The Home Machinist!

Here is another cancellation.

I have been a long time member of the N&W Society, but live too far to attend the convention.

The C&NW Sociiety, of which I'm also a member has their convention in Minnesota, I have yet to see any info.

I use Rust Oleum 5200 Series Acrylic Paint #5277402 - Chestnut Brown.

Used it to paint steel rail, RRcars, and other items.

It is to my eyes Tuscon Red.

I buy it at MSC, but others may be less $$.

I rarely use core boxes because I have no need, I made the patterns in Styrofoam, and stuffed sodium silicate treated sand in every crevice and opening and then hardened it. All the castings in the first photo required only one core box. The place I had to make the core box for was the two long hole...

Here is an interesting article on tractor repair. It deserves comment. Do we already have such a situation with automobles? I used to be a "Shade Tree Mechanic", but got too old to "get out and get under"! https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-fight-john-deere-over-who-gets-to-f...

Back in the 70's I bored a Little Engines cylinder casting on our Bridgeport using a Bridgeport boring head.

No DRO's in those days, had to carfully count each dial revolution; things are much easier today!

Here is a site for the "Rolls" of DRO's, they have lots of good information. They also own ACU-RITE. I have an ACU-RITE DRO that came with my lathe, and a Heidenhain I installed on my rebuild of the B&S #2 Mill. https://www.heidenhain.us/applications/machine-tool/ Here is their current device for la...

I have made my own track gauges out of steel bar, but I just noticed Precision Steel Car Co. has aluminum gauge bars for sale: https://www.precisionsteelcar.com/details_misc.html I use 7-9/16 for Straight Track, and 7-5/8 for Curved Track also, and it's easy to misplace a bar. My steel bars, 1-1/2" ...

Precision Steel Cars: https://www.precisionsteelcar.com/details_loco.html

Has Step Lights, aren't they the same as Ditch Lights?

Spro, I have two older B&S Mills, a 1908 #1-1/2, and a 1924 #1 they were both installed at the older school building where all shops had line shafts powered by one single electric motor near each shop. When they were transferred to the new school building, in the middle 1930's, electrical distributi...

It is interesting to start back at the beginning of these posts, 2010, and see that many photos are now missing. This is one of the problems of storing photos, etc., on another site, it may go POOF! Yahoo did this to all its Groups this December, and left only a shell of email addresses, which is ab...

Speaking of "Tilting at Windmills", I tried to do my own Ductile Iron at the school were I taught. They had an old Rotary Arc Furnace, but no way to accurately measure temperature, it was done by watching the Watt-Hour Meter, and calculating for the weight of Pig Iron at what input energy it should ...

Here I am in 1971 using a relatively new (1968) Bridgeport and a Bridgeport Boring Head to bore all four cylinders of a cast iron casting purchased from Little Engines for their 0-6-0. A DRO would have helped in locating each center, but there was no such thing in 1971, that I knew of; had to just c...