Jul 172017
 

I made a small furnace for heat treating steel, although it should also be hot enough to cast aluminium and brass.  The basic design is from a YouTube video by a schoolboy, and is the neatest small design I have seen on the web, although the basic principle could easily be modified to give different configurations – in particular it would be easy to make a front access furnace, or one that would take a longer part using the more of same bricks and elements etc. with a different configuration and a modified steel cage round it.   Having used the furnaces a few times I think I skimped by only having half thickness bricks on the base as it gets pretty hot underneath – although as its standing on  legs above a piece of stone it doesn’t really matter.    The basic parts of the furnaces were sourced from Ebay and I spent around £80 or 90 making it, but I did have quite a bit of old junk lying about that got incorporated, including the metal for making the framework,  the wiring bits for the circuit and the old plastic box and aluminium panels.

 

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Apr 012016
 

Here is a new project;-  I need a very low profile engraving vice for my portable kit, and it would probably make life more comfortable in the workshop – the height of my engraver’s block/ball, plus the working distance of the microscope plus the height from objective to eyepiece is uncomfortably close to the distance between my lap and my eye when sitting.  So I have a project to build a thin vice using only 8mm x 50 mm bright steel bar, an angle grinder, a pedestal drill  and some M6 screws and an M6 tap plus an M10 tap and an old M10 bolt for the fundamentals, plus a very small amount of TIG welding on the jaws (could be screwed).  I have cheated in that I put the half finished vice platform in the lathe to get it shaped – cosmetic only – I could have done it with the angle grinder given more time and patience than I had – plus I ran out of cutting disks for the grinder!

viceA

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Feb 242015
 

 

Since putting this up originally  I’ve changed my microscope – the Wild I now use is described, but I also more recently  bought a Chinese AMSCOPE zoom trinocular microscope because I wanted to have a digital video camera that showed my work while it was in progress for demonstrations – unfortunately the cheap trinocular microscopes you can buy all seem to work by switching out one eye in order to use the camera, so you cant work normally and show it to a screen at the same time, so it didn’t do what I wanted it for.  It is, however, a perfectly good microscope, and I’ve fitted a pillar for a headrest in place of the digital camera mount.  Mine came with a very good stand with a sliding arm and quite a long reach, and it has the slight advantage over the Wild that the eyepieces have a longer ‘eye relief’ so your eyes can be further from the eyepiece lense and its easier to keep your glasses on.  The zoom isn’t much of an advantage compared to the 3 stage click magnification of the Wild as its easier to get the scale of things if its one of 3 magnifications.   All in all it is a perfectly acceptable microscope and for our purposes there is not much to choose between it and the Wild which probably originally cost 10 times as much, and even second hand cost 50% more.   ( I paid £600 for the Wild with case and stand and light, the Amscope was £422 with stand).

as of Oct 2018 I mostly use the Wild microscope in my workshop and the Amscope for demonstrating as it saves disturbing the Wild.

 

The starting point for engraving is the tools, for me that’s mostly push gravers, and mostly square gravers.   Since engraving steel wears the tools very quickly, and the biggest cause of slips and errors is blunt tools or broken tips, you won’t get anywhere until you have got the equipment and skill to sharpen your gravers – there is no short cut to this.  Experienced engravers can (mostly) sharpen their tools by hand without jigs or guides but for ordinary mortals it is not possible. Disbelieve me at your peril!

tools1

 

Part of my setup – the tools are mostly squares sharpened the same way so I only have to stop and sharpen tools when I have blunted a number.  There are a few other tools – knife and ongulet and some lozenge.

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