see how close trig' would get it. I also decided to include a step to allow for location repeatability when machining of more than one item…

Finished gauge showing stepped edge…

Using the digi gauge sat in the stepped hypotenuse as a check, already zeroed from mill table…

The digi gauge showing discrepancy of 1 minute… that could be due to a slight burr on the bottom of the digi gauge ? or maybe the vice is not 100% flat on the table etc… I had to machine the bottom of the vice some time ago as it wasn't sitting flat or square to the table, could be other factors too…

Can't complain at the 1st attempt though. Comments / tips welcomed…

George.

Great stuff, George

MichaelG.