Ed Poore

I'm assuming you're running MIG at the moment? If so can you flip over to stick? I can quite happily run my inverter TIG (which will do stick) off a 13A socket and burn through a 3.2mm rod at 125Aish which I've found to be plenty for 20mm plate. I am Ving the plate nice and deep though but that's standard practice on something that thick. Those joints have held up quite happily to a few tonnes on them (the headstock attachments for the JCB's pallet forks). More specific to that inverter but it'll run 200A off a 16A breaker which will handle a 4mm rod but I've never had the need to try it.

You're not going to like this answer (because it means more money spending) but yes I do and it's great. Got the M18 Fuel top-handle version, so nice not having a power lead dragging behind you. My only very minor criticism is that the notch / locking system to keep it vertical (you can twist it over up to 45° to do chamfered cuts) could be a bit more precisely made. It's got a lever that unlocks it and then you can either clamp it at any angle or it's got regular notches for positive stops but there's a wee bit of slop in them so you can get it not cutting perfectly at 90° sometimes. It's just a case of slackening it off and whacking it back hard against the stop and clamping back down. Having said that as a rule if I need a precise cut I'd usually try and use a more appropriate tool, I am being really finicky over it. Worth keeping a supply of blades in stock though - I always keep using the same one and then eventually decide to swap one over and think I should have done that a long time ago. It's also pretty damn good at cutting thinner sheet steel with an appropriate blade and so much cleaner than using a grinder. You can adjust the rake of the blade (forwards / backwards slope) which helps a lot on clearing chips out of the way, you won't get a perfect 90° finish at the end if you finish on that but for the bigger sections it's worth kicking the bottom of the blade out so that it makes it easier to throw the chips out. You can always twist it back to vertical to finish the cut. It has also survived a 4m+ fall onto a 40mm thick slate slab. Was using it for some demolition in the old stable block and stood on the floorboard it was on - which was loose so the jigsaw got ejected upwards about a metre before falling down through the hole in the floor onto the slate floor below. Thought - that's it, nope just broke the blade and it's been fine ever since.

Unless you make a huge hole-saw / fly-cutter then you can have a lightweight aluminium flywheel. I know it's a fair wad of cash but if you pilot drilled it and then cut out the centre with a jigsaw and the same with the corners at least you haven't "wasted" it and I'm sure a man of your talents would find a use for the offcuts. The Milwaukee jigsaw blades I've found to be bloody good at cutting aluminium although not tried on that thickness but perhaps flooding with some coolant would help clear the chips.

To be fair I think the single biggest reason discs are preferable is the lower maintenance overhead as they are self adjusting. Particularly important if you're the one doing the maintenance. One point not brought up is that drums are effectively self applying, once applied they effectively lock themselves on with minimal effort. However that can also mean that you get slightly less feedback from the brakes. Whether that difference is noticeable is dependent on a lot of factors. When I adjusted the Sandringham's drum brakes properly it stopped a damn sight faster and with lower effort (from me) than I ever could in the disc braked Defender. As if to prove a point though it failed the initial MOT on braking effort because I'd forgotten to adjust them it has been so long since I'd had a drum braked vehicle. Adjusted the tester came back from the test drive rubbing his head with a big red spot on it where he'd whacked his head against the windscreen.

Well a decent flywheel and crankshaft for it to sit in would be nicely balanced. Find a Timken bearing for it to sit inside and then use the starter gear to turn the main flywheel. Hell if you wanted I've got a wee 24V geared motor with an encoder on it that would position the starter gear to within <0.1° . Hell I've even got an overkill driver board for it I made yesterday ready to populate for another job. Could etch another circuit board in half an hour if you wanted - although this one is for a 1HP 180VDC 3000RPM motor (but drives my little geared motor quite happily). Can handle up to 380V off a single phase supply. rough A#se my a#se - I seem to recall @Daan commenting I, at least drove, with some grace squeezing the 110 down through those tracks at Seven Sisters . But yes I can be a rough a#se sometimes.

Just need a bigger flywheel and a starter motor gear to suit... Simple shaft for it to sit on and job done

Window at the front and window at the back

True, didn't think of that. Unless it's made into a big cross shape or with a big flat bar that bits into the ali either side... I'm with Ross in that that countersunk looks like it'll pull through fairly easily.

Do you need those ones to be bolts or can you use something like wheel studs which are a press fit into the ali?

I guess your kind of ballscrew is made up of huge steel wheels rather than tiddly ball bearings.

With your capabilities I'd be inclined to knock together a bit of a support structure, even if it's just in wood onto a pallet to hold everything steady. Prior to dumping mine into a donor mockup chassis I had it on a pallet on some cheap heavy duty castors from ebay. Had blocks of wood wedged under relevant bits and big ratchet strap over it. Never fired it up as I hadn't sorted the fuel system but had it cranking over to test the ECU. Looked a lot more stable than @Bowie69s setup there.

You genuinely surprise me that you hadn't heard of them!

That just isn't true...

Do you do building work Stephen? I could really do with you operating at this speed on some of my projects...

