What did you do Today 2018

[richardandtracyParticipant @richardandtracy]

Made a tiny mitre block for my wife's precious metal clay jewellery making. The block was from a scrap 20×20 mm plastic pen blank offcut, milled a slot down the middle 12mm x12mm, then junior hacksaw to cut slots at 0,+45 and -45 degrees. Total length 30mm.

Regards

Richard.

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Took my basic battery charger apart to see if there was any clue to why it was giving an unsteady voltage.

Couldn't see anything wrong, so plugged it in… only 3-4V… and then the magic smoke came out of the bridge rectifier.

[Mike PooleParticipant @mikepoole82104]

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 27/05/2018 15:43:48:

Fitted a new toilet seat

Got one with stainless (hopefully) fixings but not very impressed by the soft close (yes A and B are on the correct sides, I checked!)

I fitted a soft close a few weeks ago and wife is used to it now, unfortunately the lid on her office loo is not soft close and goes down with a bit of a crash

Mike

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

Amongst other things, the picture is of something I actually did today (which I suppose is the purposes of this thread).

Not very exciting but it served a purpose and in actual fact was completely drama free. The parting blade is 2.5mm wide and the slot it cut ended up only 2.7mm wide. I did two of these blanks today and on the first one cut to a depth of 16.5mm before cutting from the second side. (The 6082 ali is 230mm diameter and 25mm thick). I cut the second blank 12.5mm from each side until the centre lump just dropped out (took about 15 minutes).

IanP

PS, the jaws are not nearly precarious as they look (8" chuck)

Edited By Ian P on 27/05/2018 19:39:07

[JimmieSParticipant @jimmies]

Just reading a review of ‘Exactly How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World’ by Simon Winchester and smiled on reading ‘One striking thing is that ……. virtually all the advances in precision engineering seem to have been made by men, a high proportion of whom appear to have lacked fluent social skills. And it is really not clear that this is because women have been forcibly and unfairly forbidden from taking more of an intertest in things such as screw thread counts.

Indeed, almost every advance in engineering and technology covered in this book can be narrowed down even further, to middle-aged men from just four countries: Britain, France, Germany and America.’

Now who decided that engineers lack ‘fluent social skills’?

Jim

[Trevor Crossman 1Participant @trevorcrossman1]

Well I never thought that I particularly lacked social skills having been quite a party animal in my mis-spent youth, and needed reasonable ones to run my own business, but today I used my other, rather limited woodworking skills to fashion a pair of duckboards while alone in my workshop so that I did not have to paddle about in the swarf, oil and coolant spills while standing at my mill and lathe. This, hopefully will enhance my domestic social skills by reducing the amount of swarf and grot that follows my work-boots from shop to house .why is the picture uppsy-duppsy here when it's the right way up in the album, and I see no way to correct it- (probably due to lack of key-board skills!)

Edited By Neil Wyatt on 28/05/2018 23:13:45

[MuzzerParticipant @muzzer]

Windows 10 and iPhone?

Open the photos in Paint or similar, make almost any change (I just click once, anywhere in the picture) then exit, saving on the way out. Then upload. Works for my particular combination of cameras (iPhones) and PCs (Windows 7 and 10).

Murray

[Trevor Crossman 1Participant @trevorcrossman1]

Hi Muzzer , picture was taken on Android phone and sent to my W10 laptop and posted from there. It appears the right way up in my forum album, but then inverted when posted. I even tried inverting the original , and saved it in my computer files and uploaded that to the album( where it was inverted , but that stayed inverted came out the same way. I'll play with it when I've got more time/ more in an IT mood.

Trevor.

[roy entwistleParticipant @royentwistle24699]

Trevor. It's upside down in your album. ( at least on my computer )

Roy

[martin perman 1Participant @martinperman1]

Mine is more what I did over the weekend, I spent Saturday on a Steam hauled charter behind Clan Line on a run from Paddington Station to Minehead, we then had a few hours on the West Somerset Railway and then hauled back to London, with a class 67 in charge, where I spent the night before visiting the London Transport Museum at Covent Garden. Finally ending the day with a train ride home.

Martin P

[Trevor Crossman 1Participant @trevorcrossman1]

Posted by roy entwistle on 28/05/2018 09:01:19:

Trevor. It's upside down in your album. ( at least on my computer )

Roy

So it is!!! That's really strange when it's the right way up in my W10 picture file?? Not a particularly important or interesting picture though, but I'll certainly have to pay more attention in the future.

