grendel

Day 13, certainly a change in the weather this morning, wet and raining, planned for today, sanding the other side of the model, reassembling the 10" grinder, and then it will be whatever next takes my fancy.

after a bit of a rethink, i spent an hour this evening running down through the different grades of wet and dry paper, 400, 600, 800, 1500, much happier with how smooth the finish is on the one side i have done, tomorrow i will have a go at the other side.

+1 for the coach bolts heads outside - nothing to grab onto. thats what my dad used after his shed was broken into, they came back too 3 years later, and again 3 years after that, though they didnt get in to his shed those subsequent visits, he figured that they reckoned that they gave the owners enough time to replace all of the stuff stolen then had that new stuff away

no, they were too big for the drawer, though I think I may know where i put them now.

so the guard has come off, the air hammer with a chisel was used to clean inside the guard (this is where molten metal tends to collect, restricting the size disc if you are not careful, rust was wire brushed out and a protective coat of anti rust paint applied, all the caked on oily grime was wire brushed off the body. once the threaded retaining discs have come out of the evaporust, the grinder will be reassembled.

i came to a decision, as i was going to have to do some delicate sanding on the model, i decided to get my ancient hitachi 2.5kW grider back in action, this grinder dates back to the 1980,s and due to a slightly damaged plug has been unusable for about the last 10 years. wires were cut back and new clean ends were made off, the pack of 3 plugs i saw just a couple of weeks ago had naturally disappeared, but i found one eventually, the rewired 10" grinder was plugged in and actually works. next job was to take the old disc out, considering the rust on the spindle nut i wasnt too hopeful, and correctly it seems, holding the locking pin in, the spanner in place and hitting it was a bit of an acrobatic task, but it still didnt respond, penetrating oil, still no response, ok so it was going to need heat, out came my big blow torch, and heat was applied generously, after 5 minutes (and a lovely smell of burning grinding disc throughout the house) it finally came without having to resort to the hammer. once the nuts have cooled they will be having a bath in evaporust and the threaded part on the tool will have a good wire brushing. now before Griff gets too worried about the model, no i wont be using this beast to sand it down, i will be doing that by hand with a very fine wet and dry paper (1200 grit if i can find it). this grinder has an interesting history, many years back (in the 1980's) when doing viking re-enacting, this is the grinder i used to make all my swords, these were made from car spring grade spring steel, i could run a precision channel down the length of a sword blade with this, where one slip of my hand could have sliced the blade into two parts, in fact i got so good at this that one blade i made was measured where the thickness of metal remaining between the grooves on each side was less than 1mm through the entire length of the blade (the more metal you remove the lighter the blade and more flexible it becomes).

well parcels collected (it was my new bandsaw blades) and the post office visited to post something (guess which silly forgot to buy a book of stamps while i was there) then home to fit and test a new bandsaw blade, clean up of the parts that had been soaking in evaporust, so there i am with half the day gone already.

Day 12, Monday I cant believe that its been nearly 2 weeks already, what does today hold in store, - well i have 2 parcels to pick up from the post office collection centre, and two letters to post, trouble is i will need to get to a post office for one as i dont have any stamps left. the sorting office counter has changed its opening times to 7am - 11am 5 days a week, closed wednesdays and sundays

I once had my car broken into and the tools removed, i got all of them back apart from the angle grinder as they had been stashed behind a gravestone in the churchyard behind, when reported to the police they informed me that the thieves had used the angle grinder to cut the locks on sheds and garages for the next 2 miles along the road, everyones stuff had been taken out and piled on the end of their drives, ready to be picked up, they were obviously disturbed before they picked up. the part that annoyed me was they cut the back screen out of my estate car, and carefully laid the glass down in the grass, but they cut the rubbers on the screen, which were more difficult to find than a replacement screen would have been.

its a nice picture all the same.

an opportunity arose with the moon close to venus, so i got the camera out, the moon is fairly new, and venus shows a nice crescent too, this is done using the 1100mm mirror lens i picked up at the boot fair last year.

I use polish

I have tried to show some of the worst bits left, these will get a light rubbing down again and a few more coats of paint should sort it, providing of course the pictures show it.

what, nyx the day you bought her?

so white in the sunshine it was hard to get any detail.

I found with my great conservatory heap clearout its best to do one corner, this then gives you a space to clear the second corner to, followed by the remaining corner, then go back and redo the first corner, and if you can turn out as much as i did you will have room for your kit car to come back to yours to work on it, shelving or cupboards help a lot once you have decided what you want to keep, an old kitchen unit with a bit of worktop makes a grand work bench. Good luck and have fun, space it out over the week. doing mine over 4 days was bad enough.

maybe you will find a trailer in there too.

right you all saw that rusty machinists square that went into the evaporust this morning, here it is now, i just got it out, rinsed it in water while rubbing it with a green side of a washing up sponge and then gave it a quick squirt of wd 40 to drive off any remaining water. before after ok some of the deeper marks are still there (thats how you can tell its the same one after all, but i think its done a pretty good job.

still there is nothing like watching paint dry as they say, and theres not a lot to see when its all white, i reckon this coat needs another week drying then lightly flatting back again before getting a tad more paint - or as i have since found this stuff is not a paint at all its a coloured resin lacquer, which is why we had paint mismatch issues, as i tried to overspray when it was still curing (properly it has a full two week hardening time, but between coats of the same stuff it can manage as little as 5 minutes, so once this has all been finished the below waterline and boot topping will be left a good amount of time to allow this resin lacquer to properly harden, after which it should be good to go.

I will get photos later.

so several days since the last update, i have been busy, tidying the workshop, meanwhile paint was drying out, now stuck because the next part i wanted to do that could be done while paint was doing its thing on the hull of the model, suddenly became an issue where my 0.2mm stainless steel was too thick, i have ordered more in 0.1mm .05mm and .02mm, but its a long delivery item, so today the model was back in the garden receiving another few coats of white to the hull. i am happy to report that the problem paint spots we had are now disappearing into the paint layers.

several thin coats of white paint later and the problem areas are disappearing into the paint.

Well the grand plan for working on the model today went out of the window, when i realised the thin stainless steel sheet i had still wasnt thin enough to do what i wanted, so instead as its a nice day outside, it will have to be paint.

as i also mentioned yesterday, i put an old rusty drill vice into evaporust for 24 hours and if i say so myself its come up quite well. here are the tools and bits from the day before. and finally todays object for a clean up, it was only when taking the bits out this morning i thought that i should ave got before pictures- all the previous parts had a similar level of rust to this.

Day 11, Sunday as i had a lazy day yesterday, plans are in place for today, yesterday i designed and started to print a lathe steady for my unimat lathe, this helps support longer workpieces in the lathe when i want to work on the end of a longer piece of stock that dousnt fit through the headstock, normally you would use a tailstock centre to keep the work aligned. I have since considered a mk2 where the nut on the back of the arms can be inset iinto the body to make it a captive nut, and i do need to replace the hex head bolts with stainless socket allen headed ones. the 8 hour plus print finished sometime in the night, so was ready this morning.