The Home Machinist!

I fry scrambled eggs with onions, mushrooms, and cheese in my cast-iron skillet frequently and clean it with no difficulty. Run the steel spatula around it once to break loose anything stuck (usually isn't anything), wipe it out with a paper towel, and put it on the back of the stove ready for next ...

Sometimes you need to take a close look at these repair procedures. Seems like every second procedure in the shop manuals for my old tractors starts with "First split the tractor". Then it lists the special-purpose stands and fixtures that they expect you to do that with and which, combined with the...

Sharpen her stainless steel knives on the belt grinder. Less work and it's not like you could ruin them.

You can equalize your batteries by connecting them in parallel and charging them that way. As Dianne says, though, they must be well matched. Once equalized they can be charged and discharged in series.

Use the Loctite primer. It makes a difference on ss and aluminum. I'd also stake the threads as earlgo suggests.

Steel and aluminum being temperature cycled is a bad combination, though. Can you replace either the nut or the screw so as to have matching materials?

The "car detector" I mentioned is the same as a traffic signal loop detector. BTW the PLCs I have had experience with are far from delicate. I think they are too pricey for this application, though. Multiple LED-phototransistor pairs could be wired with all the LEDs in series and all the phototransi...

Looking for inductance change should work but I think you want the axis of your coil vertical. When a train is present part of the flux path that is normally entirely through air will be through iron. You might be able to modify a metal detector. A car detector of the sort used at parking lot entran...

Ok, I'm sure this is going to be a stupid question but I'm drawing a blank, so here goes. A job requiring softjaws is about to commence. I have softjaws and a spider but how does one measure the diameter of the softjaw cut. All of my micrometers measure at 180 degrees whether they be calipers or mi...

Spot welders are quite different from arc welders. They rely on resistance heating in the parts being welded rather than on arc heating. This requires that you firmly clamp low-resistance contacts directly at the spot where you want the weld. The open circuit voltages are quite low (on the order of ...

We need to know more about your setup.

Depends on what you mean by a "true" rotary converter. Driving a synchonous three-phase generator with a DC motor controlled so as to keep the frequency correct would give you perfect separately-derived power. Converters built using a single three-phase motor, some capacitors, and some relays can wo...

A rotary converter provides pretty good corner-grounded three phase.