Home Shop Wiki

[Black_Moons]

We have a ton of tips and tricks that we type out on a day to day basis on verious subjects, but never really record down as the search function on this forum is the pitts, and nothing is really orginized well.

Any chance of the hosts of this forum maybe opening a wiki for us to expairment with? Adding some of the common questions/awnsers to it, like:

What oil/grease do I want for:
Lathe headstocks, gearboxes, ways, cosmetic exposed metal surfaces (Like the body of a chuck)

'My lathe is turning a taper! my headstock must be misaligned!'

'3 Phase motors Verus 1 Phase, VFD's are your friend, Chinese start/run capacitors are not'

'How do I fix a chuck'
etc.
Most of these could just be roughly copy/pasted from our posts here and touched up as needed.

[uncle pete]

Black moons,
I'd agree, In fact I mentioned this in one of my posts a few days ago and got no response. I think it would be an excellent area for anyone having questions about items that are asked about a lot. While I do agree about the point of too many seperate forums, An area for answers to comman questions should be a no brainer IMO. It should be titled as "Ya can't break the laws of physics" Because far too many new guy's try to do it all the time.

Pete

[Black_Moons]

Yea thats why I said more of a wiki then a forum, where we could just post awnsers in a catagorised fasond, and edit out our typical 5 page rambleing about if xyz can really mill microns or not.

[uncle pete]

I dunno about your xyz but mine will do sub microns. :-)

I think we need two people like Evan and John Stevenson to police an area like that so the crap stays out and the good stays in. Maybe? there is a board software issue with doing this. George Bulless should give his thoughts about it.

Pete

[Black_Moons]

Nah, we'll battle it out, mono a mono here in the forums, and whoever is left standing when the page count hits 100 is declared correct, just as we have allways done, and gets added to the wiki.
J/k, But really.. come on fokes

[Mcgyver]

you are proposing the current free for all (which i largely like) to more a traditional publishing approach where at the end there's a product.

nice, but who's going to take on the role of editor, arbitrator, fact checker etc. Read through these posts here, you've got guys with almost zero experience dispensing advise with the same authority as the 30 year veteran....someone with enough knowledge would have to constantly pick who was correct and censor others.

None of this comes without a lot of politics or new problems. Say the final arbitrator is some poser who doesn't know much but volunteered for the thankless job? QC would only be there if the most knowledgeable were committed to run it, and that sounds like a messy full time job...who would take it?

Then there's granularity. A (partial) reason a post goes on for 5 pages is that most subjects can be covered in increasing levels of detail. Take a look at technical or medical publishing to see just how volumes can be written on extremely narrow fields. as happens, you're going to have un-sophisticates who view increasing detail as a discussion of angels dancing on pin heads and others who are thankful for the detail insight of domain experts - good luck ruling what level's right for a Wiki.

I think we have close to what you want, just needs one to apply search and filtering

[oldtiffie]

I agree with McGyver.

That is one huge and thankless task.

It almost invites a tree structure that emulates the Dewey classification system in a library.

It is almost like a large organisations file and catalogue systems - and I've seen them both "revised"/"re-built" and started from scratch. The task and rules are a real PITA.

I like the "General" forum as it is. For all practical purposes the "other" (than "General") forums pretty well don't exist and get relatively little use by me anyway - but they do have an important place and function never-the-less.

I get over most problems by my own structured "book-mark"/"favourites" menu structure. I can find most stuff - both threads and posts as well as "links" to all/other "stuff".

Providing that its not over-done, a request for a link will soon have some one here posting it for you.

Using any thread title and assuming that that is all that is covered in that thread is being a bit optimistic at best.

I suspect that a lot of requests for links etc. are due to people "losing" their "bookmark"/"favourite" files and having to re-build them. It would help if they saved those files as "back-ups" for "restoration" as and if required. Mine are saved weekly.

Unless there are compelling reasons other-wise, I 'd go for leaving things as they are as I'm used to it and it does - or seems to do - the job well enough "as is".

[John Stevenson]

I dunno about your xyz but mine will do sub microns. :-)

I think we need two people like Evan and John Stevenson to police an area like that so the crap stays out and the good stays in.
Pete

Count me out.

Since I discovered Evan on this forum I have thrown all my text books and encyclopaedia's away as not being needed.

[Evan]

I can host it. I'll make John the moderator if he likes.

[lazlo]

Nah, we'll battle it out, mono a mono here in the forums, and whoever is left standing when the page count hits 100 is declared correct

Wow, that's an amazingly profound synopsis of this site

Although, I would add that most people don't read those threads after the 3rd page. So no one is declared correct, but some participants are bound and determined to have the last post, in the misguided belief that they'll be perceived as correct.