Recent content by rondunn

goldstar31, is your point that model engineering has always been a minority hobby? I guess that holds true for many hobbies, but it doesn't mean that they have to die.

I've been slowly entering this hobby over the last 2-3 years. I probably took a different path to a lot of people. My profession is computing, my earlier passion is woodworking, and I stumbled across CNC and realised it gave me the best of both worlds. I bought a couple of different CNC routers...

I once went behind a sandhill a little to the south of Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory, to attend the call of nature. While I was squatting, a small noise behind me made me turn my head. There was an emu, head down, staring up my nether-regions. I don't know which of us got the bigger...

No matter what we think of trade unions and big business, this is still a bad day for Australia. When we're all serving fast food and mowing lawns, and every product we buy comes from overseas, and all our food production is owned by China, where will the money come from? At the time it...

It is a sad day for manufacturing and industry, and for all the families whose lives depend on on the jobs that will vanish. As many as 2,000 skilled workers will now be blowing their redundancies on lawnmowing franchises, etc., and the Jims mob must be expecting a tidal wave of applications...

Gus, you're lucky to have that balcony. Since moving to Singapore I have been too scared of the neighbours to do anything other than sit and look at my tools stacked up in the bomb shelter :( Ron.

Why is everyone so keen to devalue this person's work? Wouldn't YOU like to think that someone out there placed a high value on something you made? Look at the skills that go into model making, or any fine engineering for that matter; wouldn't it be nice to see them valued at more than a few...

Thank you, gentlemen. That's the sort of advice I needed. Ron.

Can I make a flywheel using just a mill and a rotary table? I'm about to buy a new mill and I have two choices: spend all my budget on a better mill, or accept a lesser mill and get a lathe as well. I'd rather buy the better mill, but my planned projects are all engine and toy related, and I'm...

I don't rely on hard disks any more. Too many problems to trust them with anything I want kept in the long term. These days I have a Dropbox account (http://www.dropbox.com). $100 per year for 50Gb and I've got my important documents and files available no matter what happens to my computers -...

What can be used for long term power? For example, 1 hour, or even 8 hours? I'm a bit leery of making boilers even though I survived a childhood of unsupervised Mamod, so assuming that I want people to see my work running, what options do I have?