The Home Machinist!

the U.K. attachments are actually all located in the U.S. There should be no "paper work" or duty taxes. The last one listed is from Connecticut and shipping was free. For the others, the shipping was only $5. I can certainly see that shipping to Portugal might be more problematic than to a place i...

Yes, those are the ones I saw; in the US and expensive. + $17 postage too.
Then it will be stuck in customs until I submit paperwork that doesn't exist and pay 50% duty on the total inc. shipping.
It seems like a nice simple thing, but it's much cheaper to buy a new lever type dial indicator.

I just checked on ebay UK, only found a few and they were in the US.
And expensive.
Maybe they're known by a different term in UK.
If anyone knows the German, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese term...

Summer solstice [longest day of the year] will be on June 21.
Today, March 20, was the spring equinox when day and night are of equal length.

You do nice work.

A couple of years ago I bought a new 200A inverter stick / TIG machine for $200. I'm in Europe so the label on the outside is different, but you know they all come from the same place. The early inverter machines worked great, but not for very long unless you bought the expensive brands [like Lincol...

My machine shop is inside a 20' sea container; not the original idea when we got the new house. The container was storage and the workshop attached to the house, but the noise was driving certain people nuts. So I moved my machines [and 3-phase power] into the container, and the attached space is no...

When I lived in India, I used to have all sorts of things made by a tiny local machinist [from whom I learned a great deal]. He would have 1-off sand castings made by another local shop when needed; iron, brass, and aluminum. It was cheap enough, but the quality was pretty bad, especially the iron. ...

What wimps. I've pulled out a couple of stuck local material delivery trucks with my tractor. In the village I live, we have a culture of pulling each other out for free. I've been on both ends of that. But the good one was when a loaded 12 ton decided to take a shortcut across a dry field that cars...

Of course, cutting a large plate with a grinder is incredibly loud; the plate vibrates and is a huge speaker. Even where I live now, I have neighbors within 100 yards; they never give me grief about my noisy work [and I reciprocate of course] but long cuts with a grinder in heavy plate just seems un...

I don't really know why; vibration and noise gets to me on those long cuts. It's hard to keep a big grinder under control for that long. Often I'm cutting down the center of large plates and that means bending over with the tool. I've used a grinder when I had no oxygen; doesn't make me happy. For s...

I didn't say it wasn't faster; just more painful. Anyway, in that vid they're not cutting plate. Using my 9" grinder today, a couple of observations; 1; Using at hip height is good. Other possitions not so good. 2; after using for a while, a 9" wheel can be put in your 6" grinder and used again. 3; ...

Other dream shop ideas; If we could have aircraft hangers, we would. But we can't. So, a combined parking area / shop space has good and bad points. You have space to maneuver in with a forklift or loader. room to work on large things like your vehicles, but usually it would be parking out of the we...