Recent content by Paul135

Thank you Brian, My most important project currently when the garden and SWMBO permit is getting my lathe levelling finished as my workshop (old cow shed) floor slopes significantly. I found a way of making adjustable feet for the columns using ice hockey pucks off Amazon with M16 studding. I...

Thank you for your kind offer to help me learning FreeCad. Being summer with vast amounts of work to do outside generally and in the veg gardens in particular, doing any Cad has gone out the window. The resouces you mention are all those I watch and learn from. Mango Jelly is probably my...

Hi GreenTwin Thanks for the photos of your furnace and burner. The direction I am going will be using one of my scrap 13kg propane bottles and lining with a Kaowool type blanket, rigidiser, refactory cement and a zircon coating. The Ron Riel burner is one of the options I looked at making and...

Hi Pat and thank you. I probably should have introduced myself with; my name is Paul and I am a tooloholic. Like you I can never have enough. Unlike you I have to unfortunately share both metal and wood machines in the same shop. It is very interesting that you are into foundry work. I have...

Blender is pretty amazing. Some people use it for meshing their OpenFoam models. I don't think I have the time to really get into Blender as well. It is a big subject in its own right.

I have had many years of experience designing and running physical fluid dynamics simulations, including wind tunnel work. This type of modelling I found, provided a very high degree of confidence to the clients of our consultancy. The CFD was quite complementary however in being able to put...

Tim, what you say about results being off highlights the snake-oil aspect. From what I have seen in my working life the proprietary vendors are not transparent on the mathematics encapsulated in their code. This another reason I like open source software. Finite analysis is certainly one of...

I have noticed that quite a few CAD programs include CFD and finite analysis. I would agree with you about snake oil as often they are a bit shy on the code origins. The lack of snake oil is one the features I like about FreeCad. It has a workbench for linking into OpenFoam, a very powerful...

Hi Tim, I use the QCad community version, so still free and with no worries about it suddenly being terminated like DraftSight (which was very good).

As a Linux user most of the CAD programs mentioned are not available, hence I use QCAD for 2D and am bit by bit learning FreeCad for 3D. I do have LibreCad installed and have a play with it now and again. However I would not go back to Windows as a main operating system again.

Hi Baron, If like me you come from a 2D CAD background, yes, FreeCAD seems very awkward. The difficulty I find comes from the 2D on the "paper" aspect going to expressing your ideas in a 3D model. I have read often of this difficulty. However I persist with trying to learn to use it as it can...

Hi Peter, Short answer no. Unfortunately LibreCad is only 2D and has not had any development for some years. For 2D you would be better with QCad, which in its community edition is free but again does not do STL. To create your STL files you would be better to go with FreeCad, also free but a...

Hi K2, are you sure it is the board and not the brushes on the motor? For a new board have a look here: https://www.axiscontrols.co.uk/products-services/products/dc-variable-speed-drives/kb-electronics-dc/kbic-range/kbic-240d-dc-motor-speed-controller I bought the KB board for my lathe there...

Congratulations on getting the lathe running. Can you confirm please which board you got sent as the replacement? Is it a genuine KB electronics board? I ask from the point of view that there will be other CX lathe users reading this thread. My own experience of the KB board, which I...

A lot of old electronics does not seem to turn on due to the electrolytic capacitors. They go bad with age effectively drying out, some spilling out their liquid.gel. I have rebuilt quite a few power supplies and recapped motherboards etc to restore electronic equipment and computers.