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Cynic-al

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Cynic-al last won the day on December 8 2019

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  1. I bought a jet (sold by axminster) and have a clarke at work. They're all much of a muchness unless you want to spend big, I don't consider them a precision tool. Things I would look at are RPM they can do. A lot don't go slow enough for anything over 1/2" holes in steel and you just end up knackering drills. The other thing I think you need is a rigid table. Look for how long the bit is that clamps the support pillar and how easy it is to set level. Depending what accuracy you need a set square against a bit of rod in the chuck is usually good enough but it's frustrating if they twist out of true when you tighten the nut. Old ones tend to be a little more solid but can often be knackered so it depends if you want to spend the time trying to strip it. A good vice makes a difference too.
  2. The problem is everyone wants a solution that works without us changing our lifestyle. That doesn't work with the batteries available now for electric cars for so many reasons. The charging at home has to be linked to a smart network which can change the charge rate of cars based on demand and 'green' supply. Otherwise 5.30 every night everyone gets home, plugs their car in regardless if it needs a 10% charge or a 90% charge as they want it topped up. They then go inside, switch the lights on, kettle on, tv on, electric oven on, electric shower etc. The peak for those few hours would be huge but by bed time most of the cars have finished charging and the demand drops off. Grid watch is a good website to see what spare capacity we have. It's distorted at the moment due to corona but usually we are very close to capacity and importing electricity from abroad. It's nice to see the headlines "we didn't burn any coal today" but the fact is there are a lot of days when we need to to meet current demand. Plus we are still burning wood, gas, oils etc etc often whilst dumping green energy as we can't balance the fluctuation in generation - the smart charging network would help with this. Nissan and Tesla do the battery banks and there are some neat old school ideas for this including underground air compressors and huge weights being lifted and lowered in mine shafts but the fact is we don't have it and every time you change energy you lose some of it. Coal is about 35% efficient so similar to a car engine, combined gas is about 70% efficient so I guess better in that way. Workplaces and public places need thousands of charging points so that if you cannot charge at your house you can charge somewhere else where you are going to be doing something else so that you don't have to sit and wait. The energy needed to move a car is huge and this won't just require charging points it will mean transformers, sub stations, cabling as well as generation. 300 miles would be fine for me 80% of the time. The problem at the moment is that the 20% I would struggle to find a charger as I work in remote places and would have to divert to motorways etc. I did look on the charging point website to work out if its practical but a lot were at garages and things that they use for demonstration so you can't actually go and use them. For most people it's a weekend away or a holiday, there is no way the caravan sites will want you to have a cable out the caravan window drawing 13 amps for a couple of days to charge the tesla. I still think they should be using light commercial to develop the technology not the public. All the parcel vans have capacity for batteries, do a lot of stop start and city work so electric would be great for smog reduction and most are parked up all night at the depot so can charge, the chargers know they have until 6am to charge the battery so can fluctuate charge rate based on supply. The reality is people need to change their liftstyle. Become more local, less globalisation, travel less, walk more etc etc.
  3. I might be a bit late but I have a cheap 30t, it's no precision instrument. I find the key is to remove rust and keep things in line otherwise you can soon run out of oomph. Mine doesn't have a pressure gauge and I keep saying I'm going to add one as otherwise it's hard to know how hard your pushing. You have to get a feel for it as if you keep pushing you get to a point when your making things tighter not pushing out, a pressure gauge would help there.
  4. Ive got 3 kids, 2 are school age and it's taking me 2-3 hours a day per child to do their homework with them. It's been educational for me too, I didn't know what an expanded noun with a prepositional phrase was until yesterday. I feel it will be useful in my future vocation for sure! I'm at work 1 day a week and supposed to be working from home in between (ha!). I've done a bit of DIY - I've kocked down the wall between the kitchen, hall and dining room to make one open plan room. Moved lots of services, burn't my hand with hot water by being too lazy to drain the central heating system, fitted bluetooth ceiling speakers which is a nice gadget! Currently filling all the holes in with plasterboard ready for a plasterer to come in, not sure when, I might get brave enough to try if I get bored. Can't get the flooring until mid may, might put a new kitchen in when things re-open. My car which I had an accident in in February is stuck in a closed bodyshop and the other guys insurance are suggesting they might refuse the hire car charge as we have taken an unreasonable amount of time when they offered to repair it for us. Steamed the little steam train I bought as an unfinished project for the first time before it's stripped for paint. Part of the regulator broke, looks like it was made from the wrong material so that needs to be fixed and tried again. Couple of other workshop projects on the go but only 1 car related and that minor it's not worth mentioning. Wife got an automatic vacuum last week which we are currently programming. No instructions with it so just winging it, pictured below! So far we've found the snooze button And the gardening button We still have some debate over what is rubbish though
  5. I think the speed of print is, as you say, how quickly you can get the head to change direction without overshoot, but also how quickly you can feed the material, and that comes down to how quickly you can melt it all the way through. So I guess a thinner rod is better from that respect. Hard to describe without drawings or photos but in will try. If needs be I will do some sketches. There are a few ways of doing it. For one clip you can try put it on the split line so there is no reverse draw. I did this once on a fitting that had the clip broken into 8 expanding segments. The cores overlapped each other to create a void behind the clips to give them room to expand if that makes any sense. For a small clip we jump it. That is, you open the mould to remove the outer mould from the part then use a stripper plate to push the part off. As its plastic and still warm it will stretch over and return to size. A bit of an angle on the clip helps. Another way we have dont it is not to have the clip going all the way around. Just have 1 or 2 bits depending on size. For one bit you can have a section of the core which slides forwards with the ejection stroke, the part drops down slightly then gets swept off as you retract the ejection. For more than one you can use an up and away ejector pin. It's a pre engineered component which is bent so that as your ejection comes forwards it springs inwards. You cut your profile in it and mount them in the core. Or the ultimate which we have never used due to cost and being able to do the job cheaper ways, are collapsing cores. Again they are pre engineered components. You send a drawing to the manufacturer and they make them with the profile cut in for you. Then have a pin down the middle and as you retract it all the segments move in in 2 stages so that it all collapses in. Finally.you can make an unscrewer. You.get a core cut with a thread on that you want on your part, then cut the same pitch thread on the other end of the core. When you want to get it out the part you turn the core with a motor. And it winds itself out of the part and into the mould.
