Taken the Plunge

Awesome. Colour me impressed. That's on a par with me buying a new front wheel for my vintage racing bike with Gert's maternity allowance some years ago.

I have always felt that the American term "Home Shop Machinist" is a far better term than "Model Engineer" Many of us don't make models but still have reasonable workshops and skills.

Welcome aboard, although the number of posts here aren't great the quality is very good and virtually everyone is helpful. What part of the country are you in?

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

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I'm in Suffolk over in the East, in a little town called Hadleigh. There's only 3 surnames in the Town and most people have 6 fingers:)

I agree, the quality of posts on here is very good, particularly yours if I can say that without appearing sycophantic. I also found your website and spend hours looking through the links. Theres some amazing stuff there and proper good old fashioned creative engineering.

This is a particular bugbear of mine. In my industry (technical injection moulding)I deal with a lot of industrial designers, and whilst these guys are wizzkids on surface & solid modelling, I wish to

**** they could have spent some time on a drawing board. Positional dimensions without a datum reference and an abundance of blend rads. showing a single blend endpoint without a rad centre to work from. Don't get me started on spline curves!

Thanks for the welcome.

Peter

Bloody hell - someone else in Suffolk. I'm in down the road in Sudbury Feel free to get in touch if you want.

regards

Charles

Visit

The free pages to buy and sell workshop equipment

Peter,

You wouldn't happen to work for a small Injection moulding company on a Hadleigh industrial estate near the Hadleigh Bypass. I used to visit them to install Robots, Piovan Star, onto the Moulding machines.

Mart> >

Amaz> Peter,

Yes I do Martin, but not the one you're thinking of, as surprisingly there are 2 of us on the same estate. I take you mean Skar? Oddly enough I started my career there back in the mid 70's, then buggered off around the country and overseas then back again for the next 20 years, only to wind up 1/2 a mile down the road back in 2000. My place is here

One advantage of being in this business is an unlimited supply of small offcuts in P20, H13, EN30B, and of course EN1 from the toolmakers I deal with. They've also been incredibly generous in supplying older tooling & so on to help me set up my workshop.

regards

Peter

Peter,

Sounds like you are off to a good start, at least till the other half gets home. On the subject of model making, I have more work in progress than I care to think about. The bulk of my workshop activities seem to be making something in order to make something else, and usually ending in the repair of an item someone has asked me to look at... So I use the term loosely that I do Model engineering...

I am also interested in injection moulding, as a hobby, have a small CNC desktop machine for making wax masters, and use CAD... Oh well!!! That side came about for the garden railway bits, moulding railfreight and garden people, etc...

Hope you find lots to do and never finish a thing. LOL

Joules

Whether we mean to start off this way is a different thing but we all seem to end up at this point.

I have never been far away from engineering my whole working life but what got me started on the home shop side was my love of vintage racing bikes.

Unfortunately my skills as a rider were only matched by the force of gravity, the term "Horizontal Champ" springs to mind. So while I was making ten sets of new foot pegs for the coming weekend at Cadwell other people were saying could I make them a set as well.

It was whilst I was sat very uncomfortably in Louth General I realise that I got more enjoyment and less pain from making parts than breaking parts.

It spiraled from there..................................... now there is no hope............................................

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

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A similar passion is my excuse. I've had motorbikes all my life, but not really ridden at all in the last 15 years since getting married. About 6 years ago I decided I wanted another one, and bought a little GpZ500 twin as a crash damaged wreck, intending to get it on the road cheaply and quickly. Well 6 years on of course its still an unfinished project, as I seem to find another bit to 'fix' before I finally put it all together. One time I decided I would make some carbon fibre and aluminium silencers to replace the stock items. I found a source for the 100mm dia. CF tube, and had some end caps metal spun out of stainless for them. That was 4 years ago. Having decided to get on with this a few months ago, I needed some means of accurately radially drilling the rivet holes for fixing the end caps on the pipe, and well, one thing led to another and I ordered the lathe & mill.

The trouble is I've now consigned the bike to the spare garden shed where it's taking second place to the 'workshopping' hobby...... I also have an old TY175 twin shock trials bike that I've been meaning to fix for the past 15 years.

Peter

If you need any help or materials for the injecion moulding Joules give me a shout. I'm also a big CAD fan too, despite my earlier comments, and run both a seat of Solidworks and AutoCad.

Peter

Oh. I thought you meant beautiful LIGHT vintage racing bikes.

BugBear (disappointed)

OOOOOOOH too tempting.... maybe I need to annoy you off list.. I use Rhino for all my 3D, and CorelDraw for the 2D stuff. My moulder is a

1970's Austin Allen Gnat, small and portable, with my engine crane. By the way, if you haven't already got one, an engine crane is a God send when your space is limited. My machines often end up dancing about the workshop to fit in the next job... Even though the lathe cabinet has a bolted position, it can still be nudged up against the wall when needs must.

Joules

Sorry no, pedaling one of those is far harder than even picking yourself up from the Gooseneck at Cadwell

My era consisted of Manx Norton's, AJS 7R's, and the rare but nice sounding early works Japanese bikes.

It's rather sad when you have Ralph Brian's dropping 6 gears coming into Ramsey on a 1964 4 cylinder 125 Honda as a ring tone on your phone.

Only problem is I hang on listening to it and the person on the other end rings off before it's back up to full chat..................bugger

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

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What about the little Kriedlers and what did Frantisek Stastny (Czech rider, spelling might be wrong) ride? was it a Jawa?

Peter

-- Peter A Forbes Prepair Ltd, Luton, UK snipped-for-privacy@easynet.co.uk

Peter, Behave, they are two strokes

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Visit the new Model Engineering adverts page at:-

Hey, what's wrong with a two stroke? In my day I could have the engine out and big end changed and back in again within an hour on a Bezzer Bantam and with me head right down over the handle bars could get up to 30mph into wind!

Happy days ......my excuse to get my Myford ......

Alan

with my engine crane.

Your correct there Joules, best thing ever invented to move stuff in tight spaces, best to get the C of G right before you lift though.

Martin P

Welcomb aboard.

I will steer clear of spline curves, But how would you like to see the odd wizz kid forced to actualy *make* the odd part from his own drawing ( under the supervision of the senior member of the tool room :-) ).

Having said that.. I do quite a bit of design work, some of which I do actually get to make... I do run in to problems which have me cursing the designer... and then I sort out the problems I have made for myself.

But the whole point of 3D CAD models is that you don't make anything from a drawing. You program it directly from the data using a CAM package. The only thing we use a drawing for at work is to check the part after it has been moulded, and we quite often never have a drawing -just the 3D data.

The slightly unfortunate thing about the way design has gone is that you do get people who can fly the CAD software but have no idea how anything is made. But that's OK because it keeps me in work sorting out their designs so they can actualy be made

Regards

Kevin

PS How's the AB substrate running Peter

What a small world this is:)

Hi Kevin, it was running well since you did the coining pins on it a while ago. Still moulds flat to 0.04mm,and the surface finish hasn't moved off 0.6Ra. You made a nice tool there.

The AB work in general has gone very quiet in the last month or so, lots of funny things happening down in Romford. Keith Abbotts leaving btw, don't know if you knew.

We still use a couple of small local toolmakers that don't have CAM, they just can't afford it against the prices they have to compete with, so whilst they have NC mills they still have to program them manually, and they pull the data manually off a 3D model. Much as they would like a seat of Powermill, they don't have the money to invest in it. Hence the curse of spline curves:) These guys are only a few years away from retirement, so its another reason they don't invest.

Regards

Peter