Woody's Workshop - Page 15 of 57 - Keeping the Grey Matter active

July 7, 2022

Bad day steaming with my 5″ Polly V live steam locomotive

Last Sunday was a members steaming day at the model club. I told all the family I would be there and to bring the grandchildren along for a ride.

I arrived early with a view to getting steam up and be ready to go … in theory.

First problem was that the connecting rods had stopped in a position that was blocking fitting the fire tray holding pin. This immediately got worse in that the cylinders had seized since my last run. The more experienced members told me not to worry and if I could move the wheels enough then fit the fire tray and get things warmed up. After some rocking I managed this slight movement …. but forgot I hadn’t filled the boiler and the fire was burning very brightly. Mad panic to get some water in quickly.

Steam pressure up to 90psi but no joy on the cylinders. Gentle tapping on the con rods lead to heavy tapping on the con rods and lots of slide dragging back and forth on the steaming bay. Still no joy. Cylinders locked.

Now running out of water in the boiler. Grandchildren arrived. “Why can’t we have a ride grandddad ?”. Grabbed the handpump leaver and rapidly pumped away to get water into the boiler …. too rapidly in fact and broke my hand pump leaver. Still had a few PSI of pressure and thankfully the injector kicked in … for a short while until the pressure dropped.

How bad can this get ?

Some slight movement on the cylinders now. Grabbed some blocks of wood and got the engine airborne so the axle pump could be used … if I could just get the wheels to fully turn. More tapping/thrashing at the con rods and suddenly the wheels jumped into motion. Phew. Water now flowing into the boiler, fire good, pressure good. Get out on the track quick and keep the grandchildren quiet.

Back home in the workshop I made a new hand pump handle and fitted new oil port plugs on the top of each cylinder each with a M3 feed hole. This means I can syringe oil into the valve and cylinders a lot more easily after future steamings.

It is a hobby after all but this was one of the most stressful steamings I have ever experienced – all because I was in a rush last time out and did not do the end of day drain down processes correctly because it was tipping down with rain. Lesson learned. Thankfully no long term damage to the cylinders.

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June 30, 2022July 2, 2022

Solar Energy servicing issues

We have a ‘wet’ solar panel for our domestic hot water (DHW) and a 3kW PV array to supplement our electricity consumption. We benefit from a feed in tariff for the excess power fed to the electric supply grid.

The DHW system is a 1 metre square grid of evacuated tubes feeding conducted heat through a closed loop pipework to a secondary heating coil in the hot storage water tank. The system was installed in 2008 and has given good service and lots of hot water. Recently the temperatures at the panel on the roof were showing very very high (>100C) and a closer investigation suggested that there was no circulation of the heat transfer fluid.

I registered a service call and the technician duly arrived. The conclusion was that the transfer fluid had degraded, leaving mainly gas and debris in the system pipework.

The technician pressure washed the pipework loop and refilled it with new transfer fluid. The system is now back up and running. He made a not so subtle suggestion that maybe leaving it for 14 years between service intervals might not be a good idea …. hint taken.

The other topic of conversation revolved around holiday absences and hot sunny periods. When we go away on holiday we ask the kids to regularly run off hot water otherwise the hot water storage tank just gets hotter and hotter. This results in the roof panel venting under the pressure.

The technician commented that the latest controllers have a reverse action facility which you can enable during holiday absences. This reverses the transfer fluid flow so the heat in the storage tank water is conducted out to the roof panel at night where it is radiated off. Unfortunately our controller does not have this facility. Maybe in four years time when we have a maintenance service call we can arrange an upgrade ….

While investigating the problem prior to service visit I went up on the roof to check the DHW panel. (We live in a single storey house so reduced Health and Safety risk …). While all seemed OK, it was noticeable that both the DHW panel and the PV panels were dirty. I always clean them early in the year but we have recently had rainy periods where Saharan sand gets deposited via the rain. This was clearly visible on the PV panels and less so on the water panel.

As a result of this, this morning has been a panel cleaning session. Every kW counts. Keep your panels clean.

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June 28, 2022April 23, 2023

3Dconnexion Spacemouse has better Fusion 360 integration

I had a mailer this morning from 3Dconnexion to say that their Spacemouse has now got better integration with Fusion 360.

One of my long standing frustrations when using Fusion 360 is that there did not seem to be a short cut or macro to provide the equivalent of using your right hand mouse to click on ‘Home view’. This is desirable when you have flipped and spun your model and just want a single action to reset the view to your starting position.

It appears that the 3Dconnexion Spacemouse now provides this and it can be associated with one of the two buttons on the device. You have to go to Settings/Buttons/Views and then select ‘ISO1 View’

Note that you have to set up the use of the two Spacemouse buttons for each Fusion module i.e. once in the Modelling module and once in Manufacturing module.

Attached below is a write up of the process.

SpaceMouse-Home-view-with-Fusion-360

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June 28, 2022June 28, 2022

Workshop storage update using Spacemaster 5L boxes

Some time ago I posted a note about using the Spacemaster 5L storage boxes for all things workshop. These are an incredibly versatile size and I admit to having a plethora of them sprinkled around the workshop including use for storage of my Tormach TTS tooling collets.

Zoro UK now offers these boxes which is a bit more convenient than the previous UK source. The Zoro stock number is ZT1053092X and the Spacemaster part number is CTL4048201B.

On the subject of TTS collets, I grew weary of having to repaint the tool number on the side of the collets and have migrated instead to printed labels.

These are printed on a Brother P-Touch Cube printer using their 6mm White on Black tape stock. These look very professional and time will tell how robust they are when subjected to cutting fluid. The P-Touch is nice in that it is battery powered and connects on Bluetooth so I can print ‘on the go’ from the Android App. The only frustration with the P-Touch is that it wastes around 2cms of tape at the beginning of each label print. I minimise this wastage by concatenating all my labels into one long print and then cut them up individually with scissors after printing.

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June 24, 2022June 24, 2022

Femi NG120ABS bandsaw failure and support from Stakesy’s

Last week we had the hottest day in the year so far and I had a couple of jobs to complete in the workshop. Not ideal but with the doors open I had a little through breeze. I had lots of aluminium to chop to length and my Femi NG120 bandsaw was doing sterling service.

A few days later when I needed to use the Femi again it was dead. Not a spark of life. I buzzed out the electrics and the trigger switch, emergency stop and end of cut switches were all working fine.

My conclusion was the motor controller had failed. This is a potted electronic assembly that sits on the end of the motor assembly inside the top of the motor housing. I measured various voltages with and without the trigger switch in action and sent the details off to Stakesy’s who is the UK distributor of Femi (the saws are made in Italy). As bad luck would have it my bandsaw was a few months outside of a 12 month warranty.

Stakesy’s sent off the details to Femi and after some email interchanges Femi agreed to supply a new motor controller module free of charge. This arrived in the post a few days later. It was an easy fit, just four wires into a chocolate block and the bandsaw sprung back into life. My hacksawing arm muscles breathed a sigh of relief.

As mentioned earlier, the motor controller module is a plastic moulding that has the electronics potted into the moulding. There are some parts proud of the potting compound but in the main all is submerged. With hindsight I wonder if something failed with the high ambient heat it was subjected to on my hottest day activity.

Great service from both Stakesy’s and Femi. A big thank you to Matt and Alex for getting my NG120 up and running again.

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