The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

Well my parcel has just arrived. Thanks' very much Christel and Dave, some handy bits there that I'm sure I can find a use for.

I quite fancy making a small Sterling engine if time allows.

1066

A question about some the bits of bar stock in my pack. The aluminium bar that you use for your comparators is it aluminium tube or have you drilled/machined the hole through the centre. By the length of the samples I am guessing its tube. Yes/No. If it is tube were do you get it from or is it a trade secret.

:roll:

It's Ok the bits you sent me will do for what I want I was just curious. I would be well impressed if he had bored the hole through the centre himself. :lol:

Be impressed, the hole in the middle is bored to +/- 0.0005" using a bespoke boring tool capable of going down to 0.159"

I'm impressed that he can do that accurately over the lengths of tube I have seen. I take my hat off to him.

One of the benefits of a big lathe and mad skills :-)

The two lathes here are not huge however they are both very, very accurate. The biggest sits on isolating mounts on a very large lump of reinforced concrete that is independent to the rest of the workshop and the lathe itself is level. keeping things level is key to accuracy and as such a conventional spirit level is certainly not going to do the job. Next thing is using the correct tooling and fixtures for jobs and I use a lot of bespoke material holding systems for everything from RCBS adapters through to 34" rifle barrels and actions. I build the vast majority of the fixtures myself. Good DRO's (Digital Read Outs) I run 5 micron systems and believe they are essential. I also run pairs of lever type DTI's that will measure to 0.0001" and they are in calibration.

If you are talking about comparators then yes they are bored by me. The boring is not the hard part, it is maintaining the position of the slots from batch to batch. getting this to the level of accuracy I wanted took a lot of imagination.

If you are talking about cleaning rod guides then it is totally dependant on the ID and OD, some are deep drilled by me from 25,0mm stock and some the material is available but to special order. It took me over a year to find someone who held the stuff and it was the result of a cancelled order.

David, I think it's fair to say I both envy and hate you :-P

Im guessing its the tube you use for your comparators. I got a couple of lengths of the tube between 8" to 10" long they are 20mm OD I think with a 6mm ID I looked down the tube and could not see any machine marks so I was curious to know if it was bought in tube or if you had machined the hole through the centre. The piece being 10" long If you did bore the hole through the middle like I said I am seriously impressed. As I say it was just my engineering side thinking wow did he do that.
The tube is exactly what I want for a project and that's it in a nut shell. I love the sound of your set up. The only problem with it is you need to know how to use it. Ill stick to what I know oil and Gas. :lol: :lol: