A pleasant job

A friend just bought a place in France and discovered a cider press lurking in a barn. In attempting to dismantle it he got a bit medieval wivvanammer and snapped a handle off an iron casting. He dropped it off with me and I faced the two bits, drilled, bored and tapped them, and made a stud to match (1/2" BSP on the grounds that I had a tap and die in that size!).
This evening the repaired job is on its way back to him. It pleases me that the original probably lasted a hundred years before my mate had a moment of madness and now there's no reason that I can see that it won't last another hundred.
Sorry, just wanted to revel in the fact that we can *do* stuff... ;^)

Nigel Eaton wrote:
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Sounds good and hopefully later in the year you get re-payed with some of his cider production. It's a wonder to me as someone with a workshop full of tools how people manage to survive without, I guess they just don't know any better.

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I'm not sure how competant I am at the "doing of stuff" but I know what you mean.
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I can also relate to this sentiment - how do people cope without a lathe etc?
Last week I adjusted a wing mirror on my motorbike and it can off in my hand - the 8mm chrome plated bar had fatigued through from the vibration. In a spare hour over the weekend I drilled out the left hand threaded M8 mounting point and retapped righthanded M10. Then I made a small tapered socket in one end of a piece of an M10 bolt which was silver soldered onto the end of the mirror bar after a bit of grinding to give it a slight taper. An M10 nut serves to lock it all at the correct angle.
No real precision on the tapers, just as long as it fitted. The repair is virtually invisible after the short rubber sleeve has been put back on.
A very satisfying outcome and again I'm left wondering how others manage?
There is of course a subsequent issue - how long will the repair survive the vibration and rain etc? I'll worry about that when I need to.
cheers all
Toby

Toby wrote:
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Lathes be blowed - there are people out there who don't own a screwdriver! This is something I can't begin to get my head round.
In the pleasant job stakes - the other week my much sainted aunt knocked the wing mirror off her Honda Jazz (again, though that's another story) and, since I couldn't stomach the idea of her coughing up £250 for a new one, decided I'd fix it.
The mirror mount had ripped out of the plastic boss on the door so I made a bizarrely shaped aluminium plate to fit inside the boss so that when it was bolted through to the mirror body, it'd trap the remains of the broken plastic 'plate' and pull it all back together.
Cost: £2 - needed a couple of longer M5 cap headed bolts so had to buy a bag from Screwfix!

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It's my belief that most people are just completely wedded to the sales pitch of: 'Well, nuffink larsts fer evva. Buy a new 'un. Can't be fixed, nah, modern plastics innit, too complerca'ed'.
It's tragic and infuriating. The whole modern ethos never fix anything it's too expensive, just fit a new one. It's also curiously at odds with modern supposedly ecological thinking, but nobody who gets their mug on the idiots lantern seems to have the wit to point it out.
Cynical of Kent
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There's more to it than that. I too prefer to repair if possible rather than buy new because of the sense of satisfaction it gives me. However we have to recognise that the time involved in making anew, if we priced our time at the rate most of us are paid, sometimes exceeds the price of a new widget.
Cliff Coggin.

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That is certainly true, but very few things are made (designed) with service or repair in mind, indeed many are made specifically to prevent or resist it. If they were, the time element of repair would be vastly reduced. In most instances in my experience, the major time element is due to trying to fix something which is not intended to be fixed.
I accept there is potentially a price penalty for such a design for the initial purchase and overall the manufacturer is trying to maximise his profit on the one sale and to hell with anything else, but the public mind-set and teh way it is manipulated are also to blame in part.
Richard
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David Billington wrote:
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Yes - such a thing soon pays for itself. (*)
BugBear
(*) MASSIVE sarcasm intended!

My current none model engineering workshop job is to fix my brother in law 110 year old door lock. Just can't get the spares anymore.
Mike

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I agree with your sentiment, it breaks my heart to have to throw something away because it can't be fixed. I was recently able to save a fortune due to my workshop. We'd been out in the harbour fishing, but when we started the outboard to come home there was a problem. Motor ran OK, but the boat didn't go anywhere. Managed to get a tow back to the boatramp from a passing boat (which saved the embarresment of having to radio the coastguard). I thought it might be an electrical fault, as the gearbox is electro-hydraulic, but that was all working OK so I started a major strip down of the bottom end. Once it was all apart the problem was obvious, forward/reverse gear is selected with a dog clutch moving forward and back to contact either the forward or reverse gear. What should have been square shoulders on the cluch were worn off to 45 degrees, but even worse the gears were just as worn. Pricing up spares the dog clutch wasn't too expensive, but the gears were over US$1000 each!!!! This would have made the repair more than the outboard was worth, and more than we could afford to spend at the time anyway. After some thought I noticed there was quite a lot of material on the gears, enough that the face the clutch contacted could easily be moved further round. So I set up the gear on a rotary table (made a mandrel to centre it), clocked up what was left of the face then moved the gear round 5 degrees and re-machined a nice square face. Repeated this for the opposite face and then the other gear. Not sure what they were made of but HSS cutters didn't touch them, fortunately I had a carbide cutter and that did the job. Put it all back together and it's working great again.
Without a reasonably equipped workshop and the ability to use it the motor would have been scrap, and we wouldn't be going fishing on our boat. More brownie points from the wife and justification that all that equipment really is essential -sounds like a win-win to me
Regards Kevin