What Did You Do Today 2025

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, I’ve tried an old used piece of carbon paper on a piece of brass and it seems to work, that’s assuming you wish to trace it out.

Regards Nick.

[JasonB]

On JasonB Said:

.. …just stick it or a copy of it to the metal and cut through both… ..

Oh yeah! – Doh…😁

 

 

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Finished my steam-lorry’s rear axle: I’d built it a long time ago but it needed a new sprocket and various other changes. The details included making two Stauffer-type grease-lubricators, which had my scraping myself off the ceiling until I realised the tap was blunt so cutting undersize! Still, a nice exercise in screw-cutting the external threads.

 

[Sonic EscapeParticipant @sonicescape38234]

I discovered that there is a nice public library 100m from my home. You just go inside, pick any book you want and start to read it. You don’t need any permit if you don’t take it home. Also is more effective to learn Spanish in this way than by reading some boring grammar book. I hated school. The book on the left is quite interesting. And since the technical books have a more reduced vocabulary I can understand around 70% of the text. To be fair it has also a lot of pictures that help. Overall a very nice place to relax.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

That looks a lovely place to study in a relaxing way! What probably helps using techncial books in other languages is that terms developed within the last couple of centuries often insinuate themselves into various languages by simple “~ifying”.

……

This afternoon: put my steam-wagon’s axle back on the chassis, after a lot of detail improvements. Oh, and correcting having put one wheel on back to front. (They are slightly unsymmetrical.)

Finished in time for a clean-up, brew and off to the club to join others helping a recently-joined member sort out the assorted parts for his locomotive boiler’s fittings. He’d acquired it unfinished, with a still-shiny new commercially-made boiler, but with no drawings.

[Sonic Escape]

On Sonic Escape Said:

I discovered that there is a nice public library 100m from my home. You just go inside, pick any book you want and start to read it. You don’t need any permit if you don’t take it home. Also is more effective to learn Spanish in this way than by reading some boring grammar book. I hated school. The book on the left is quite interesting. And since the technical books have a more reduced vocabulary I can understand around 70% of the text. To be fair it has also a lot of pictures that help. Overall a very nice place to relax.

If you know English, Spanish is not too hard. Both go back to the Romans in large part.

Great that you have a local library with technical books. It’s becoming a thing of the past in many places where in this day and age, making a cup of coffee is considered a skilled trade.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

LOST:

Tank, Water, Steam-Wagon.

Approx 14 X 9 X 6 inches with hand-pump, cover, large filler and mounting-angles.

Brass rivetted and soft-soldered.

 

I know I am not too domesticated. I know I can put a screwdriver with a bright red handle down, go to use it three minutes later but not see it for the next three hours.

But a bloomin’ great, unpainted, brass tank?

I had fitted its hangars back on the chassis, returned to the house to collect the tank…. Like Michael Flanders’ French Horn, it had gorn.

Not in the workshop.

Not in the kitchen and en-suite bathroom. (It’s a long way at 3am!)

Not in the middle room among the lorry’s coal-bunkers, tank pipe-work, tools, ruined drawing-board and more stuff under the sofa.

Not in the front-room among ditto.

Not in the bedroom, between the wagon woodwork, bed and more …. Not in the spare bedroom (you get the message).

I’ve not investigated the loft, which does carry a stock of materials, but am sure I’d not have put it up there. Nor have I taken it away from home.

I searched again and again, no luck.

Losing a few screws (or marbles) or the last 5mm drill maybe; but how can anyone mislay a big item like that tank?

 

I don’t want to have to make another, but that looks horribly inevitable…..

 

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Have you found it yet?

..I actually managed to make some chips..

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

I know what they are but I don’t know where Nigel left his tank!

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

..feels good to have made a start..

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi, when needs must! what else can one do?

Regards Nick.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

What are you making there, Nicholas?

[Nicholas FarrParticipant @nicholasfarr14254]

Hi Diogenes, it’s a fairly simple thing, but I don’t want to revel what it is at this time. If it works out ok, I hope to show it at the MMEX exhibition, but I found the piece that I’ve shaped up, hiding in the top part of the photo below.

Regards Nick.

[Pete.Participant @pete-2]

Took delivery of a couple of new toys, a nice Bison 5c collet chuck I picked up for half the retail price,  and cut knurler I’ve been after for a long time but at £800 with the knurling wheels it was just out the question new, luckily found one a lot cheaper used, now I have one I’m going to make a scaled down version for the mini lathe as this’ll only fit on the big lathe with a 25mm shank, be a nice little project and doesn’t look too complicated to replicate having the angles to copy.

[Sonic EscapeParticipant @sonicescape38234]

Today I went to a bearing shop in a rather shady neighborhood in Barcelona. On the way I discovered a little pig that lives in front of an apartment building. The flag on the first floor makes me think it’s not a pet. I’ll stop by after the first Christmas to see if it’s still there.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

My own Vicker’s still has a way to go, but making steady progress nonetheless..

