Excess Postage

 If I ever have a nemesis, I'll need their postal address. Then I'll send them letters and parcels but without paying the right postage.

My sister is generally not paying attention. She once received a wonderful letter from her bank that said something like "Thank you for your change of address notification. Unfortunately we have been unable to action this as you didn't include your name or your account details".

When she visited me recently she somehow accidentally took a radiator bleed key with her when she left. She texted me a photo of it and asked if I wanted it back. Yes Please. A couple of weeks later I got a snotty letter from Royal Mail about an item addressed to me that didn't have the correct postage paid. About a week after I paid the excess (and a handsome handling charge) I received my own radiator bleed key through the letterbox. Poor value - would not buy again.

Richard "Amazon Composite" B

Better than the R.A.C.

 In the late 90's I didn’t own my own car or a mobile phone. One weekend I borrowed my mum's car and drove to Guildford to meet my friend. I broke down a few miles short of his house and had to walk to someone's house, ask to use their phone and call him. He dutifully came and towed me back.

Last weekend I drove in a car that I inherited from my mum to visit the same friend in a village near Guildford. Again I broke down a few miles short of his house, again he dutifully came and rescued me. I believe that as soon as he got off the phone with me he said "this is the second time he's done this now".

The first time it was an alternator fault. We misdiagnosed it and bought a new battery, and while it did get me home it had to be fixed properly once I'd got home. This time it was the clutch and while we tried to put a new clutch in ourselves we ran out of time (we had dogs to walk, birthday parties to attend, stag nights to go on) and I had to come home in a recovery truck.

Richard "we couldn't get the drive shaft out" B

Swarf

 I'm learning to use my lathe from Youtube, and there are quite a lot of videos about what your first turning project should be. My first one was just making some chips off a bolt head to see if I could get the thing cutting. My 2nd project was to make a handwheel for a friend's watchmaker's lathe. He's also recently become a lathe owner and his lathe is too small to make its own handwheels. I didn't make a very good job of it. I've now thrown myself in to job 3 which is to make a strong and airtight catchtank out of aluminium.

A good friend of mine acquired a lathe a few years ago. It came with the house he bought (my mum once got an elderly pet rabbit in the same way). As he's a few years ahead of me in self-taught turning I asked him what he'd done on his lathe. His answer was poetic and honest. "I've turned valuable stock into piles of swarf".

I'm close behind him. Every operation I do my proposed catchtank design gets smaller and thinner.

Richard "CCMT06" B

Treasures

 I'm now the proud owner of a lathe, and various boxes of junk/treasure that goes with it. It belonged to the father of a good friend of mine. Sadly he died between agreeing to sell it and completing the deal. Even worse the roof of his workshop had failed and everything was rusty/mouldy/mildewed (I did get a steep discount).

The lathe itself is from Warco, so it will have been a Taiwanese import, but fettled in and delivered from the home counties. It's small. 9 inch swing and 20 inch between centres. 3/4hp motor. You need to put it on a bench and it only weighs about 100kg. It is sadly rusty and in need of quite a lot of restoration. With the original owner being dead, it's quite hard to know what's what. There are boxes of tools and accessories, a lot of them damaged, and it's hard to identify all of them.

I think I've mentioned "yak shaving" before. You can't do job A until you've done job B. You can't do job B until you've done job C. Eventually you need to have shaved a yak before you can finish what you started. I want to use the lathe to make part of a catch tank. I need to use the 4 jaw chuck to grab the stock because it's too big for the 3 jaw. I need to use the dial indicator to centre the stock in the 4 jaw. I found dial indicator, it's clearly ancient and has been repaired many times over the years. It has got wet and seized but I managed to free it up. The "glass" seems to be homemade from acrylic and it has gone yellow and cloudy so that you can't actually see the needle. I found myself polishing a dodgy bit of acrylic as a necessary step in cutting some 4 inch aluminium tube. I wouldn't have been surprised if the polishing had had to be done with freshly shaved yak hair.

Richard "Mitutoyo" B

D.I.Y.

 As I have previously mentioned my car has old fashioned wheel bearings with conical races and tapered rollers – and a big castellated nut with a split pin.

I was able to drift out the old races but try as I might I couldn't find a way to press in the new ones. I thought I could use my hub puller in reverse, but there wasn't enough room to fit any kind of tool under it. I thought I could use my vice but it wasn't big enough. I thought I could use the stub axle and the hub nut but it wasn't long enough. I eventually gave up and took the hubs and the new bearings to my favourite garage.

When I picked them up they refused to take any money. Instead I got quite an insulting lecture about how easy a job it was and that I could definitely have done it at home without bothering them. The races weren't a tight fit - "I could almost have pushed them in with my thumb" and I had the old races to use as a drift. Apparently they went all the way home with a couple of taps from a hammer.

Richard "But at What Cost?" B

Perfect Pitch

 My car has an old fashioned front axle with double wishbones and uprights with a stub axle. The hub is supported on the stub by tapered needle roller bearings which need to be repacked with grease every 4 years. How quaint!

I have played with some very skilled musicians over the years, but I now consider that none of them had as good an ear as the mechanic who did my MOT this year. He gave me "noisy wheel bearing offside front" as an advisory. When I took the bearings apart to grease them one of the bars on the cage that holds the rollers in place had broken off and probably been crushed in the bearing. The outer race was slightly discoloured but I saw no other damage. As far as I was concerned it ran smoothly and didn’t make excessive noise.

Richard "He's the Alan Jeffery of Chasses" B