Table of contents for September 2025 in Model Engineer & Workshop

I use suds, soluble cutting oil, on both my Myford 7 and my Tom Senior Mill. My workshop is basically a concrete sectional garage but with a personel door not a garage door. I have fitted an insulated roof, ref. 1-, and double-glazed draught proofed windows but the walls are plain concrete. The consequence of this is that periodically we get a bad winter, and the suds separate out into oil and water that do not want to remix. They have to be changed. The mill, due to its elevated large base area, seems to be the worst affected and suffered last winter: time for a suds change. This is a straight-forward job done many times before. This time things did not go to plan and then one thing led…

A long description and a longer article for a job! Firstly the ‘why and how’, I have owned a ½” OSC ‘Coventry’ Die Head for quite a few years. This tool is a very handy one for producing short runs of external threading with consistent length of thread. The series in Model Engineer by David Earnshaw gives an excellent explanation of these tools and an idea of what can be produced using one. ME. 4657, 4659, 4611 (you can download these from the Model Engineer forum at https://tinyurl.com/yryx6msh or use the QRcode). For those who have not come into contact with these die heads, I will digress for a while. They come in several sizes – smallest is ¼” size and would fit in your pocket, the largest (Heavy Industrial)…

BOILER FITTINGS The boiler fittings are next. When testing the boiler it is necessary to plug all the various holes. Most of the bushes use common thread sizes so plugs for those can be made from some hexagon bar, or it may be possible to borrow some, and when the test is complete they can be put away/ returned for future use. Remember to leave one bush (I used the safety valve bush) to connect to the test kit. Do check sizes for compatibility; most clubs have an assortment of adaptors for connecting boilers and it would be a waste to make a solid plug for that hole. The odd ones are the inner dome, the regulator bush, the safety valve bush and the mounting (expansion) brackets, I connected the…

The Colchester Chipmaster has a large following amongst home workshop enthusiasts and others. It is strongly built, powerful (with a 3 horsepower motor) and compact. When in production, it was an expensive machine supplied with few standard attachments, so second hand machines seldom come with a fixed steady. In recent years fixed steadies for small industrial lathes have become astonishingly expensive – certainly when compared with their “as new” prices. For example, a 1972 Colchester price list shows a new Chipmaster costing £910 while the fixed steady sold for £9 i.e. about 1% of the lathe itself. Now a fixed steady – for a hopeful seller – sells for 10% to 20% or even more of a used Chipmaster in reasonable condition. My own ex industrial lathe came without a…

This year's competition, hosted by Fareham and District Society of Model Engineers, was held at their excellent site in Titchfield, Hampshire. The elevated track has a run of 1,582 feet with two particularly challenging gradient of around 1:100 and 1:70, which took their toll on the entrants. Out of twenty-eighteen competitors, there were sixteen finishers and twelve retirements (not all retirements are shown in the table)-See page 24. On the final day there was some unexpected drama when Kevan Ayling's recently completed Vortigern, a model ofa proposed BR 2-8-2 locomotive, had been running well, until on his final lap it derailed coming over the bridge and came right off the track, landing on its side. Fortunately there were no injuries and the prompt reaction of the marshals ensured it was…

Like most things, it seemed like a good idea at the time - ship my 1/5 scale German Tiger tank to display at the 2013 Model Engineer Exhibition - how easy could it be! I originally chose to make the Tiger over the British Churchill, American Sherman and Russian T34 for one simple reason; it was entirely constructed of flat plate which meant it was a simple job to design on Solid Works and cut the panels on our CNC laser cutter at work. Give me a year and it would be done – yeah right. That was back in 2003. It ended up taking ten years to design and build the Tiger including the 150cc V12 engine, photo 1, an eight-speed gearbox, photo 2 and a sixteen-gear transmission, photo…

To finish off the low-pressure cylinder we need the valve chest, valve and the bits that drive the valve, fig. 48. After finishing the cylinder, we also have to work out how to fit it to the assembled engine. The steam chest casting was in gunmetal and this machined very nicely but there wasn't enough metal to finish the part to drawing dimensions without leaving some surfaces rough. Fortunately, the two surfaces that have to seal against steam pressure cleaned up properly, but compromises had to be made on both the outside and the inside of the other faces. With the four long faces milled smooth, the part was juggled into the four-jaw chuck to turn the end face and the gland boss, photo 314. Photograph 315 shows the O-ring…

Many years ago, when I obtained my second hand Myford S7 lathe, a Far Eastern milling machine came with it. This was one of the early Economy round column mill/drill machines – the sort that was reputed to still have core sand in the column (mine didn't but there was fair amount of it in the base casting! For general milling work this was immeasurably better than milling in the lathe but there were some issues with usage. The quill was inclined to be wobbly, the quill down-feed had no index and, of course, registration was lost if the head needed to be moved to change tooling. I resolved to do better and saved up for something new. Having seen the Centec machines in the machine shop for our laboratory,…

In a series of articles, published in Model Engineer in 2019, on the subject of my 5-inch gauge LNER locomotive stud, I mentioned, in passing, an enthusiasm for the East African Railways (EAR). This had derived from a very enjoyable period of working in Kenya during 1976/77 at a time when steam was still the predominant motive power on what was then a well maintained and busy metre gauge network. At that time there were three classes, designated 55, 59 and 60, of 4-8-2+2-8-4 Garratt locomotives, two classes, 30 and 31, of 2-8-4, one class, 29, of 2-8-2, one class, 24, of 4-8-0 and one class, 13, of 4-8-2T locomotives, all to be seen in varying degrees of intensive service on the main line and in the yards between Mombasa…

Continued from Model Engineer & Workshop issue 4767 To continue with the cylinders etc. we will start this time with the cylinder end covers, figs 66 and 67 and photo 163. This photo shows Geoff reaming the end cover for the piston rod. These are not quite the same as the end covers for our 76000 but I am sure you will get the idea. You will get a better picture later as I have a photo that shows my 4MT being assembled with the slide bars similar to the 76000 which has similar valve gear to the 4MT; identical, in fact, to my 4MT. Photograph 164 shows Geoff's set up for drilling a hole for the tube from the lubricator. If you are fitting atomisers, however, you can omit…

Photograph 1 shows the lifting table. The left-hand ends of the two H-frames have fixed pivots secured to the upper (carrying the loco track) and lower (with casters) frames. The right-hand ends have rod extensions that slide in slots milled into the box section of the upper rectangular horizontal chassis support frame and lower rectangular caster chassis. The H-frames have a pin mid-way on their length, passing through the four pieces of box, allowing them to ‘scissor’. If you look carefully, a piece of box section will be seen welded horizontally across the two left upper legs of the H-frame, attached to the loco deck. Between this and a corresponding box section welded across the caster chassis (slightly to the left of centre) is attached a car scissor jack; not…