What did you do today?

[Baz]

Recovered some nylon string, some 3/16 square rod, and a handful of slats from the venetian blinds. Thanks for the ideas for them.

[RB211]

Exchanged my defective Stihl chainsaw for the next model up, the Farmboss. 50cc 20". Guess all the oak I was cutting was too much for it. Clutch got so hot it melted the chain tensioner mechanism. And no, the chain brake wasn't engaged...

[RB211]

[Cenedd]

Exchanged my defective Stihl chainsaw for the next model up, the Farmboss. 50cc 20". Guess all the oak I was cutting was too much for it. Clutch got so hot it melted the chain tensioner mechanism. And no, the chain brake wasn't engaged...

Ahh, nobody intended you to do so much real work with it when they designed it!

Me, I'm feeling twice my age and groaning when I move. Nobody designed me for a few days of real work either! That's the trouble with remote working when it was mostly desk-based in the first place. I've been playing Tetris with the furniture (that's too big to get out of the room and either already glued or too IKEA'y to survive dismantle-reassemble) in my son's room so that I could get the carpet back far enough to take up the floorboards (which, of course, ran the opposite way to convenient) so that I could move the dining room light fitting and also ceiling-mount a wifi point.
While I have some of the carpet in the hall up (only at the door-joints) I'm going to attack the squeaky floorboards that have been driving me slowly (more) nuts for the last year. A box of 200 screws should be enough for two boards, right?!

[AntonLargiader]

The most notable achievement today was playing "find that landmark" while watching a Hallmark movie....

A few years back I got addicted to GeoGuessr. It's a ton of fun. Haven't touched it in a few years and it's probably a bad thing that I saw your post!

https://www.geoguessr.com/

[Dan Dubeau]

Changing the blade on my wood bandsaw this morning I knocked the cheap diecast insert off the table and it broke. Found a suitable chunk of scrap al out in the garage, and turned this pinched between a faceplate and live center riding in a prick punch.


The astute viewer will notice the prick punches on the mounting face. Whoever machined that table casting machined that ledge a couple thou too deep......

Also got some time to get back on the shop reorganization.

2 ships passing in a narrow channel on their way to their new homes. The table came from behind me in this pic.

And the welding table now parked in its new home. the toolbox is now behind me in this pic. Still jockeying things around a bit, but this layout is looking promising for being very workable. I don't anticipate buying anymore big tools....so it should be easy to keep this layout workable for a while.


I need to sell my old buzz box, and that little hobart mig in the back there. Getting rid of those should free up some more room and budget too. Getting there, slowly.

[GadgetBuilder]

Recently I built an air graver of sorts based on a Russian video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyh2OB41BAo&list=WL

I used it to add some crude engraving to a Kant Twist clamp I'm building, part of a CTHSM group project. This was my first use of the air graver and it was interesting to see how easily it cut mild steel. It was more difficult than expected to make smooth curves, so I'm thinking about making an engraver's vise.

The air graver is shown below the clamp parts.

[Mcgyver]

Recently I built an air graver of sorts based on a Russian video:

that's a neat build....I've wanted to try an air engraver.

[GadgetBuilder]

Thanks Mcgyver, the air graver is an interesting project.

My air graver system remains a work in progress. I thought it would "idle" as the Lindsey unit does. The Russian video doesn't provide a plan for the foot control so I winged it. Most air foot controls are on/off switches but this needs the ability to throttle smoothly through the range. My foot control design has a slight leakage which I expected would augment the idle control air, approximating the Lindsey approach.

Turns out my unit won't idle, it stalls intermittently if the air supply gets low enough to stop engraving and won't restart with the pedal.. In reviewing the video the Russian design doesn't idle, it simply starts when the pedal is depressed and stops when the pedal is released. Note how he shakes the air graver frequently when it is off - I suspect the unit has trouble starting unless the piston is at either extreme of its travel. So, more experimenting is needed to get my foot control working properly. The graver works fine but is noisier than I expected - truly a miniature jack hammer.

