Member postings for Mike Poole

The spiral on the Quorn column was left to the builder, from none at all to a 1/2” to 3/4” pitch. The professor did mill it with a saddle mounted milling head and a jury rigged slow drive to the lead screw. Not really screw cutting proper, more a spiral milling task. Unless you have a dividing head and drive from the table lead screw then it is quite an ingenious method.

Mike

I think a lock on the trapdoor open position might be useful or it might not be up to you how long you spend in the man cave. Getting someone else to pay for the stuff you like doing has to be a good idea, if he can make a living from having a good time and putting it on YouTube Then happy days, better than being a wage slave and having to self fund your hobby, if it buys his wife a Prada handbag Now and again I bet she is right behind his projects.

Mike

4mm is only just outside the normal range of the Myford so should be ok, the spiral on the Quorn was regarded as beyond the capability of the Myford in normal screw cutting mode due to the load it would put on the gear train.

Mike

I remember the original build, can’t believe it was five years ago, the wall of death was one of his early projects and the longest moped.

Mike

The giant rolls in public loos are frustrating as the often break before the required amount of paper has been teased from the dispenser you then have the entertaining task of finding the end for another try, the loaders of the individual sheets must laugh their heads off when theY reload the wrong way. Talking of reloading the wrong way, the hospital car park machine was loaded with the magnetic strip the wrong way up so everybody’s ticket was invalid, funny how many people only parked for an hour, the queue was swelling fast when I left.

Mike

They had to dig a big hole to get this one in our tool room, variable speed DC drive on each axis and a 40hp rapid travel on each axis, 100hp Variable speed DC motor on the spindle. It could machine a 10ft x12ft x 16ft block

Mike

It is probably advisable to wait for any propellant flash off before reapplying power to any device that has switch cleaner/lube applied to it. If you have a circuit diagram or the inverter manual you should be able to test or bypass any interlocks, check the stop button is not latched in or jammed in, I wouldn’t mind a pound for every stop button that has caused a breakdown. Some smart alecs found the buttons on a production line had break before make buttons to they could stop the line before the indication flagged up the button station, a production line has a lot buttons to check.

Mike

Considering that Myford used to go for a 3phase 1/2hp motor or 3/4hp single phase motor then I feel that 1.5hp will rather over motor the lathe and in the event of a disaster could do some serious damage. I take your point that you would like a bit more grunt at slow speed but as you will already have the pulley system is it really too much trouble to slip the belt across to a more suitable setting. I run my Myford with an inverter and a 1hp motor and even though it is a flux vector drive it will still be under powered at low frequencies. I find that often the need for slow speed is because the job is a large diameter so a decent cut is going to require a lot of torque, even with a flux vector drive which will perhaps be able to keep 100% torque down to single digit frequencies it will be no match for the torque that is multiplied by the mechanical speed reduction and back gear. The variable speed Myfords still keep a high and low speed belt reduction. A VFD is a joy to use but it still cannot do the impossible. I suspect that even your large motor will stall at low speed with a decent cut on a large diameter job. A toothed belt will eliminate the belt slip that can save damaging the lathe but what will break next? An inverter can current limit but the large motor will introduce more inertia into the drive so a crash at high speed is going to break something. A poly V conversion will offer slick belt changing and a smoother drive less inclined to slip, Hemingway have a kit to make this conversion.

Mike

Our motor winding workshop utilised an old milling machine as a coil winder, a large collection of formers hung on the wall with the details of the motor they were made for. The formers were mostly fashioned from plywood and wood and as the works engineering carpenters being next door they often obliged with making the former, another style was to use two plywood cheek plates and a spacer for the coil width and steel pins drilled through the cheeks to make the shape of the coil required, these were often just rectangular or a squashed hexagon shape, a resettable mechanical counter operated by a cam logged the turns and a foot pedal started and stopped the machine. The wire drum was behind you and the wire was fed manually onto the coil by letting it run through your fingers, you soon developed the feel to apply the right amount of tension with your fingers and wind a neat coil With a smooth side to side motion, be careful to not feed side to side too quickly or coil will a hard uncooperative bundle, if you get it right then the coil will squash between your fingers and feed into the stator slot easily. The wire gauges for small motors are easy to work with but things get a lot more physical with heavy gauge wire in large motors. If you succeed in this project it will be very satisfying.

