Treasures

 I'm now the proud owner of a lathe, and various boxes of junk/treasure that goes with it. It belonged to the father of a good friend of mine. Sadly he died between agreeing to sell it and completing the deal. Even worse the roof of his workshop had failed and everything was rusty/mouldy/mildewed (I did get a steep discount).

The lathe itself is from Warco, so it will have been a Taiwanese import, but fettled in and delivered from the home counties. It's small. 9 inch swing and 20 inch between centres. 3/4hp motor. You need to put it on a bench and it only weighs about 100kg. It is sadly rusty and in need of quite a lot of restoration. With the original owner being dead, it's quite hard to know what's what. There are boxes of tools and accessories, a lot of them damaged, and it's hard to identify all of them.

I think I've mentioned "yak shaving" before. You can't do job A until you've done job B. You can't do job B until you've done job C. Eventually you need to have shaved a yak before you can finish what you started. I want to use the lathe to make part of a catch tank. I need to use the 4 jaw chuck to grab the stock because it's too big for the 3 jaw. I need to use the dial indicator to centre the stock in the 4 jaw. I found dial indicator, it's clearly ancient and has been repaired many times over the years. It has got wet and seized but I managed to free it up. The "glass" seems to be homemade from acrylic and it has gone yellow and cloudy so that you can't actually see the needle. I found myself polishing a dodgy bit of acrylic as a necessary step in cutting some 4 inch aluminium tube. I wouldn't have been surprised if the polishing had had to be done with freshly shaved yak hair.

Richard "Mitutoyo" B

D.I.Y.

 As I have previously mentioned my car has old fashioned wheel bearings with conical races and tapered rollers – and a big castellated nut with a split pin.

I was able to drift out the old races but try as I might I couldn't find a way to press in the new ones. I thought I could use my hub puller in reverse, but there wasn't enough room to fit any kind of tool under it. I thought I could use my vice but it wasn't big enough. I thought I could use the stub axle and the hub nut but it wasn't long enough. I eventually gave up and took the hubs and the new bearings to my favourite garage.

When I picked them up they refused to take any money. Instead I got quite an insulting lecture about how easy a job it was and that I could definitely have done it at home without bothering them. The races weren't a tight fit - "I could almost have pushed them in with my thumb" and I had the old races to use as a drift. Apparently they went all the way home with a couple of taps from a hammer.

Richard "But at What Cost?" B

Perfect Pitch

 My car has an old fashioned front axle with double wishbones and uprights with a stub axle. The hub is supported on the stub by tapered needle roller bearings which need to be repacked with grease every 4 years. How quaint!

I have played with some very skilled musicians over the years, but I now consider that none of them had as good an ear as the mechanic who did my MOT this year. He gave me "noisy wheel bearing offside front" as an advisory. When I took the bearings apart to grease them one of the bars on the cage that holds the rollers in place had broken off and probably been crushed in the bearing. The outer race was slightly discoloured but I saw no other damage. As far as I was concerned it ran smoothly and didn’t make excessive noise.

Richard "He's the Alan Jeffery of Chasses" B