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Toothpaste is about 1/3 abrasive by weight. Some of the abrasives used in toothpaste include hydrated aluminium oxides, dehyrated silica gels and silicates, which can have quite high Mohs' hardness values. Give it a go - while it won't grind away material at a rapid rate it quickly discolours...

I'm with Steve - post the list!

A lavender engine would have been...interesting... On my screen though, your engine looks bright orange, not red at all. Still looks great though, and if I ever paint an engine orange you'll know where I got the idea.

It's good to hear you're open to advice. Re the gloves, even the very thin latex or nitrile ones can be dangerous. They seem flimsy enough but if they get grabbed by a rotating part they can quickly roll up into something that you will not be able to tear and suck you in. Most of the 'normal'...

That turned out really nicely, well done. I'm a little surprised at how well the colour scheme suits it - not the sort of colours I would have thought of using for an engine but they work!

I first used the helicron site around 2013 from memory, 2014 at the very latest, so it's been around for a while.

I can't take the credit for the idea - here's the link to the page which describes the tool with the following pages covering the math, etc. to construct one (if you're interested to see how it compares with yours) LINK.

You could face off a bar then zero the dro at that point and measure the bar length from the chuck jaws (mark which jaw you measure from). Now turn the bar down for some specific length and measure from that step to the marked jaw. That distance, plus the distance your DRO is showing you moved...

For the 'straight rack', I imagine it could make quite a difference in precision for something like change gears for a lathe, but for non-critical applications like cam gears for a model, the same type of cutter but only doing 1 pass at full depth produces a decent facsimile of the involute...

Hi Del. I have only watched your 'spinning top' video but I do have some feedback for you. In my experience (which is just hundreds of hours wasted on watching youtube machining videos) the majority of videos with music over them get called out by the viewers who would prefer to hear the...

Do you not do this? I print out a workshop copy of my plans which I use to document changes, actual finished dimensions I've achieved, calculations or even just notes to myself as I go. At the end of the job my workshop plans are scrappy and sometimes barely readable but they've finished their...

I like the vacuum idea and it would be an interesting experiment to try it on a bush that has been refilled using the thumb/palm pressure technique. My intuition suggests the vacuum method would find more trapped air in the bush and therefore get more oil into it. If I had some I'd give it a go...

Truly outstanding work and a beautiful model!

That's pretty much exactly how I make them.

My procedure is similar to Brians' although there's enough differences to mention. I cut my valves and seats at the same angle (nominal 45 degrees) but as the seat cutter is made in the same setup as the valves themselves it doesn't matter if it's a little off). I also use brass cages and only...

As far as I know side valve is the same as flat head, at least where I come from. You can't have a flat head if it has valves in it so there's nowhere else for them to go but on the side...

What you are so stoically defending is an American standard that does not exist in the rest of the world. Here in Australia, if the man in the shop is told to braze it not solder it, he will inevitably pull out a stick of bronze filler and braze it, because that's what 'braze' means to us. So we...

I've been quiet but I'm certainly following with interest. I am curious, do you know what grade ali the original conrod was made from? I'm thinking I should have a look at some of my older engines (although they don't see much running so hopefully they're ok).

I'm not familiar with the tower of Babel (except that it's mythological) and I assume the satellite you mean is the Mars Climate Orbiter that was slammed into the surface of Mars because Lockheed incorrectly used archaic American standard units instead of metric as specified by NASA? If this is...

It's something of a fools errand to try and standardise even the simplest of terms across large geographic areas. We can't even agree on the pronunciation of things like 'solder' let alone the finer details of soldering vs brazing. As for the terms themselves, there is a US standard that says...