Table of contents for January 2024 in Model Engineer & Workshop

If it Looks Right, is it Right? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder is a cliché, but is that true? Or are there deeper aesthetic rules that can mean elegant design is also good engineering? There’s no argument that many boats, planes, trains and automobiles combine elegance with efficiency, but to what extent should we allow our aesthetics to influence the things we design and make in our own workshops. There are three ways I look at this in my own projects. The first is economy of material; when a load bearing part is designed for industry calculations will be done to ensure that a shaft, beam bracket or whatever is strong enough for its purpose without being over engineered. In the workshop we generally rely on a…

The small sensitive drilling attachment seen in photo 1 was recently made to the drawings originally published in Model Engineer at the close of the Roaring Twenties by one Herbert Dyer, fig. 1. H. Dyer, as he signed himself, was a prolific contributor to the magazine, publishing more than fifty articles from 1923 to 1962. So, I assumed he knew his stuff and set out to build his sensitive driller using as much as possible the simple methods he describes in his article of August 15, 1929. A drill press was in those days an unobtainable luxury and a milling machine unthinkable for the home workshop, so all was done in the lathe and the bench vice. H. Dyer’s instructions were easy to follow, being written in a breezy conversational…

Coming from a hobby woodworking and turning (I’m still doing these) background but being new to model engineering and a total novice I have found that there are many things that I have had to either buy or make(lf they are simple). One of those being a small machinist’s jack, photo 1, which I found I needed to support a thin rod to drill a cross hole. I set to and made one, which being of a simple design would not take me long. Being new, my stock of raw material is still quite small, I am sure that will grow over time. I found some cold rolled round bar of 1 3/8” diameter which was a nice size to make a small jack and also big enough that it…

Cutting To Size - nearly! Once I had all six of them glued-up and dried it was back to the tablesaw. I have an extrusion which clamps onto the rip fence on my saw which is around 15mm high so I could use this as a guide for the top edge of the sheet which was assembled with the strips on it and subsequently trimmed flush. It enabled me to make a parallel cut along the bottom edge through each complete step to create a square and clean edge. Thus, if the second glued on sheet had projected over the edge of the first one, it did not affect the straightness of the cut which sliced through the entire step. I used a fine-toothed blade to give a clean and…

When I started my CNC project a typical hobby installation was based on Mach3 or EMC2 (now called LinuxCNC) software and a parallel port on which various breakout boards were attached. Now, some ten years later, the hobby CNC landscape has changed quite a bit, though I expect those two programs still are the major players, but you also might want to check out ‘grbl’. Today parallel ports have become rare, so USB based parallel port replicators have surfaced. Also a few newer generation boards and some newer software offerings are now visible in the radar and some of the new ones have already faded away. Cheap and tempting Chinese hardware on eBay is also shaking things around. EazyCNC is not a commercial product, nor is it fully open source…

Readers! We want to hear from you! Drop us a line sharing your advice, questions or opinions. Why not send us a picture of your latest workshop creation, or that strange tool you found in a boot sale? Email your contributions to meweditor@mortons.co.uk. Mystery Tool 1 Hi Neil, I’m sure this is not the answer you are looking for but I use a similar clamp to hold a strip of Velcro backed sandpaper for light sanding. The sandpaper strip is folded over a piece of aluminium and the clamp holds everything together. I never did find out what it is really used for so I’m very interested in the answer. Super magazine. Keep up the good work. Mervyn Karwot, Glasgow Mystery Tool 2 Hello Neil, the mystery item photos 24…

As SECURITY DEVICES, means of making adjustment or of exerting force. cotters and wedges find innumerable applications in mechanisms and techniques. Cotters are mainly used tor securing arms or cranks to spindles, or pins into bosses, and function on the wedge principle through tightening of a nut. There are two types-the flat-sided or cycle type, A, and the grooved type, B. For the flat-sided cotter the spindle has a flat with which the cotter engages, providing a firm hold and positive location. For the grooved cotter the spindle or pin is uniformly circular: ana although the cotter grips and holds firmly for the purposes for which it is used, its action is less powerful than the other and it does not positively locate. These differences are important, not only technically,…

A restoration job done some time ago on the screwcutting gearbox for an old lathe led to a big session of gear cutting. During this work I found out the hard way just how easy it is to place the indexing peg into the wrong hole of the disc on a dividing head, especially when the viewing conditions are less than ideal. Especially frustrating is that the error may not be discovered until the last tooth is being cut. In two articles published in MEW, refs 1 and 2, I described the restoration of an original Norton screwcutting gearbox that was fitted to a 1902 US made Hendey lathe. The gearbox was severely damaged and unusable. All the gears, a total of fourteen, needed replacement, with tooth counts that ranged…

Readers’ Tips TIP OF THE MONTH WINNER! This month’s winner is James Spray, whose tip arrived some time before possession of nitrous oxide without a legitimate use became illegal. We had better add two disclaimers: First it is essential to make sure any cannister is fully depressurised before cutting into it - a good way to do this is to fill it with water. Secondly, visit www.homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2023/10/18/media-fact-sheet-nitrous-oxide-ban/ for details of the law! I would humbly proffer my idea for utilising the Nitrous Oxide cylinders used/misused and often discarded. These thickwalled cylinders make robust crucibles for home casting. I unscrew the brass valve after checking the cylinder is empty then cut the top off the empty cylinder. A second cut creates a 1/2” deep ring that is tack welded to the…

A dam for coolant (and more…) Usually the coolant crawls slowly along the vice until seeping down out from the machine, and preferably on your feet! A piece of double sided tape (the thick type with a foam center layer) makes a very efficient dam to force the coolant back to the machine table. Don’t remove the outside layer, unless there are many flies in your workshop in which case this will make a very efficient fly catcher too as you can see in photo 1. Hard pads for the travelling steady I use small square carbide tips stuck on mild steel with epoxy glue, photo 2, to get hard travelling steady pads. This was made after a great scare when screw cutting, the carriage was still moving while the…