Trevor

[Perko7Participant @perko7]

Today I completed stage 1 and commenced stage 2 of a water pump re-build for a chinese 2-cyl diesel tractor used for mowing the church land (about 10 acres half of which is undeveloped). No parts available anywhere in Australia or from overseas, so had to bore out the bearing housing and make a sleeve to fit available bearings (stage 1) and now turn down the shaft and make a sleeve to fit available seal (stage 2). The previous repair by a supposed tractor mechanic ended up with a broken seal which scored the shaft and allowed water into the bearing housing. The weep hole was clogged with gunk so the water eventually caused collapse of the bearings (ball bearings) which wore grooves in the housing due to movement of the outer ring. Seems like the previous repair had relied on silicone sealant to hold the bearings and seal in place . Hopefully a 'proper' repair will see the pump outlive the tractor.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Trevor Crossman 1 on 27/05/2018 23:11:33:

…why is the picture uppsy-duppsy here when it's the right way up in the album, and I see no way to correct it- (probably due to lack of key-board skills!)

Bad news, you can't correct an image once it's stored in your Album. Delete and reload after using Muzzer's trick.

Why the confusion? It's because the picture is a fake – the colours aren't real, not everything is in focus, the camera chose the resolution and the result is a stream of numbers organised to represent an image. The camera does portrait and landscape by convention only, the picture is actually captured on a square sensor through a round inverting lens and then cropped. The image has no intrinsic means of understanding up, down, right and left; these are decided by more-or-less intelligent guesswork in the camera, and added to the image as a suggestion. Bear in mind too that images can be made without needing a real scene or a camera at all.

Cameras usually do a good job, but not always. Even if they get it right, for historic reasons, there are at least three ways of suggesting orientation within image data and they need not agree, nor is there any law that says the software that decodes and displays an image has to obey the suggestions. And of course the software has no knowledge of reality either. It's a bit of a mess.

Muzzer's Method lets you force the image to look as you want. The software overwrites the camera's guesses with your superior understanding of what the photo should look like. To fix the image it's important to edit it, not just open and save it back.

Just for fun, my version of Trevor's photo above. Can you see what's wrong with it?

The duckboards are an excellent idea; apart from the dirt I get tired standing on a hard concrete floor.

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 28/05/2018 10:04:14

[Colin HeseltineParticipant @colinheseltine48622]

Image is reversed.

Colin

[Colin HeseltineParticipant @colinheseltine48622]

Put two more 13amp electrical sockets in the workshop. Takes me up to 30, plus four 3 phase outlets. Got conned into going to IKEA by wife and daughter last week. Decided had to make the best of it so bought two of the Jansko LED lamps (one to go each side of the recently acquired BCA Jig borer – plugged into the new sockets) and quite a nice 3 level rolling trolley. The trolley has a steel mesh base, ideal to put the tools etc in for the milling machine, keeps the suds tray empty of spanners etc. I may have to get another trolley to use for the lathe. Rapidly running out of floor space. Its like walking round a very narrow maze.

Colin

[Trevor Crossman 1Participant @trevorcrossman1]

Thanks for putting the picture almost right Dave, funnily enough the mill used to be to the right of the lathe, though that wasn't a left-handed one , ha-ha!

Trevor.

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Trevor Crossman 1 on 28/05/2018 13:57:11:

Thanks for putting the picture almost right Dave, funnily enough the mill used to be to the right of the lathe, though that wasn't a left-handed one , ha-ha!

Trevor.

Yup, mirror image. The left-handed lathe and paint bucket full of swarf are dead giveaways. Who knows though, xuluD paint might turn up at Lidl's one day!

You have a delightfully tidy workshop. Like Colin, mine is like working in a maze. I bet mine is worse than his!

Dave

 

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 28/05/2018 14:09:15

[Brian HParticipant @brianh50089]

Finally finished installation of DRO on my old Graham mill/drill. It's taken longer that it should have because I had room at the back of the table to put the X axis track and I changed the Y axis installation to make it simpler. I have to say though that the M-DRO instructions were very good, in proper English and illustrated in colour.

I took the opportunity to clean all the old grease off the internal parts of the mill and to change the table bearings, some of which were a little rough. Otherwise there is very little wear.

I'll post some pictures later.

