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As someone who in their very early days built a table saw using an upside down circular saw held somewhat precariously upside down under a table, and didn't see the need for a safety fence. I soon learnt the hard way to be wary of sharp spinning things when I slipped running timber through and...

As an owner of a Proxxon DB250 and a Sherline, they are different purpose machines, but I must admit the DB250 is an unusually gutless machine even for a small lathe, not really much of a joy to use for pens I found. The ridiculous on/off cycle renders it almost unusable anyway. To my mind it's...

Could you do one face first leaving a stem, then grip the stem in the chuck and do the other face, then knock the stem off and lightly touch up the nub? You could even use some some quick and easy soft jaw inserts to grip for the second operation to make it easier.

I have an Optimum BF16 and love it, it's an absolutely superb machine for light aluminium machining, fantastic value. For bigger stuff I have a 3hp geared head knee mill. I spent ages looking at various smaller models, and gradually going up in size until I ended up with a model pretty much...

They're forges are really nicely made, great value I reckon. Pretty quick shipping to OZ too for my one.

There's a time and a place for everything, and in general criticism should always be constructive, but you can really only do so much hand holding for grown ups, as there will always be a segment of people who are incapable of the application of common sense with some things, and need "extreme...

In OZ we're pretty stuffed when it comes to buying online, although the stance of China of late to OZ after the Covid investigation has put a lot of people off buying anything Chinese. My 6090 cost me around $5k AUD all up including getting ripped off on local port and brokerage fees, but was...

I have a couple of the Unimat SL1000's and another model I can't think of right now, but I think the Sherline overall is a better quality machine that holds a better tolerance, and is designed with a fairly decent robustness despite the small size, at least IMHO anyway. I started out in CNC...

The Sherline is a truly beautiful machine, and I absolutely love mine. Quality build, well designed, a delight to play with, but if I had to rely on it to produce any sort of quantity of product with a consistently good finish, I think I'd go nuts pretty quick. I got into the CNC route early...

Very true yes, I mentioned that one as I originally intended to get the MF70, but after digging found out about the abysmal duty cycle of the motor (why are they so bad?), and that it was essentially not a lot better than a really nicely made toy for any form of substantial work, of course small...

As small (relative term there) mills go, I have one of these, and they are amazingly powerful in what I would consider quite a small footprint for a decent hobbyist mill that can produce industrial quality work...

Fantastic work! The castings came out brilliantly! Do you use any type of compounds to degas/flux when casting to get such a good result?

I too usually find it's the cap that clogs, I keep a thin stiff bit of brass wire that I just poke through and it cleans it every time.

Hi Ken, as others have suggested be very careful copying files from the existing MS install, you may find files you've worked on in sub folders all over the place, especially if you use Outlook for email. If you have another old PC or laptop handy you can trash, the best thing to do would be to...

For those Windows users who want to try a live Linux distro but don't have a cd/dvd drive, there' a brilliant Windows utility called "Rufus" you can download to create a bootable USB. It' as easy as plug the usb in, point Rufus to the iso image of the downloaded Linux distro, and select the usb...

I would actually say with the advancement of device drivers over the years Windows has become far more easily supported, and for most people using it is still a fairly easy task for even the biggest noobs. Apart from the bloatware, invasive telemetry, and crap of releases, it is very usable by...

Win 7 is far superior to Win 10 anyway, in Win 10 they tried to make it everything, for every use, for everyone, and in turn made it so dumbed down and bloated it runs like rubbish, and you have to run 3rd party scripts to turn off all the disgusting telemetry and crap they put in just to make...

All Linux distros come with pretty much everything you need from a security point of view, IPTABLES is usually the default, and can be auto configured by most distros during the install, or afterwards via editing config files, command line, or GUI tools, in linux there's always a lot of choice...

It's many orders of magnitude more reliable and safer than Windows, but if it isn't patched and ports on a firewall are open it can be just as vulnerable. However, I'd say a mis-configured firewall would be the far more likely attack scenario. It's staggering how quickly ports start getting...

I would consider that a pretty decent price myself, certainly compared to what we have on offer here in OZ anyway. And the Sherline's are pretty well regarded in general as a fairly good quality and very workable lathe. I think they would tend to slowly go up in value too as they are fairly...