  6. If you had a central cord (bungee or welder liner etc) you could have them clip on so you could take the middle one out. The thing you might come across when trying to print fine tolerance clips is the layer thickness. How much it spreads as it comes out the nozzle and the layer thickness giving you a staircase on the taper and lower strength (as your putting hot material onto cold the joint isnt as strong, that's why some people heat the cabinet, that and to control shrinkage as it cools) We injection mould hollow sockets at work with an internal socket range of 5mm yo 320mm and wheelie bins are injection moulded so it's quite common to do hollow parts.
  7. Material wise pick one and stick with it ir your making it hard for yourself. Abs is a proper plastic but not the easiest to work with. I think the printer would have to be well setup for a tight fitting spring clip. A bit of reverse taper on the clip will help pull them together. Tolerance the fit so the plastic isnt fully relaxed so it's still putting a bit of tension on the joint. Or could you make in 2 halves so it doesnt need to spring as much and you can have a bigger overlap? Or a screw down the middle so you can get them in position then clamp them tight together. Or just get a length of welding wire and bend that. 🤣
  8. I guess it's to give them a fighting chance against the authorities. Your not allowed a concealed weapon so I'm not sure how you would get treated if you were pulled with one hidden down the side of your seat. It's also why I never enter into any sort of road rage when I'm there as you dont know what the crazy fool is packing. Someone cut me up once nearly causing an accident, i had to really react to avoid his accident, he looked like snoop dog so I apologised 🤣
  9. My first one was a reprap. That worked in a fashion but was definitely the project version. I had to heat the bed to get the material to stick and fiddle with every job. There was no support structure so you had to design the part for the limitations of the printer. The software for slicing was really flaky and after a java update on the pc it just died altogether and I lost interest. Based on that bad experience I got an objet 24. It's different in terms of it's a polyjet not an fdm and it prints with heated heads in a heated cabinet. Accuracy is 0.1mm, layer thickness is 28 micron and you just load your stl in and it does everything for you. It can only do 1 material which is expensive and a little limiting. I would be interested to hear how you get on with your machine, I have no experience. There is an exhibition in Frankfurt once a year full of them, very impressive, but a bit of a trek! My advice would be to use this time to pick and learn your cad software first. That can be done for free. You need to be able to design the part on that before you can print it. You can always send it to someone like shapeways for a price if you want to see what it should look like before you buy a printer.
  10. One of the reasons a lot of americans support gun ownership even if they dont have one is the ability to overthrow a government. Goes back to early american history.
  11. I'm going to have a go with one called design spark too. It's free from rs, you can layout a cabinet and create drawings from it. Dont know how biased it will be towards what they sell but could be worth a look.
  12. Just to muscle in on the post... I'm building a machine at work which I'm at the stage of doing a manual for. It needs a wiring diagram in it for CE. Basically it's industrial boards wired to industrial boards. I haven't created any PCBs or anything. So for example there is a robot controller which has safety inputs from a laser scanner, emergency stops, emergency stop outputs to a spindle motor etc. There are IO cards connected to solenoid valves etc etc. So I need something like this; Initially I was going to do an autocad drawing but through it would be a bit tedious moving everything and it becoming disconnected etc. The version of Solidworks I have has the circuits option which I have never used, I thought about learning but then I have a feeling it would expect to to model all the physical elements which would be a pain. Which of the above softwares do you think would be most appropriate to create this?
  13. Just shows they should've listened to the americans and not allowed the chinese 5g hardware, it's clearly how they're spreading the virus! I cant go on social media for all the stupid. People posting saying theyve been to the shops for a few bits and cant believe how many people are there why aren't they at home? Why do they see themselves as different? Then there are all the people who are sharing bbc news stories on the local community pages. If I can find this page I'm pretty sure I can find an international media outlet with tv, radio and internet. Grumpy old man for sure! We are about the magic period from when the people all went out for mothers day so hopefully the number of cases will start to fall away, that and increased nhs capacity will hopefully see restrictions lifted otherwise lots of businesses will go under, lots of people will lose homes, people will die from cancer treatments and operations that were put on hold and so on. Tough balance! Not that the nhs can treat it, just try to minimise and effects of the symptoms and hope that overall it takes enough strain off you so you can survive it. That depends on your general health and how much you've been exposed.
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