integerspin

If you don't want to spend a lot on a tig and it's just for DC get a torch and a DC stick welder. I put together a Murex Tradesarc and a 60 quid torch. Worked really well, if it hadn't been nicked from a mates garage I would probably never have shelled out on an AC/DC tig.

If I need a highlighted mark I clean the metal with brake cleaner and use a Sharpie. I tied pound shop markers, they aren't very permanent and don't last long. I have an Eclipse Automatic Center punch, it stays sharp pretty well.

Got to make a thrust washer for a gearbox. The replacement parts, apart from being to thin, are made of case hardened cheese. The original was described as 3% nickel case hardening steel, so I guess EN36 will be great. Just need a few inches.

Have you looked on freecycle?

Best grinder I have had was a Flex, lasted a lot longer[in use] than any other grinder I have had without question. But you pay for it, they cost several times what a Bosch cost. I had a couple of Bosch grinders, one[not used as the Flex] lasted almost 20 years! The Flex lasted as long but got used a lot more.

I use a schutz gun, cut the nozzle down it will spray much better. I made a pressur epot, it will spray a light wet coat out the end of a 5m long 6mm nylon tube. paint the waxoyl can black and stick it in the sun.

I did my first adapter before I had a milling machine and DRO and got the adapter pretty concentric. I stuck the block on a offcut of granite, leveled the sump rail as best I could, the granite looked looked pretty flat. I measured the heights off all the bolts and dowels best I could with a Vernier. Then I measured between all the holes, from there I was able to lay the lot out on the back of an old road sign. Road signs are a good source of 2mm aluminium;-) I bolted the aluminium to the block, I took the dowels out and it bolted on fine. I could see the dowel holes needed a bit of correction, which I did. I used this plate to mark out the casting for drilling. The adapter was something like 6 thou out of center, If it had been more I would have removed the dowels and reamed larger dowel holes with the two parts assembled concenticly or resorted to offset dowels. Offset dowels work fine for correcting crank to mainshaft alignment, you can buy them for correcting crank to mainshaft alignment. When I started making more adapters I got the block drawings off Perkins, you could try contacting the factory and asking for block external drawings?

I cut the old metal away, then cut a patch slightly smaller and seam weld it in. If I could be bothered to scurf the weld away you wouldn't be able to see it.

what sort of material? If your after paper look on the RS site, I think post is free, your looking for Statite or similar. If you want a thicker material that doesn't ever seem to leak, look at something like Klinger C4400, costs a lot though. Look up gasket makers and see if theres one near you, I had several near me and they chuck away loads of gasket material. I bought a few metres of statite from one place and it cost 30p a meter! but all the Econsto and Klinger stuff I got just came from their scrap.

I was given a 2-1/2 litre tin, brush painted all the suspension of a RaRo, looked great and seems to hold up OK. The lid of the tin was a bit damaged when I was given the tin and the paint got real thick, below the skin, so I thinned it with gunwash and tried spraying it, goes on nice and seems pretty good.

I tried alum, think it came from Tesco's, I was told about this years ago by an old bloke who used to cast his own heads and stuff before the war. I never tried it till I needed to remove a roll tap from an engine adapter casting[i didn't drill a hole deep enough], think where I went wrong was not supplying enough heat, I was warming it with a blow torch every now and again. After a few hours and no visible difference I used acid. Like the bloke said, anodising is a good way of removeing ferrous parts from ali. If you send soemthing for anodising, with Helicoils in[how do I know this?], it comes back minus the Helicoils. So battery acid and a battery are needed. I bolted some aluminium tubing to the part, with a gasket between them and filled the tube with acid, I connected the battery charger to a bit of ali welding rod and clamped that to something so it was almost touching the tap. It took about a week to burn the roll tap out, but the castings and heat treatment were something like £90 plus the time machining, so was well worth while; when the tap was burned out the thread was still perfect. Only sign it had been done was the little circle of anodising. I will try just hydrocholic acid next time, if there is ever a next time. I have a vintage gearbox someone has tried drilling bolts out of, and made a major mess off, if I have any alum left I will give it a proper try and take some pics. If you do the acid thing do it well away from stuff that rusts, I had acid condensation all over the filing cabinet the casting was on top of while the tap was being eaten away. I ended up throwing the cabinet away, it rusted like hell.

