Lathe bench

I'm thinking ahead now. I'm going to need somewhere to put my lathe when it's done, and given that it's going to be bigger and heavier than Gingery's lathe, moving it around will not be an option. I've drawn this bench up, it's made of 25mm box section painted RHS, welded together. The small box shaped cavity in the top left corner will house the motor at the back, and have a little cupboard or drawer or something at the front. It's a metre long, so I mah have to shorten my lathe a bit, I'm planning on a 1m bed at the moment... we'll see.

Under pressure

Last year sometime I got, free of charge of course, a gas tank, and a car's air-conditioning compressor. I wanted, you see, to build an air compressor. But I procrastinated with it, as per usual, for two reasons: the tank still had propane in it, and I had no safety valves. Well, today I found someone who will sell me the appropriate valves and regulators etc, so I will get cracking as soon as possible. I mean to buy parts on Saturday. Here is my plan of attack:
Note: It's only a schematic, it won't look like that when I'm done.

My card box

If there are two types of games that I love (which there are), they would have to be billiards and cards. Last year I made this sweet, if rather chunky, card box of copper. It had a handmade hinge, and I etched a a picture of the mad hatter's tea party into the front of it. It held the cards well, was sturdy, and the bottom never fell out, not like the cardboard boxes that cards normally come in. Anyway, recently I lent it to a friend who wished to continue playing cards in their free period, something I often do, and the next thing I knew, it was gone. I had the cards, but no box. I don't know who lost it, and I don't really care anyway. It gave me the kick that I had been needing to make a newer, better one. So here it is. It's not done yet, but I've made the two parts of the box and done the hinge. Next up is to put an etching on the front. I expect I will do the same picture as before, but I'll do it better this time, the last one was a bit shallow. But I'll also etch a 500 scoring table on the inside of the lid. Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the old one, but I do have photos of the new one.









Here are some of the details. The top is unadorned at the moment, but the bottom has a gear from an old broken German cuckoo clock that I found soldered on to it. I made the hinges with some very small copper pipe, I cut it to the length of the (short end of the) lid, plus a little extra, then cut it into thirds. I cleaned the ends up, then put some flux on the pipes and the edges of bot the box and the lid, pushed them into position lying on a tile, and gently heated them, then added a very small amount of solder.









The pin running through the pipes is some brass wire.








The old hinges were made from copper sheet, folded into a rough tube at one end, then soldered onto the rest of the box. Funtional, but chunky and fiddly. These ones, while fiddly, were actually easier than the old ones, and are almost invisible.

Vectra PC

I got a power supply for it today, 19v, 3.16A, usually used for laptops. Having arrived home, I hooked all the different bit of computer together and fired the Vectra up and, lo and behold, it worked. It turns out it's running XP professional, but only has an 8GB hard drive. That will have to be fixed. Micah and myself are going to do some fiddling on Monday. I plan to strip it down to the smallest possible amount of software. I want it to play music, read pdfs and do MS Word as well. And maybe paint. But that's all it needs. Micah has suggested using Live sessions, but we'll see.

A plan for the future

I was talking with a friend of mine recently, and discovered that her father is a lithographer, and, as such, does copper etchings. She said that he did acid etches, which piqued my interest, so I have done a little research, and come up with this. It's called the 'Edinburgh Etch', and uses Ferric Chloride as the 'acid'. I say 'acid' because it is actually a salt, not an acid. Anyway, I shudder to say it, but...Dick Smith...sell bottles of Ferric Chloride, so I shall purchase some, and start tinkering.

On a different note, a package came from A&E Metal today, containing a sheet of 1mm brass, and a sheet of 0.5mm nickel silver (which actually contains no silver), and some brooch backs. I intend to try and electroplate the nickel silver onto brass and copper. But we shall see.