My wife has the knack of finding some interesting and diverse places to visit for birthday treats. We have just returned from an overnight stay at No Man’s Fort which sits in the Solent between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.
The Fort along with three others were constructed in the late 1800s to protect Portsmouth from the French fleet. Like our modern day government projects they overran their construction target date and budget and by the time they were finished so were the French navy. There is plenty to read about them on the Net.
The reason for this mention is the resulting respect and admiration I now have for the engineers that put these fortifications in place. You arrive by shuttle boat at the landing stage faced with a circular wall of stone blocks that are precisely cut and interfaced together and show no sign of cracking or movement. The whole construction has no deep pile foundations but simply sits on the sea bed. They had no laser positioning equipment, no JCB equivalents, no CAD. Yet here these structures sit after 150 years in the most hostile of environments and look non the worse for wear. Impressive.
If you get the chance to visit any of the Solent Forts either for afternoon tea or an overnight stay you should go and you will not fail to be impressed.
Back from after a few weeks in France and back in the workshop.
Every now and then there is a project that is on the go and you can’t sit down and focus on it. It is a sort of mechanical procrastination. A reluctance to put the first pencil mark on the paper. You then suddenly find all sorts of other things that you kid yourself are more important / higher priority and you get distracted. You know that job will still be there but maybe tomorrow, not today. You suddenly develop a clear conscience about doing something else while you do some background thinking ….
This particular day started off by cleaning down the accumulated swarf (chips) in the 440 tray. Really important job. This led to a check behind the various 440 slideway bellows to see that all was well with the oiling mechanism on the slideways and the ballscrews. X and Y were fine but Z was dry. Not good news.
The 440 is supplied with a manual oiler as standard. This is a reservoir of oil and a pump/plunger which you pull out and release to initiate a slow pressure to the oil distribution pipes.
View of the manual oiler mounted on the Tormach 440
I checked the plunger and it didn’t feel like it was applying much pressure. This is not the first time I have experienced this problem. If I pumped a few times it felt better so something should have been happening at the oiling points on the Z. I disconnected each of these where I could and sure enough if I pumped hard enough some oil dribbled out but not with much pressure. Something probably not right with the plunger ?
Squeezing round the back of the mill I removed the top of the reservoir (4 retaining screws), disconnected the oil pipe union and lifted the plunger clear. The reservoir can be left in place sitting on the mounting bracket.
There is a large end cap at the union end of the plunger cylinder which I removed and sure enough I could see a mangled O ring. To get the plunger out you have to be a bit brutal. You pull the T handle plunger back out of its housing against its spring using the handle as shown above and then grip the shaft with pliers so you can then twist the handle off. What you don’t do then is suddenly release the pliers grip or the plunger will go into low Earth orbit under the pressure of its spring …
Having disassembled the plunger it was obvious that the O ring had failed quite badly. Tormach support do not offer spares as the oiler is a third party item. They do not know what size the O ring should be. Checking in my box of miscellaneous O rings it looked like a 9mm ID, 3mm thickness part would do the trick. Smearing the O ring with DC4 silicon grease allowed easy re-assembly into the piston bore and then back onto the 440. I now had lots of pressure and oil was apparent trickling down the Z slideways and ball screws. Job done. No pumping needed, just one pull out of the piston handle was generating a slow release of oil to the key areas.
The job I should have been doing was still sat on the bench glaring at me but psychologically I was doing something more important.
Next problem was the Fogbuster air activation valve. Under CNC control this reliably switched on but sometimes would not switch off when commanded to. There are various forum discussions on this problem and many contributors just replace the solenoid valve with a different version. Forum chat also recommended that electrical transient snubbers are fitted across various inductive loads in the Tormach control unit. I had some of these in my stock box (Tormach offer a kit for this). They are simply a series resistor and capacitor in an epoxy block. They are fitted across any inductive device to suppress switching transients. I dived into the control box and fitted one across the controller relay coil that switches the Fogbuster ON and OFF and another one across the outlet from the control box feeding the Fogbuster solenoid coil. See picture below.
Snubber across Fogbuster activation relay coil. There is a second snubber fitted to the lower LHS contact which activates the air solenoid. The other end of this snubber goes to the any ‘100’ connection which is mains neutral.
The problem seemed to be improved but still occasionally the solenoid did not switch OFF.
The Fogbuster solenoid has a clear housing over the activation coil connections and there is a LED inside this that comes on when the Fogbuster is switched on.
Fogbuster solenoid assembly showing the connection clear housing which plugs into the solenoid coil which in turn sits over the activating plunger assembly. There is a screw in the LHS to release the electrical connection and the nut on the top releases the coil to reveal the plunger housing.
This connection housing plugs into the coil and the mechanics of the solenoid body and is released with a screw in the end. Toggling the coolant ON and OFF via the PathPilot user interface I could see the LED responding correctly to the ON and OFF commands but occasionally the solenoid was not closing. It was therefore not an electrical problem but mechanical.
On top of the solenoid housing is a single large nut which when released allows the solenoid coil to be lifted off. This leaves two countersink screws which hold the mechanical plunger housing in place and if these are removed the plunger can be gently removed. Inside the valve is very simple. A central hole allows the air to pass through and when the solenoid is de-energised a spring forces the solenoid plunger to seal this hole. I gave everything a thorough blast with compressed air and re-assembled it. Care is needed re-assembling as there is a tiny O ring seal on the plunger cover. The solenoid now responds correctly to the PathPilot commands.
Another tick. Job done. Warm glow.
That other job is still sat on the bench glaring at me ….