LR cheapskate / broke (Underneath the Land Rover)

I could flip the block upside down potentially but that means adjusting my stand. Although I did have a thought of seeing if I could find a cement mixer gearbox to turn it into a gear driven rotary one, would be vastly more useful (possibly). Though by the time I've faffed about doing that I could have just simply spent the time on my knees working on it as is. I built the stand so that I should hopefully have enough space to work on it in this orientation - I'll probably regret that when I come to putting the crank back in and so on but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. Worst case I'll just put a sheet of wood onto my surface table / work bench and just put it upside down on that or on the floor on a pallet and built it up that way.

Perhaps it's not obvious but this isn't a Land Rover engine (Perkins 1004.4 out of my JCB 2CX), the bare block alone weighs the same as a fully dressed Tdi... Our chest freezer is down at -24°C so that should be cold enough for them overnight. It's possible to fit it inside my press (capable of taking something 5ft tall inside and it is just wide enough) but moving around the block is a PITA especially as I'll have to make another frame for it to sit on inside the press. What I plan on doing is tacking a couple of bars to the 30mm plate and that way it can be placed underneath the block on the stand and the same puller that was used to pull it out will be used to pull it in. Another possibility is to weld the box and plates together and drill the base plate (got another large piece of 20mm scrap somewhere, might have some 40mm that's big enough) so that I can clamp it to the head. That's what the special Perkins tool does and basically the puller gets reversed into a pusher. I think I cut the box tall enough to accommodate that setup, if not I've still got 5ft left of this "offcut" from gate-posts or there's always another 15m of it up in the vegetable garden.

Have you seen the size of the boats that he tows around for work?! It'll be welcome for the break.

Was a flex plate and torque converter.

Maybe but then using a fine thread blah blah blah would have helped too. As it was this puller cost me £50 for two bits of bar (used one so far), £15 for the bearing and £4 for the nuts. They happened to all be in stock in the local tractor factors and (hopefully) it's a one off. To date this has saved me about £500 for getting a local engine over haulers / machine shop to extract them so I'm happy with the outcome. It wasn't about building a perfect puller.

Useful to know thanks. To be honest I hadn't considered anything else, it was sprayed on before and during the operation. The main benefit of duck oil is it's a penetrating fluid so gets into all the little nooks and crannies, it's amazing what it will flow into and I've usually found it to be super slippery and helps greatly when it does work it's way in. I guess in this scenario it probably got squeezed out of the relevant bits. Lithium grease may well have worked better if I'd applied it. I dismissed it largely because I didn't want to get it everywhere (the nature of the beast meant the whole setup has to be completely stripped down for assembly into the next liner). To be honest I just started on the first one gently to make sure everything was lined up, cranked it up a bit given I was expecting resistance and then a few second later there was a crack as the seal broke so I cranked it a bit more and it came fairly easily. Removed it to investigate and yup the liner was sliding out. It was really only the last liner that put up a bit of a fight and some of that may have been a slight misalignment in everything as the box section had shifted slightly in the bandsaw as the cut progressed. I may see if I can power up my big mill to machine it flat before pulling the new ones. Although freezing them before hand (from someone who's done it before) means they slide in fairly easily.

Every four turns or so it was getting liberally doused in duck oil. Didn't think of EP90 but duck oil penetrates through tiny gaps and even that wasn't flowing as readily as it normally does through the gap between the thread and the nut. From prior experience duck oil lubricates stuff beautifully as that's what it was designed for. WD40, for example, just evaporates off. Also bear in mind this was just cheap M30 coarse threaded bar which on smaller stuff (M20 for example) I've managed to strip the thread with a normal spanner so doesn't take much to chew it up.

I spoke too soon, #4 was a person I&#39;m not that keen on. Kept fighting for the first half and then realised that the threaded bar had galled up with the zinc plating being stripped off from it so the nut jammed. Cut the bar off and used the seized nut at the bottom of the puller and had just enough to finish the job. Came out easily enough after that and a bit of a rejiggle to keep things nice and straight. I was astonished at how warm the bar got pulling the liners from the forces involved in pulling them out. Shiny bit of steel is the stepped pulled a friend machined up for me.

This mornings project was making a fnerkin big puller, M30 threaded bar, 30mm plate offcut, one bearing a load of nuts and a lump of steel a friend turned down to suit the liners. This afternoon's project has been a workout... Steel box to jam the engine stand against 1.5 tonnes of work bench, aluminium scaffold tube clamped to the stairs sleeving a big adjustable on one of two lock nuts on the bar to stop it rotating and then a 24" pipe wrench on the nut to pull the thread through. The first three liners weren't actually too bad and didn't necessitate all of this faffery but the last liner (#1 piston) has finally just popped so I'm having a cold one before getting dizzy again walking around it lots of circles cranking it out. I think it's about 75 turns given its 3.5mm thread pitch and there's about 10" of liner to pull out.

Can you make up a jig (even timber) to hold the engine and gearbox in the right locations then you can tweak and align things before tacking them all in place.