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Nice, Brian! An old hand told me that whenever he has to do something precise in the 3-jaw chuck he will slowly tighten each jaw in several passes while tapping the chuck with a light copper hammer.

From the inside it looks wonderfull and it really is. But it is just the partitioned back-end of the open shed in the yard. The original shed was so low that I bumped my head at the back-end. Our local village smith has solved this by raising it 0,5 meter. With a simple car-jack he went five...

My bar stock sits vertical in a rack size 400 x 600 mm, with my brass sheet to the side. The stock is color-coded. You should avoid cutting a piece from the color-coded end! Short stock sits in drawers. For general storage I use quite ordinary kitchen cabinets as I find workshop tooling and...

Well done! The only small disadvantage of organization is that it takes a bit of serendipity out of the search.

Thanks for the for me new idea of plastic covers. Only my (recent) Myford has one. Now that I understand I will fabricate some for the other machines. Australian sheepfarmers found that steel posts after rubbing by sheep don't rust. It seems that sheeps wool fat is about the most effective and...

Hi Animal12, as for me a TAIG or Sherline falls very much in the category of desired machinetools, I'm happy to oblige. I've mounted the TAIG on a length of U-beam. The electronic motor controls are at the underside of the U-beam. The motor is of the type used in Robotics, 40 Volts, 5 Amps and...

One of our most popular manuals is 'Practical Benchwork for Horologists' by Louis and Samuel Levin, any edition from 1938 on.

As I have developed the habit of throwing away the bills for my tools and deleting the relevant financial data from the innermost recesses of my head I can honestly say I don't have any idea about the cost of the contents of my shed.

On Machinetools.... . I worked my whole live in machineshops all over the Western World and upon retirement I find that actually manufacturing something yourself is quite different from managing it or talking about it. I limit myself to the technology from about the 1960's. So a lathe, a mill...

Sadly he is no longer with us. Frans Arts had most of his designs in his head. Usually he would start out with a traditional base and keep adding to it. No drawings or sketches left behind.

You are right about back to the basic issue. Lately I have started to improve my skills in shaping metal with hand-tools. A major motivator is the clock which our former member Frans Arts of our horology society made without any machinetool at all. It took him four years. Also all gears and...

Most of my equipment is of good lineage but has seen more than half a century work. Like on myself this leaves some marks, so the internal grinding of the jaws of chucks is not new to me. To tighten up the jaws I first followed the bad advice to put a ring at the backside of the jaws. Then I...

On a good place for your workshop I suggest to take a good hard look at the separate kitchen. You may find that when you move the kitchen stuff to a corner of the living room the quality of the daily food will not really suffer. And you have opened up an excellent place where you machines will...

Thank you, I appreciate the fast and to the point responses I get!

Thank you very much indeed!

A good friend of mine recently went on, and I am tasked to find useful destinations for his machines, tools and materials. His collection shows that he was am avid home machinist for more than 65 years. Not everything is clear to me, as he was more into tools, machines and general construction...

Kromhout constructed this engine in license from Gardner Diesel. Maybe interesting to know that the Kromhout machineshop/shipyard is located adjacent to the site of, and is a direct descendant from, the main shipyards of the VOC, where the ships were built for the trade with East Asia, in...

Thank you! I sure knew about Sherline. But they just did not respond, so I went to the source.

For some reason unclear to me Peatol from the UK never answered any emails from me in the Netherlands. Finally I found a friend bound for California who brought my TAIG back over as hand luggage. As personal luggage the price is lower than duty requirements when you package the machine and the...

Exactly the same thing happened to me. It is in the design of the axial centering dial indicator. Dependant on the length of the feeler you use, the relation between displacement of the point of the indicator and the displacement of the dial indicator is 10:1. This means that an eccentricity of...