Twitter Updates for 15-12-2011

• Abdomens. <3 00:33:21, 2011-12-15
• Awake on time. Didn't sleep well. Lots of nightmares again. 08:24:56, 2011-12-15
• @Houndloaf Yup. Nothing here. in reply to Houndloaf 08:40:48, 2011-12-15
• Tories, stop blaming the minors. #fivewordsforcameron #ukuncut 09:09:58, 2011-12-15
• @simonpegg And also Scotty. Why, by their powers combined…! in reply to simonpegg 10:02:50, 2011-12-15
• Last RT is not about the captured drone in Iran but about the Jamaican gov covering up spy-plane footage of sec forces killing 73 civilians. 10:15:02, 2011-12-15
• No mill yet. 5hrs to go. Waiting is driving me spare. Hope it arrives before dark. 12:39:13, 2011-12-15
• The mill has arrived! It's been unpacked, dissembled and moved to the workshop to await modification. Am now knackered. 17:49:54, 2011-12-15
• @jackalesque Crooked Little Vein contains Godzilla -bukake. in reply to jackalesque 18:06:47, 2011-12-15
• @xeni Did your doctor just call you fat? O_o in reply to xeni 18:07:28, 2011-12-15
• There's a muscle spasming in my left ear so it sounds like there's a fast bassline to my left. 18:08:43, 2011-12-15
• Anyone got any old CD drive motors knocking around? Specifically flat-sided ones marked "PPN13"? About an inch long. 20:00:39, 2011-12-15
• @GammaCounter @dandidier Couldn't they have just forced them to stay awake for 72 hours? Weakness, mis-hearing PLUS cognitive issues. in reply to GammaCounter 20:14:39, 2011-12-15
• @penguat Maybe #SOPA went through? in reply to penguat 20:52:58, 2011-12-15
• Please America, don't vote in SOPA. You control DNS servers, so nasty feeling your law could put me out of business in another country. 22:38:47, 2011-12-15

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.

Finally! The mill arrived!

After 6 months of waiting I noticed Chester had the Eagle 25 mill on special offer. I called them and found out that this indeed meant the new lot of mills had arrived!
I borrowed some money to pay off the outstanding bill on it and got delivery arranged as soon as possible, since I didn’t want mine to be the last of the lot for a couple of reasons;

• If there was something wrong with it, I wanted there still to be one to replace it with.
• If I waited until there weren’t many left, I’d risk getting the obviously less than immaculate ones.

So yesterday around 3pm, it arrived!

I’d had some trouble with Chester when trying to find out how large the actual crate would be, since it was coming to a domestic property and we have a nice domestic garden-gate it’d have to get through. I’d been told it was 90cm wide, so to expect packaging a few cm larger than that. So as a result I was fully expecting to have to dismantle it on the pavement outside to move it in.

Fortunately the crate, once off the pallet was just small enough to fit into the front garden. :)

The reason for this was it’s packed diagonally to save space, so the crate wasn’t as wide or deep.

And there she is. :3

Checked the manual and with help from Andy, broke it down into; the base, motor, headstock, and column. Then we lugged it through to the workshop.

Whew! That’s a hell of a weight off my mind now.

I generally like the layout, though there’s a couple of niggles; the belt housing lacks an extra hatch that’s in the manual so it can be opened when the head is in a lowered position. It also has mains cabling running through it within milimeters of the spindle pulley. The quality of the table casting is also a bit rough. But of all the Chinese tools I’ve bought it’s probably the best, and I bought it understanding it would need tweaking.

It’s the R8 taper version with metric leadscrews (2mm pitch). I’ll need to make some adaptors and stand-offs for the the table portion.

The top-box should come off fairly easily, though the spindle pully is a lot larger than I expected. This might make it trickier to position the big DC motor. But overall nothing has been thrown up that can’t be overcome.

I’m going to knock a couple of other small projects out of the way before I really get started on it, but should be able to work on it pretty easily come the new year. :)

Mirrored from The blog-hub for Peter "Sci" Turpin.