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

..made and proved a cutter for the ‘tabletop’ mouldings..

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Looking good

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

Thanks – I got the cut-outs and rebates done by a guy not-far-away I found on the ‘net by searching ‘CNC routing’ – I’d have tackled them on the mill but the thought of setting up & cutting the two ‘three-centred-arch’ windows and concentric rebate separated by only a 0.5mm upstand seemed like a days work involving a tedious list of offsets and a bit of trial and error to prove it..

The charge (I guess for an unknown punter walking in off the street) was £70, it saved a Saturday, but wouldn’t make me feel like it was a solution I’d revisit in a hurry (it did spark an interest in used CNC machines tho’- which is undoubtedly ‘where I’m going’ when the time is right)

– I should probably have searched around a bit more – I have no idea what a ‘normal’ charge might be.?

The ‘arras’ of the moulding is a quarter-ellipse 2.5mm long by 1.5mm high – for these kind of small jobs forming a nice shape on a bit of 4mm square GFS with Swiss files before hardening is much easier than trying to grind HSS.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

..perfect Sunday lunchtime – beats mowing the lawn..

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

So today I went to the ME club as usual. So that I can’t mislay the car keys I left them on the car seat with the doors unlocked (we are in a remote location, very little chance of being stolen). When I went to go home, the stupid automatic system had locked all the doors with the keys inside.

Rang the daughter to go to my house and get the spare set. Can’t find them. They eventually turn out to be in my trouser pocket, yes the ones I am wearing. Just shows all this cleverness is self defeating

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

Id be a bit concerned if my car self locked with the keys in it, are you sure you didn’t absentmindedly operate the remote in your pocket during the day???

[duncan webster 1]

On duncan webster 1 Said:

So today I went to the ME club as usual. So that I can’t mislay the car keys I left them on the car seat with the doors unlocked (we are in a remote location, very little chance of being stolen). When I went to go home, the stupid automatic system had locked all the doors with the keys inside.

Rang the daughter to go to my house and get the spare set. Can’t find them. They eventually turn out to be in my trouser pocket, yes the ones I am wearing. Just shows all this cleverness is self defeating

Been there got the tee shirt I called out the AA and I was surprised how easy it was to open a car door !

 

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

A rather sad day…

Not at my home club. That is thriving, though that has its own sadness in the loss of another long-standing member, and the funeral notice has been circulated. He had preserved an old brewery lorry he used to drive professionally, and I gather that will, fittingly, be his hearse.

 

No, today’s bleakness was with another, totally separate, much smaller group with a rather nomadic history. Its latest episode was becoming involved several years ago with a farmer wanting a miniature railway apparently as some adjunct to farm open-days; with us doing most of the building and operating in return for a railway for us to use…

Best laid plans… Several years of work, mostly by our little club of about eight people at most, then his entire dream and its credibility in our mind, slowly faded. As did our numbers.

The leading member of our team died more than two years ago. His son has been trying to keep things going,  despite responsibilities elsewhere. I am in my early-seventies and no stronger than I should be; another member is about eighty and cannot lift anything very heavy either.

With other work on, the landowner did less and less of what he was going to do – complete the earthworks, using his excavator. Though he had bought ballast, second-hand track and other materials. Nor had he done anything towards making the farm attractive to visitors.

I think the alleged interest from a model-railway club renting one of the farm buildings was only in the mind of just one man who has barely been in touch since. At least the farmer can use the workshop we built, a container we supplied and a big, old fuel-tank he already owned but we converted into a carriage-shed.

Today the remaining five of us removed our personal tools and shared any of the remaining rusty steel stock and well-worn old tools we wanted.  We had supplied all this ourselves, by donations and by sharing use of personal equipment like welding-sets.

One member took on a part-built, freelance diesel-hydraulic locomotive we intend to complete together, at his home. This was a club project, so quite what we might do with it, we’ve not yet decided.

As one commented, “All this work, and all our time and money!”. We never had a formal subscription or anything like that, and our portable track had only really paid for itself, its insurance, and some materials before eventually losing all operational and financial viability. We had all paid personally for many things including the cost of making club-project parts in our home workshops. Our main personal expenditure of course was travelling to and from the site nearly every Sunday for a few years – a 60-mile round-trip for me.

We’ve not fully walked away yet. Apart from track and rolling-stock still there, we are keeping watch for any sign of revival. Otherwise, another era gone.

 

I think the only sign of life there was a woman tending her horses in another farm-yard building.

[DiogenesParticipant @diogenes]

That’s a shame, Nigel – if it’s any consolation (and right now I’m sure it’s not), it sounds a bit like the project never had (or lost) one of those individuals who possess that peculiar kind of slightly unhuman energy and obsession that acts as a kind of human-flywheel on so many large projects and often seems essential to keeping the the momentum going..

[Author]

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