[challenger]

I made an arbor for a friend that builds fly rods. This gets inserted inside the rod blank of multi section rods and makes it much easier to spin the blank while putting the thread on the guides.
I used some .392" W1 drill rod that was laying around. I'm glad I chose this because CRS would have definitely bent in the process. I used the compound set at 1* and my Jacob's collet chuck. It's 12" long and took four "feeds" and was extremely tricky for my hack machinist skills. I polished it to 600 grit WD sandpaper. The "handle" is a piece of brass I knurled and it's a tight press fit. Came out great IMO.

[The Metal Butcher]

Yikes, that looks like a nightmare. Curious as to why you didn't use your taper attachment though, that's like a textbook taper attachment job.

[Tungsten dipper]

Looks like a dry fly taper.

[Cenedd]

challenger Looks good to this hack machinist!

I'm on the home run of finishing the mods to my computer. I built a watercooled workstation some time back for the silence but recently I've needed a BluRay reader and I'd knowingly made it impossible to install one because I'd never need one of those and could always use an external USB drive if necessary for the odd time. Turns out that I'm too cheap to pay out for an external version of something I already have. So I've been cutting rectangular holes in the back of the case to mount some eSATApd ports so I can hook up the drive as and when I need it.

Machining content? Well I was just trimming the 'ears' off the template I had and I managed to get it sucked down the slot in the bandsaw table and mangled in the bearings. Was .....lets say "irritated" but on the plus side, I still had all my 'push sticks' attached to my hand so it could have been far worse. One of those where you see your mistake just as you hit the 'kill me' button. Lining up blade good....starting saw with teeth engaged, bad.
So a new template - mainly as a filing guide - had to be made on the mill and then used. Once I've written it up on my project page on a computer forum I frequent, I'll post a link on the off-chance someone's interested.

[PStechPaul]

Last night I wanted to get a file from my Win95 Compaq laptop which originally had XP, but I couldn't figure out a way to do it. It has USB ports, a DVD drive and an IEE1394 "Firewire" port and ethernet jacks, but they don't seem to be accessible from Win95 MSDOS command mode. I have it set up to boot in MSDOS command mode to run some programs that use the parallel port and won't run on anything above Win98. I tried typing "win", which started to load Win95, but it stopped with the message:

"While initializing device IOS: Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer."

After a bit of searching, I found this helpful forum, and I followed the advice of "LoneCrusader" to make a bootable CDROM

https://www.computing.net/answers/wi...up/170738.html

More discussion and link to the files for the patches is here.

The problem seems to be due to Win95 being unable to run on faster CPUs. The patch worked fine and I was able to run Win95, but it still did not have drivers to use the I/O ports available. So I removed the HDD (very easy) and used an adapter to read the drive via USB on my Win10 machine.

[Dave C]

There is a dead pine tree a little over 100 ft. tall that has a slight lean towards my greenhouse. It has dropped most of it's limbs, one of which took out 2 glass panels in the green house roof. At approximately 10:AM today, my neighbor brought his potato gun over and we attempted to shoot a line over one of the remaining limbs, at about the 75 foot mark. It took 3 shots to get the line where we wanted it, and then we spent the next couple of hours hauling progressively heavier lines up and over the limb, starting with monofilament and ending up with 1" dia. manila rope. The plan was to pull the rope with my 55 Ford tractor, and break the top 20 ft. off the tree. The idea here is to minimize damage to other trees and shrubs in the area. So my rope is a 300 ft. long block and tackle set, that has been coiled up and stored unused for the last fifteen or more years. It took close to 2 hours to get the rope untangled and stretched out, but we finally got it hooked up and started pulling it with the tractor. When the line got tight the tractor wheels started spinning and there was no action at the tree. Upon inspection, while tightening the rope, it apparently began sliding down and shearing off dead limbs on it's way. It stopped at about the forty foot mark where the tree is about 18 inches in diameter, and too solid to break off. By then it was 3: PM. and while we were planning our next move, it started to rain, so we called it day. My neighbor went home, and I got a good soaking while putting all the tools and equipment away. That's what I did today. Accomplished nothing🙁 Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention, as soon as I got everything put away, the rain stopped.