grendel

Charlie, you may be off the hook, i think the nearest to you is york (maybe you need to go buy the paint using the tiger?

it can cost a fortune to build it back up to useable levels

I also have a case of brass bolts in BA sizes, from 12BA up to 0 (12BA are tiny)

this is my stock of m4 nuts and cheeshead bolts

MM i am slightly more organised than that, I have cases with small compartments for bolts m2, m2.5, m3, up to m12, with the exception of the several thousand 4mm bolts and nuts that substitute for meccano ones as they are 1/10 of the cost.

looks like you need some little drawers to organise that lot, how about building a nice little cabinet with wooden drawers.

I do have 3 more of the small cabinets with drawers, one of those does have all my meccano gears in it though.

looks like a fin keel mould

This is the before pictures showing the current storage, now to start labeling

yes MM that will really help find things.

Day 7 Wednesday - 1 week into furlough. up at 5am as usual this morning, a few hours on the internet and catching up on the forum, and its time to go get breakfast. after breakfast plans for the day are a mammoth session with the labeling machine, i have recently done a lot of tidying and just dumping stuff into little drawer units, of those units containing maybe 300 small drawers, at the moment things are in those drawers in somewhat a random distribution, and maybe 30 drawers are labelled, so todays plan of action is to at least get the drawers labelled, sorting could well be another days job to then get similar things into the same cabinets. I also have a drawer unit full of taps and dies, so that could well be labelled too, plus any taps in drawers can be added to that unit.

https://www.volvo-forums.com its not very busy, but there is a lot of info on it.

my gran never made bread, that was her husbands job, as a master baker, he taught my mum, who has baked a loaf every other day for all my life.

We just need to teach the tides how to read the time and the tide tables, as they can still be early or late.

modelling was done then it was lunch, as my daughter works for an NHS related company that manages several surgeries, and she has had a persistent cough for a month (like every year) they decided to send her for testing for the virus, so a trip to the local testing station was in order, we will get the results in a few days. After this i spent several hours deleting spam posts from a volvo forum i am a moderator on, some nice spammer had spent literally 12 hours posting over 300 spam posts into 1 thread - 16 pages worth, as the forum software on that volvo forum is antiquated the multiple delete option does not work, so 2 hours just to delete all their posts 1 at a time.

I'd probably still be trying to get the point of the drill out of the work if i tried that. replacements arent a problem as i have about a hundred in those small sizes, they break so easily you get through them pretty quick, especially when using powered drills, they were originally bought when i was trying to drill thin stainless sheet, 10 bits per hole was about average until i found the carbide pcb drills, they get through the stainless but are brittle as anything so break when you break through to the other side.

Ok, here are some macro images to show what we have been up to, i use 0.8mm stainless steel pin blanks to represent screws on the model (these are a tight fit through a 0.7mm drilled hole) since the blanks are obtained without points and pre hardening they bend quite easily, so where possible they are put right through and the ends bent over to form a secure fastening, here is a pin compared to the 1.2mm rod i used for the handle of the mudweight.

so back to the surround, and i hear you ask, how do you drill a small hole through that - well generally if you do it in a drill, the slightest shake of the hand will break the drill bit, so you do it manually in a little archimedes drill with a pin vice end, here we are drilling a 0.7mm hole through the centres of those dimples we added this morning, you will notice at times the drill bit bends alarmingly with the downward pressure of 1 finger on the top, but crucially it doesnt break as you are only turning it slowly, yes a 0.7mm drill is about the thickness of a standard household pin. worryingly i have taps and screws in these sort of sizes, though my preference isnt to drop below a 2mm screw, now just 3 more holes to drill.

adding the handle to the top of the mudweight. first we need a loop of brass wire, this measured out at 1.2mm diameter, so the wire was bent around a 3mm rod. i then drilled two holes the correct spacing apart for the wire, these were at 1.4mm dia for the first 6mm, then 1.2mm for another 4mm depth (i had to first find the correct number drill for this - number 56). holes drilled the loop was cut off the wire and test fitted. i was then proceeding to try and solder it in place, and it was only a few minutes into heating i realised i had forgotten to put flux on the part, this cleans the part and allows solder to flow properly, so i stopped and added flux, after this the brass body had to be warmed enough to get the solder to flow into the holes. once i saw the solder flow into the holes (i could see the air bubbling out) then it was time to remove the heat and allow the part to cool. once cool the process of cleaning up the excess solder and flux was done.

Day 7 Tuesday, awake at the normal time 5AM, up and at it fairly early, feed the monsters, and make myself a coffee while pondering the forum. then out to the workshop to do some work on the model, back in, post an update for the model, then breakfast.

that sounds a bit like the story of one of the as laid drawings for a new electricity cable i was sent by the cable jointer, i looked at the sketch and there were unusually very detailed dimensions on it, unfortunately they were all measured from the back corner of his van, when i tracked him down in the yard and asked him how he expected he would find this in the future, i got the answer - he would park the van in the same place.

or use a diy method like this - https://www.instructables.com/id/High-Quality-and-safe-Nickel-Plating/

thats easy, you can buy small chrome plating kits on ebay for under £100, or i might have a go at nickle plating them, its like the rust removal, but in reverse, the part attracts the nickle out of the plating solution.

so details are important, the mudweight locating plate has 6 equi spaced screw holes, so these need to be represented, into my indexing fixture, this one is only accurate to about a degree, but plenty accurate enough for this, 6 holes at 60 degree spacing, unfortunately the drill bit i want to use is too small to fit in the drill chuck, so a centre point drill is used, this is just to place the hole centres, if i need to drill through i can use these to start the drill bit in a smaller drill.

there were a couple of more videos but i see they are out of focus, so they are on my video channel, but i wont bother putting them here, they were an attempt to show a closer view anyway, i guess you want to know what i was making, here is the finished articles (well not quite finished as i need to add a ring at the top of one part. (the picture it is sitting on is the clue to the part.)