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March 2008 news |
You'll be pleased to know that the great Lincolnshire earthquake of a few nights ago left us unscathed - I was actually burning the midnight oil getting some CAD drawings finished when it happened, it felt for all the world like a very heavy goods train passing close by. The house shook for several seconds which was quite exciting (although not enough to wake the dog, who could probably sleep through the second coming). The epicentre was about fifteen miles from here, apparently the shock waves could be felt as far away as Scotland.
You may have noticed a singular lack of updates to the website in the last few weeks (yes, alright, even less than usual…). The last few months have seen a great deal of "behind the scenes" work going on in the workshop, starting with getting the new vertical machining centre (VMC) last October. After a fairly steep learning curve (you may remember the four, inch thick manuals I mentioned last time), this machine is now doing exactly what was expected and has settled down to turning out some really nice quality bits. The new lathe has been an easier machine to master - like my Bridgeport it is more of a "CNC assisted" machine, retaining handwheels (albeit operating "fly by wire" with electronic control of the axes) which allow manual operation if required. The VMC, by comparison, doesn't really have a manual mode - you program it, shut the doors, cross your fingers and watch it get to work. Top spindle speed is 8000rpm, at which speed it sounds like a jet engine running - I had a carbide cutter break at speed a week or two back and you realise why the thing is in a full enclosure. The bang as the bits of cutter hit the cabinet inside made you glad to be on the outside!
Not content with giving myself a lot of new manuals to read for the new machines, I decided just after Christmas to change the CAD system I use for all the workshop drawings. For the last fifteen years I have used AutoCAD - it was the software in use at the company I worked for at the time, when I left I bought my own copy and have had updates at regular intervals since. When I first started with it, I remember it being quite tough to gain a good working proficiency - however, like all things as the years have gone by it has come to feel like a well-worn tool that I feel very comfortable with.
Whilst AutoCAD had served me well, a friend on our industrial estate who runs an precision engineering company is a great fan of SolidWorks, one of the current crop of 3D modelling packages. I had a go with that last Christmas, when I found it just as tough to learn as AutoCAD had been (possibly tougher, as I already knew one CAD system and it was tempting to keep running back to that one). Solid modelling is a very different way of working to drawing third angle projections "in the flat" as it were - rather than simply drawing a view of the part, you have a library of tools that allow you to extrude and carve it from the solid, all on the screen. The great advantage of this is the ability to assemble and animate assemblies, as well as automatic generation of workshop drawings and assembly drawings, complete with exploded views, all of which in the past I have generated manually.
Trying again with new resolve this Christmas, I assessed two or three systems before finally finding one that I felt comfortable with. A months intensive work on it has allowed me to get up to a reasonable speed, with about forty drawings produced for a new project, sufficient to allow the entire chassis to be assembled and animated on-screen. I am impressed by just how much it can do and the potential problems it spots before a piece of metal is cut. The first time I assembled the chassis to check the valve gear, I inadvertently left off one coupling rod. On animating the chassis, the wheels turned together until back dead centre, at which point the rear of the coupling rod dropped while the front continued on up making the wheels go in opposite directions - which is exactly what happens if you take one coupling rod off a real engine and turn one set of wheels!
It think it would probably be stretching the truth to claim complete mastery of the new machines and CAD system just yet, however it is a fact that making things gets a little easier by the day.
As you've probably noticed, I have been posting videos with some of the listings for the last few months. I'm fairly ambivalent about internet video, what you gain in motion you seem to lose in resolution, I find myself peering at rather dark, fuzzy little clips trying to work out what I'm looking at (of course it could simply be my ageing eyesite and nothing to do with the videos at all). However, somebody must be looking at them, as I have had several requests to put up the old clips on the site somewhere. I had been thinking about this, at the same time wondering how I could use a bit more of the original footage I filmed (as you may have spotted, the clips are edited pretty ferociously to conserve space and bandwidth) when number 2 son Jack unwittingly came up with the solution, dragging me over to the laptop for the umpteenth time to see the latest "Revenge of the mega Ork army" type saga on YouTube.
I've put together slightly longer versions of some of the old videos, along with some new ones, which I will add to now and again - some of engines, others of things going on in the workshop. I hope you find them interesting, they are all on our channel at YouTube.
Whilst I've been head down working at one end of the workshop, Dal, our ace builder, has been working at the other. When I first moved to the new units in January 2006, all three were in a fairly run-down state - the previous occupants had gone bankrupt, leaving at rather short notice over a Bank Holiday weekend. After all the legal wrangling had finished, it was months later they were actually put up for sale and nearly a year until I got the keys. During this time the council (the previous owner) had kept them locked up - unfortunately still with a fridge full of food in one room and a large water heater left switched on. We arrived to a very smelly kitchen and 50 gallons of boiling hot water in a cistern (which, whilst the units were empty, had run up an £800 electricity bill).
Over the first three months we refurbished two of the units which are now bright and clean and very nice to work in - you'll be glad to hear that the occupants of both are very happy there. That left only the last unit to refurbish, which has been slow going given that the entire plant and stock of Station Road Steam was installed there the day we moved in and it tends to get in the way of the builders and decorators. At last the place is now starting to look a little more respectable, since Christmas one of the old toilets has been knocked down and a new kitchen put in.
Outside, we had problems last year with the roof, which had a loose sheet at one corner. A local hot-shot roofing contractor duly arrived, nailed it all back together again and sent their bill for £700. Six months later, the sheet was loose again in exactly the same way, so we asked him back. "I'd have never done it that way" quoth the man they sent. "But you did", we said, "when you came six months ago". "That wasn't me though, it was my mate". Ah, to go back to the days of an honest job and collective responsibility. They came back with a quote for £1600 to re-do the job that they'd already had £700 for, in the end Dal came in and did a super job in half a day. Yes, I know we should have got Dal to do it in the first place, but he doesn't like heights - in the end I coerced him into doing it by providing some serious scaffolding, which made the job ten times easier.
Whilst not fixing the roof or installing new kitchens, you may notice from the pictures that Dal has now cleared the land beside the current units - plans are afoot for a brand new, much larger unit.
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3rd March 2008
