The Diaries Of An Un-Furloughed Grendel

[grendel]

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

[grendel]

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.

[MauriceMynah]

1 hour ago, grendel said:

I dunno, Call that "rust"?

I owned a Ford Anglia, and a mate of mine had a Triumph Herald!  We know rust when we see it!

[grendel]

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.

[SwanR]

I have been enjoying getting a look at the night skies over the last few days Grendel. I don't think my iPhone picture quite compares to yours!!

 

[grendel]

its a nice picture all the same.

[FairTmiddlin]

5 hours ago, MauriceMynah said:

I dunno, Call that "rust"?

I owned a Ford Anglia, and a mate of mine had a Triumph Herald!  We know rust when we see it!

Problem was with 60/70's cars was you didn't see the rust. Just where it had been before it left the car.

Often in large lumps in the road

[Timbo]

6 hours ago, FairTmiddlin said:

Problem was with 60/70's cars

Uncle Albert was behind the wheel of some of 'em!

[grendel]

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

[SteveO]

8 hours ago, FairTmiddlin said:

Problem was with 60/70's cars was you didn't see the rust. Just where it had been before it left the car.

Often in large lumps in the road

A pal of mine had a Triumph Toledo back in the '70's. He thought all was well until he drove through a puddle at speed and found himself soaked up to the knees. 

[grendel]

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.

[grendel]

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).

[Ray]

12 minutes ago, grendel said:

. ...once the nuts have cooled they will be having a bath...

I'm sorry...... 😂😂😂😂😂

[grendel]

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.

[wombat nee blownup]

Well I don’t know but the time spent labelling the drawers etc I d have thought the packet of three plugs would have been in a drawer marked .........PLUGS???


Sent from my iPhone using Norfolk Broads Network

[grendel]

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

[Bytheriver]

7 hours ago, SteveO said:

A pal of mine had a Triumph Toledo back in the '70's. He thought all was well until he drove through a puddle at speed and found himself soaked up to the knees. 

I had a Toledo too & it was ok when I traded up to a 1500 after 3 years (My father worked for a BMC dealer & did the PDIs & applied the under-seal which was an extra those days He told me the fitters who went for factory training laughed at the flakes of rust coming off the spray shop roof which had to be caught on plastic sheets to save the cars)

[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.

[grendel]

the grinder is back together the sanding is done on the model, time to tidy inside cupboards and generally on lower shelves etc. the plugs came to light this morning when i moved my jigsaw to get a can of oil out, i had picked them up, reached in and got the oil when i looked down and saw what i had in my hand.

[grendel]

more tidying of cupboards has progressed, next we need to tackle under the work bench

[grendel]

Day 14 wednesday,

well here we are at the two week mark already, yesterday was spent sorting under the work bench and through cupboards, some tools i had forgotten i had came to light, i found a set of taps and dies from way back that were covered in rust, they have gone into a bath of evaporust, for as long as it takes.

todays tasks, no ideas yet, i did find an engraving tool that i am looking at for some of the stainless steel lettering on the side of the model, however it really needs to be cut out, that said i also found an old dremel set of tools that included my long lost dentist burrs, which are great for fine detail work on wood. i am about to head back into the workshop to see what needs doing, and apply some dustings of paint onto the newly sanded hull of the model, its still not as smooth as i would like as i was trying not to sand through the white paint layer, but it is a lot better.

[grendel]

Today i was playing with tool steel grinding my own lathe tools to work with brass, this general tool seems to have come out quite good,  here we start off taking a 0.025mm cut (approx 1/2 thousanths of an inch) and its producing a very nice shaving from the brass, second video going up to .15mm cuts.

i also found that a steel die that has turned into a blob of rust, probably cant be recovered with evaporust, though you can see its a die now - to be fair, when i found this set 5 years back there was water in the case and probably had been for a few years

 

 

[grendel]

Day 15 Thursday.

today will be interesting, as training is still allowed during furlough, my company is taking advantage of the fact, today I have a 1 hour skype training session, next week we have 2 6 hour training sessions lined up, it will be interesting to see how they will work that one, considering they want us to access our work PC's for parts of it, while still remaining on skype, I can do that, but it will mean I cant see the skype while I am accessing the work PC, i will have to point that out to the trainer, as most people will have the skype and work on the same screen as they have work laptops, for me once I log into work, that takes over my screen and I have to shut it down again to get back to my pc screen.

well we are certainly experiencing that ancient chinese curse, and living in interesting times.

[grendel]

this morning so far , bits have been removed from evaporust and cleaned up, wire brushing on the rusty dies has revealed they are heavily pitted, and i have spent an hour on a skype call 'training' this was hilarious as half the people couldn't see the presentation, and the other half couldn't hear it. i started off not being able to see it, then transitioned to not being able to hear it and finally got round to being both able to see and hear it.

after a whole hour i had learned nothing new.

[grendel]

die cleanup continued, after the wire brushing it was on to the important bits that cut threads, drills were pushed by hand through the holes to clean them up, then out came the grinder with the sanding belt to clean up the outsides, i guess somewhere in the region of 90% of the dies have been saved. some of these are sizes i dont have elsewhere so they cover a gap, as i acquire better ones they will get replaced.