Do they have a spark gap like tigs?

I use a die grinder a lot, seems a waste running a compressor just for a little grinding so I bought a 20quid elcheapistani dremel copy. Lasted 5mins? well yes but not an awfull lot longer, the replacement lasted almost a year as I never used it, lent it to my brother when he asked to borrow my Dremel and he killed it. I bought a Dremel, Robert Dyas had them on special offer at £20, I didn't bother with Dremel accessories. I bought a collet set for it, there are about 5 or 6 sizes. I buy carbide 3mm burrs from drill service/ebay. It has worked great since 2004. I was given a Dremel accessory kit by someone who's Dremel died when he used it continously for a few days. Those little cutting disks are fantastic they just wizz through steel, but the sligtest wiggle while it's in contact with something and they break. The nylon brushes in the kit were a joke, not tried the felt wheels. It doesn't replace a die grinder but does a lot of the little jobs pretty good.

I will probably go down the smoothstepper route, I was going to try the CNCbrain, there is one functioning in the wild in Horsham, but they seem a bad bet. I have thought about the dynomotion Kflop, but it's around $500. Any problems with the smoothstepper. I will be using granite devices drives, they seem to be pretty good. Annoying thing is I arranged a good price in sept 2008 and he wouldn't take my money as the new drives wouldn't be shipped for a week or so and the the pound fell from 1.55euro to 1.05! So I have been putting off buying the drives, not all bad though as they will be selling a motion control that uses an RS485 adapter soon, I think. A real killer is the 22% Finish VAT. Phase converters: These can be as simple as an old three phase motor spin started and mains whacked across two phases, you can run a motor from this. Use a piece of string wrapped around the shaft/pulley to get it spinning and switch the power to it when it's spinning. If the motor was wired to another, thru a switch, you can switch the motor on once the first has accelerated up to speed. The next step on from that is to use a motor to spin the generator motor up to speed, I have seen pics of 50hp motors that were running a couple of VMC's. Next. Add some capacitors between two of the phases of a three phase motor and wire the other two, switch it on and away it goes. Now you can either use that for whatever it is, drill, lubrication pump etc or call it a rotary converter and wire stuff up to it. I say lubrication pump as I have a Showa oil pump on my mill, with a tiny little three phase motor on it. I looked at it, looked in the junk[garage] and came up with a capacitor from a microwave oven. I wacked the capacitor on the motor and switched it on . It works great. If you add a few more bit's to your rotary converter it becomes a press button and you have 3phase device. Add a transformer so you have ~420 V and you can just plug stuff in as it came and it all works. My converter has a 7.5kva continous transformer and it cost less than £200 to build, that's all new componets including a custom wound transformer. I switch it on and everything works. It doesn't mind you whacking the mill or lathe in reverse when tapping. If you want to run loads of stuff rotarys are pretty good, not that I would say no to an inverter on everything. How big is it I may be interested, what inverter is it. I can run them from my rotary converter.

That's the sort of service I used to get and was expecting, hence I pulled all the brake system off ready to put the new stuff on. As it's my only car that wasn't the wisest move;-)