I am quite anal in needing to have a tidy workshop with everything having a place where I can find it easily. It is a kind of insurance policy to perhaps give me a bit longer time in the workshop before I lose the plot altogether. (The less palatable advantage is the dealer who comes in to clear my workshop when I am in turn in ‘a box’ can easily see what a treasure trove he has stumbled on. We’ll move swiftly on from that thought).
To this end I have settled on using 5 Litre Spacemaster storage boxes for all my ‘stuff’ (technical term as defined by my long suffering wife). These are readily available in the UK at Dunelm and on the net. They are made from a very durable plastic and supplied with a lid which is rarely useful for my application. I believe they are principally intended for ladies to store their shoes in.
Update : – Dunelm no longer supply Spacemaster boxes but Zoro UK have added them to their range. Their stock code is ZT1053092X.
The boxes have a 6.5″x 12″ footprint and are 4″ deep. It is surprising just how much workshop kit can be stored in these (and of course nicely labelled). The 12″ is just not long enough for 13″ silver steel but a little hang over can be tolerated for such useful material.
How sad is this ? Just a small section of my anal storage system
I have accumulated a reasonable (by my standard) set of Tormach TTS tooling collets with my preferred tools permanently fitted. These are each numbered to match my tool table entries in PathPilot. The numbering is done using an Edding 750 white paint marker.
My solution to storing the collets was to use the same boxes. I used a sheet of Dural (150mm x 290mm) and punched a (3 x 6) matrix of 20mm holes into it to take the collets. The Dural sheet sits on 5 off 10mm diameter x 36mm long spacers.
Spacemaster 5L box used for TTS tooling storage. Side view showing Dural plate
To give you some idea of the strength of the boxes, you can pick up one of these fully loaded with tools by the front wall and your wrist will break before the box does. (Well you know what I mean).
You will notice in the above photo that after some expensive clumsy breakages I now fit 3D printed caps over the most fragile tools such as carbide PCB drills.
Spacemaster based TTS storage box showing protective 3D printed caps over fragile tools
So a bit of a slow news day but thought this might stir an organisational initiative somewhere ……
I am not an expert but just have an accumulated veneer of knowledge of what goes on under the hood. I have also had enough of ‘my printer doesn’t print’ during my working life to not want to expand this limited knowledge. However when my wife has an IT problem it is in my best interest to try to fix it …
First problem was her Samsung Galaxy Tab A (2016) would log onto the house WiFi network but would not be able to make internet connections or was unreliable. This did not seem related to whether the connection was to the router direct or via the various extenders we have running.
Logging into a WiFi connection OK but not allowing internet connection smelled like a DNS issue. The WiFi was running under DHCP so the DNS was being passed out from the router to each device. I had Google’s DNS servers entered as DNS#1 (8.8.8.8) and DNS#2 (8.8.4.4) on the router. All other devices were quite happy with this … except the Tab. My solution was to change all the Tab WiFi settings for each of our nodes as Fixed instead of DHCP and used 208.67.222.222/4.2.2.5 as the new DNS servers.
This seems to have fixed it but you have to ask why was this needed just on this single device ?
Second one was a bit more difficult.
She runs GMail on all portable devices and uses Outlook 2007 on her desktop set up with her GMail accounts. Yes I know it is a bit dated but it works (usually) so who cares if the GUI isn’t quite so sexy as Office 2040 or whatever the latest version is ?
Logging on yesterday to her desktop it came up with demand to login before allowing access to GMail on Outlook. It is one of those infuriating dialogue boxes that just keeps on popping up even though you and it knows the answer given is not correct …. except it was correct but was not being accepted. Logging into GMail via Chrome all worked fine so it was something to do with Outlook and Chrome suddenly not being best buddies for some reason.
I did some digging around on the Net and it seems that GMail can for various reasons decide that it is not going to allow access to ‘Less Secure Apps’ and this includes Outlook. They go to great lengths to tell you it is a potential security risk.
In order to re-enable this you have to log into GMail in Chrome, go into the Security settings in the left hand side pane and find the ‘Allow Less Secure Apps’ section and click this back on.
This fixed the problem and all is now sunshine and joy with domestic peace restored.
Have you ever stopped to consider how much of your life dribbled through your fingers while suffering IT related issues ?
From previous posts you will be aware of my involvement maintaining the local church clock. Over the past months my colleague and I have been nibbling away at various little problemettes with the movement and things are now looking quite good. For the past two weeks it has run sweetly and maintained +/-1 second over that period.
Then last night it stopped.
This morning we wandered round to see what the problem might be. The first thing we do on arrival is look at the front dial to see at what time it had stopped. This time it had stopped at around 10.35 last night. We climbed the tower and inspected the movement.
There did not seem anything obviously wrong so we decided to swing the pendulum and get it working again. We had arrived at just before 10am and our inspection took us over the hour and the front the dial was showing 10.35. Because we were now ‘within the hour’ it was acceptable to wind the hands back to the correct time which was now just after 10am.
I pulled out the motion work locking pin and began to move the hands (which were now independent of the movement) in a backwards direction to set the time. Except the hands would not move backwards. There was resistance. Something bad had happened to the motion work.
We checked the mechanism to both the front and rear dial but there was nothing obviously wrong but the hands refused to go backwards under light pressure and I did not want to force anything at this stage.
We went outside again and this time checked the front and now also the rear dial and this is what we saw : –
Our feathered friends had built a nest on the belfry window ledge and a stick had fallen from the nest and jammed itself in the dial. The odds of this happening must be pretty thin.
A careful waggle of the hands back and forth broke the stick free and we then reset the time and hopefully all will now be well.
The interesting observation was that the stick was only brushing the hand in the forward direction but in reverse it was pushing against it. The forward resistance was still sufficient to reflect back through the motion work into the main mechanism to stop the escapement and therefore the clock.