Brian

[richardandtracyParticipant @richardandtracy]

Soft aluminium jaws for my vice. I can now – finally – get rid if the irritating angle extrusions I put over the hardened diamond pattern jaws the vice came with. Why don't they supply vices with aluminium jaws to begin with? It's been on my 'to do' list for a good 15 years, but I only just got some 10mm plate from a skip.

Regards

Richard.

[Brian HParticipant @brianh50089]

Here are some pictures of my DRO installation on a Graham Alpine Mill/Drill. The reading heads etc are not in the positions given in the instructions.

The handles and screws need replacing when the batch of bearings arrive and the cable runs need tidying.

There is also a picture of the supplied bracketry that was not used.

[MuzzerParticipant @muzzer]

Posted by SillyOldDuffer on 28/05/2018 09:59:55:

Posted by Trevor Crossman 1 on 27/05/2018 23:11:33:

…Muzzer's Method lets you force the image to look as you want. The software overwrites the camera's guesses with your superior understanding of what the photo should look like. To fix the image it's important to edit it, not just open and save it back.

When you open a picture in Paint and click somewhere (anywhere) in it, you are actually using the default colour and size settings to draw a tiny speck. I think the default size is probably 1 pixel and the colour is of no consequence (black?). If you were to zoom in to pixel level you might see that as an (otherwise invisible) imperfection but with practice it's a very simple and quick process: Right click on the file > Open with (Paint) ….click once, anywhere > Exit (save when prompted). Job done.

Murray

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by SillyOldDuffer on 28/05/2018 09:59:55:

The image has no intrinsic means of understanding up, down, right and left; these are decided by more-or-less intelligent guesswork in the camera, and added to the image as a suggestion. Bear in mind too that images can be made without needing a real scene or a camera at all.

Cameras usually do a good job, but not always. Even if they get it right, for historic reasons, there are at least three ways of suggesting orientation within image data and they need not agree, nor is there any law that says the software that decodes and displays an image has to obey the suggestions. And of course the software has no knowledge of reality either. It's a bit of a mess.

Sorry Dave, but you are completely wrong!

Any phone or camera remotely worth its salt will contain an accelerometer taht tells it EXACTLY what way up the camera was when the photo was taken.

But as many phones have all the controls on screen, it's easy to use them 'upside down'.

As orientation data is stored in the Exif information and the byte order of the image isn't changed software that doesn't look at the exif will just use the default orientation.

Neil

[Trevor Crossman 1Participant @trevorcrossman1]

Ah Neil, that explains why, no matter what I open the picture with to edit it, the eventual upload is inverted. My laptop default picture editor is Irfanview 64 but I also tried the inbuilt Paint, both gave the same result.

The picture was taken with my Moto G5S android phone which tends to reorient the display screen if I rotate or tip it with a sudden motion, this is quite annoying sometimes. I have only moved to a 'smartphone' ?? recently from my 10 years old flip-top mobile and I've not totally got the hang of it yet. I lack the motivation really as my preferred use of a phone is using it to talk to others !

Trevor

[richardandtracyParticipant @richardandtracy]

If an image is being viewed using old software (eg the forum), then old software needs to be used to strip out the spurious orientation information ignored by the old software… I always use a copy of Paintshop Pro I got on the front of the PCPlus magazine in the year 2000 or so. It's good enough to do what I need, works on 64bit windows and is simple enough to be compatible with older software.

Regards,

Richard.

[Jon GibbsParticipant @jongibbs59756]

Posted by JimmieS on 27/05/2018 21:47:32:

Just reading a review of ‘Exactly How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World’ by Simon Winchester and smiled on reading ‘One striking thing is that ……. virtually all the advances in precision engineering seem to have been made by men, a high proportion of whom appear to have lacked fluent social skills. And it is really not clear that this is because women have been forcibly and unfairly forbidden from taking more of an intertest in things such as screw thread counts.

Indeed, almost every advance in engineering and technology covered in this book can be narrowed down even further, to middle-aged men from just four countries: Britain, France, Germany and America.’

I wouldn't call myself a feminist but it seems pretty clear that Simon Winchester needs a few history lessons and perhaps ought to have checked his facts, as well as dare I say "his privilege", before making comments like that.

The likes of Ruby Loftus in WW2, and her predecessors in WW1, only got their chances during wartime and were pretty much dropped as soon as peace was declared. In earlier years Ada Lovelace only got her recognition because she was rich and Byron's daughter and, despite being arguably more talented and farsighted, was forced to play second-fiddle to Charles Babbage.

Jon

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