Sounds similar to my motor setup. A single pulse mag pickup on the spindle and a resolver in the motor. The motor resolver was, I imagine, used by the inverter for vector control and the single pulse for spindle orientation for the tool changer. Seems several people with mach and lathes are threading with just the one pulse per rev spindle setups, I was going to fit an encoder to my spindle. How many pulses per rev for your servos are you going for? Are your amps analog or digital? I got rid of all my original electronics, inverter the size of a fridge, amps the size of a large packet of cornflakes. Everything had super large heatsinks, which I think went towards the 15KVA rating. The inverter and the serovpacks had braking resistors. My inverter runs a small motor great, my coolant pump[motor ~6inch diam by height], responds pretty good though it gets a bit noisy over 200 hz;-) Checked all the V/f settings, the motor has V, I, Hz and RPM for 1500 rpm and 6000rpm on the plate, infact it gives them for 3.7kw and 5.5kw[30minutes]. With the max current set as 3.7kw rating it oL2[inverter overload] errors before it can get near 50hz. That max current is above the inverters rating, motor 50Hz 25 A 3.7w inverter rated 19A.

I ordered some brake parts monday, the monday before last. I wondered where they were had a look on the paddocks site and it seems they ain't been dispatched yet!

That sounds reasonable, I set a fence 17mm to the side of the cut got to have a fence can't anything with the big flat tip.

Think I should have asked about inverters here, rather than on a cnc forum;-) I bought a few inverters, a pair of Moeller cos they were cheap enough to **** about with[the inverters were less than the post!], one is single phase and the other is three phase input. The single phase one I plugged in and checked with a coolant pump, seems to work but I have a loooong document to read, once I have decided what to use it on. I also bought a 4kw omron 3MV3 inverter to run the spindle on my mill. I connected it up, turned it on and it did roughly what it says in the 356 page document, flashing the run light etc. I was kneeling down next to the mill reading the pdf on my gobook. well I gave up after getting the spindle to turn at around 33 rpm, definetly not as high as 45rpm. I got a oL2 error after a minute or so. I had reset it to run V/f and reset the max current to the motors plate setting for 52Hz, it gives the voltage, rpm, Hz and current for 1500 rpm and 4000 rpm. At this point I went in and printed the pdf[yes 356 pages] after doing that I had to find a folder[seems a pity to loose pages, or get them all mixed up] and the only folder I could find had 4 holes, so I had to punch loads of holes. yes I am putting off letting the smoke out? Is there a most basic set of parameters you could set an inverter up to test, far as I can see I really need to check/reset all the relevant ones. I was hoping to verify the inverter worked properly, not yet planned how it's going to be switched. I have overrides on the pendant for the spindle so will wire them just so I can go and make it spin and marvel at a spinning spindle.

Try calling john davies welding in liverpool. The website died a year or so ago, but a scouser tells me the shop is still there. I used to buy my traffimet tips and stuff from them.

If you want 2 inch aluminium tube with beaded ends let me know, I bought a length when I did my intercooler. I also have a metre of black silicon tube.

I had never seen this done but I looked at beadblasting[well looking for wet bead blasting] on and one vid was someone putting a truck tyre on the bead with an old gas cylinder of air, looked a good way of doing it.

I will look into that margate place, maybe if a few people round here wanted to go for it we could get several cylinder at the same time and make it more reasonable. Someone in reigate used to flog air products stuff, they guaranteed they would save me money on the BOC prices. However their price list didn't give prices that you could easily equate to BOCs and they woudln't give me straight answers to questions, but when you sat and worked it all out it wasn't going to be any cheaper. There is a section on mig welding forum on shielding gases, There are some BOC alternatives.

I have made a few, basically you need as much rigidity as you can get. My present 3 foot width one has a clamp leaf made from something like 8inch x 10mm steel. It puts a nice bend in 1.2mm but you need to increase the radius for 16swg and 12swg needs a huge radius. You can avoid having the rigidity if you could copy the hinges and magnets on the aussie magnetic clamp bender;-) It has hinges evenly spaced out along the beam and the clamp is full length, so you can bend with a bit of flat stock as the clamp!

I don't have the link but I saw a video from Jay Lenos Garage about his Dimension printer and a cheap 3D scanner, a bloke who has five 8 Litre Bentleys has a different idea of cheap to most people! among the things show was a scanned and printed adjustable spanner, quite amazing. The spanner, fully working, was printed in one hit already assembled!