Mike

With an 89 year old mother and 91 year old mother in law who both live on their own it has fallen to me to do the shopping, my mother is battling a deeply depressed spell and I visit daily to listen to her and do some jobs for her. It’s not ideal but it hopefully helps her a bit, she has an open invitation to stay with me or my sister but she lives in a bungalow with her cat and is very reluctant to leave, she has stayed with both of us before but is anxious to return home all the time, logic goes out the window with mental health problems.

Mike

It’s worth remembering that the vice only uses a spring and light pin to retain the moving jaw when opening the vice, small parts placed on the all too convenient surface at the back of the vice can jam the slide when opening which will mangle the spring and shear the pin if you don’t stop when it starts to tighten up. Of course this is just something I have heard

Mike

I bought some of the eBay aviation connectors purely because they are so cheap, it would surprise me if they are fitted to aircraft. I would hope to find connectors like the military spec Amphenol on any aircraft I was a passenger in. Do these “aviation” connectors actually meet any specification for aviation use or does it just sound good in a sales pitch? the quality of my purchase was in line with the price paid but they will be ok in the non critical application I purchased them for. Are they a cheap copy of a quality connector or are they just a cheap and nastyish component?

Mike

**LINK**

Myford are closed until further notice, don’t break your lathe until the virus is over.

Mike

Edited By Mike Poole on 26/03/2020 17:35:15

If you detail your hardware, operating system and browser then if anyone is running the same and has the same problem or not then you may take a step forward, as we see from the replies many do not have a problem, someone reports a similar problem with Chrome but I do no have a problem with Chrome or Safari on an iPad running IOS 13.4

Mike

I think it was the mid to late 70s when pay was equalised but all jobs had to be done by everyone, the trim manufacturing was largely a female preserve and the welding and presshop were 100% male. The night shift was also a solely male shift, some of the jobs did require a significant physical strength which was beyond most women and even slightly built men, of course some of the girls were stitched up with these jobs just to make a point. Of course it all settled down and regulations on weights to be handled levelled the playing field. The night shift opened the doors to a bit of low level prostitution for a while but that blew itself out after a while. Forty years later people think nothing of females in a factory even though it is still a strongly male profile and with robots doing most of the hard work all the workforce are getting soft, so a gym is now provided for those who don’t get enough of a workout in the job. Times change.

Mike

I worked with a chap whose take on beards was ‘ why would you encourage on your face that which runs rampant round your a**e’

Mike

Many years ago I was given a pacemaker as a curio, it was recovered in a routine exchange, a scope showed it was still ticking away for many years after the exchange. My mother recently had a pacemaker fitted and I accompanied her to her first checkup, it appears they are very sophisticated devices now, they are interrogated with a wireless connection and seem to transmit a log and live data, clever stuff.

Mike

I think too many people buy an inverter, attach a power cable and a motor and switch on, after a battle with the parameters the job is regarded as finished. Newton Tesla provide a ready to go package which is put together properly by the looks of things and is oven ready, just bolt the bits on your machine. The inverter is one component of a drive and the rest of the shopping list should have an enclosure, some control items and some properly specified cable, filters and a brake resistor may be required. An ideal installation will not be screwing the inverter to the wall.

Mike

+1 for the Deutsches Museum

Mike

Avoiding EMI is difficult, failure of the components that control EMI will often not result in the device no longer working. We are surrounded by devices that have the potential to radiate, switch mode power supplies are everywhere and PV solar panels have an inverter that on a sunny day could be working hard. Properly designed devices in good working order should comply with EMI regs but unfortunately some imported equipment is not compliant. Poor installation of things like inverters for your lathe and mill can also result in unwanted emissions, arc welders are obviously a device to avoid. The inverters for spot welding transformer control all carried a pacemaker warning so I would avoid a car factory tour if you were considering one. I am surprised you promote the electric shave as a time saver, in the washroom when camping I find my wet shave is done and dusted while the electric boys are still stood there mowing away.

Mike