It's now freezing in Newcastle upon Tyne, too cold in the workshop and really the invitations to keep swopping into morning dress and evening dress and consume large quantities of Christmas, then New Year, then Burns Suppers and finally Chinese New Year is far to tempting.
So between large offerings of food and alcohol I have done little serious work but have sought to find 'a cheap' solution to tool grinding. frankly, Chuck Fellows excellent contribution to tool grinding simply does not exist anymore. I've spent a whole morning with a headache from too much Chinese banquet, too much wine and far too much whisky but nothing more has turned up. Tonight it's evening dress and formal dinner yet again after a masonic evening.
So a simple fabrication of something simple. Years ago, I was one of these people who saw the hidden advantages of one of cheap and rather nasty Chinese 3 way vices utilising a cheap but not quite so nasty 6" double ended grinder was thought up and published by the late and much lamented John Stevenson in Nottingham. It works, I did a better hand scraping of the ways in the vice ways.
Today, with cheap and very good Chinese 7 x14 etc lathes it is possible to concoct a surface grinder which is really all that things like Clarksons, Stents, Brooks and whatever are. If you add a better three way little vice to the earlier idea, one has an extremely useful tool. I have a vice, a Clarkson and a fabricated Stent- and have tested it. I've got a SiegC4 lathe complete with a vertical but movable mill drill- nothing is impossible!
The other bright thing for people without a means of dividing and graduating is a mathematical formula of using the number 0.0088 to solve degrees on grinding wheels. One wants an angle of say 7 degrees which is a common requirement and say a 6" wheel. So the maths is :-
0.0088 X 7degrees x 6 inches. 0.3696" which is near 0.375" (3/8ths)or at a pinch a millimetre
It's a simple as that.
Back to carousing- and spending the Children's Inheritance.
Norman
