Hi Guys,
Seems to be a spate of Lurkers becoming active members lately, I've been lurking for around a year, so I probably should introduce myself too.
Before I get to that though, a friendly tip for non-Australians on the pronunciation of 'Aussie'
It is pronounced with hard Z's, like Ozzy Osbourne... I only bring this up due to the soft 'Ossy' heard frequently on TV
Anyway, my name is Simon and I live in Perth, Western Australia.
I currently work for a company that designs and builds Fire Protection Systems for the oil & gas industry.
Occasional CAD work lets me play with Autodesk Inventor 3D modeling software but my main role at the moment is documentation.
I just finished a ~1700 page PDF document containing Material Certificates and Hazardous area certificates etc etc, of which the Client requested four hard copies... had to print and collate ~7000 pages!
Weren't we supposed to have been a paperless society by now?
My interest is mainly in IC engines, but I have had the occasional urge to build a beam engine with coal fired boiler. Will get around to that someday.
I suspect I am like many members of this forum, in that I was fascinated by model aircraft, cars and boats when I was a kid, which ofcourse lead to an interest in Glow and CI engines and then onto dreams of owning a workshop full of machines to make my own Glow or 'Diesel'.
A magazine I used to buy when I was a dreamer kid was 'Airborne' magazine which often had adverts for the Taig lathe, I used to stare at those adverts and dream for years. Another advert I used to see was for the Conley V8... that really got me dreaming!
The magazine also had(still does?) a columnist named Brian Winch. He wrote a monthly article called 'The Airborne Engineer' in which he occasionally wrote about his own workshop and constructing engines, all with a very witty sense of humour, and he often mentioned a magazine called 'Strictly IC'... but being a young kid, with little money and a magazine published on the other side of the planet... a subscription remained a dream.
I now have about half the SIC back issues, and will be purchasing the remaining issues as cash flow permits.
I'm slowly piecing my workshop together, it is modest at the moment and contains a Sieg C3 lathe (7x14), X2 mill, a vertical bandsaw, horizontal bandsaw, and a half completed gantry style CNC router that uses parts salvaged from an old Servo driven pen plotter.
I still need to sort out the Z axis and build a spindle which will be driven by a high speed BLDC motor. I will probably have ER8 collets or something similar for the spindle, but would like to somehow set it up with an auto tool changer. Also need to shell out for some Gecko servo drives.
I recently purchased a set of plans for Steve's 'Little Demon' V8, however I hadn't considered that the plans were in imperial units(silly me) so not sure what to do now. I can use imperial no problems, do it all the time, but machining in imperial.... particularly with metric machines... ewww.
I am considering re-modeling the plans in metric using Inventor 3D, and then going from there.
To get an idea of how difficult that would be, I am testing my mettle by re-modeling the plans for David Kerzel's hit'n'miss engine, in metric.
As soon as I have done the cad work for the Kerzel, I will start building it and might start a build thread.
I'm still buying/making tools though(it never ends does it?) so it may be a while.
Thanks to everyone here for such a great forum, it's good to see so many people openly helping others and sharing their knowledge and failures for us newbies to learn from. Two thumbs up!
A short post is a good post right? Sorry! I promise this will be the very last looooong-winded post you see from me... ever! ;D
"I am sorry I have had to write you such a long letter, but I did not have time to write you a short one"--Blaise Pascal
Seems to be a spate of Lurkers becoming active members lately, I've been lurking for around a year, so I probably should introduce myself too.
Before I get to that though, a friendly tip for non-Australians on the pronunciation of 'Aussie'
It is pronounced with hard Z's, like Ozzy Osbourne... I only bring this up due to the soft 'Ossy' heard frequently on TV
Anyway, my name is Simon and I live in Perth, Western Australia.
I currently work for a company that designs and builds Fire Protection Systems for the oil & gas industry.
Occasional CAD work lets me play with Autodesk Inventor 3D modeling software but my main role at the moment is documentation.
I just finished a ~1700 page PDF document containing Material Certificates and Hazardous area certificates etc etc, of which the Client requested four hard copies... had to print and collate ~7000 pages!
Weren't we supposed to have been a paperless society by now?
My interest is mainly in IC engines, but I have had the occasional urge to build a beam engine with coal fired boiler. Will get around to that someday.
I suspect I am like many members of this forum, in that I was fascinated by model aircraft, cars and boats when I was a kid, which ofcourse lead to an interest in Glow and CI engines and then onto dreams of owning a workshop full of machines to make my own Glow or 'Diesel'.
A magazine I used to buy when I was a dreamer kid was 'Airborne' magazine which often had adverts for the Taig lathe, I used to stare at those adverts and dream for years. Another advert I used to see was for the Conley V8... that really got me dreaming!
The magazine also had(still does?) a columnist named Brian Winch. He wrote a monthly article called 'The Airborne Engineer' in which he occasionally wrote about his own workshop and constructing engines, all with a very witty sense of humour, and he often mentioned a magazine called 'Strictly IC'... but being a young kid, with little money and a magazine published on the other side of the planet... a subscription remained a dream.
I now have about half the SIC back issues, and will be purchasing the remaining issues as cash flow permits.
I'm slowly piecing my workshop together, it is modest at the moment and contains a Sieg C3 lathe (7x14), X2 mill, a vertical bandsaw, horizontal bandsaw, and a half completed gantry style CNC router that uses parts salvaged from an old Servo driven pen plotter.
I still need to sort out the Z axis and build a spindle which will be driven by a high speed BLDC motor. I will probably have ER8 collets or something similar for the spindle, but would like to somehow set it up with an auto tool changer. Also need to shell out for some Gecko servo drives.
I recently purchased a set of plans for Steve's 'Little Demon' V8, however I hadn't considered that the plans were in imperial units(silly me) so not sure what to do now. I can use imperial no problems, do it all the time, but machining in imperial.... particularly with metric machines... ewww.
I am considering re-modeling the plans in metric using Inventor 3D, and then going from there.
To get an idea of how difficult that would be, I am testing my mettle by re-modeling the plans for David Kerzel's hit'n'miss engine, in metric.
As soon as I have done the cad work for the Kerzel, I will start building it and might start a build thread.
I'm still buying/making tools though(it never ends does it?) so it may be a while.
Thanks to everyone here for such a great forum, it's good to see so many people openly helping others and sharing their knowledge and failures for us newbies to learn from. Two thumbs up!
A short post is a good post right? Sorry! I promise this will be the very last looooong-winded post you see from me... ever! ;D
"I am sorry I have had to write you such a long letter, but I did not have time to write you a short one"--Blaise Pascal
