HI , just bought an ml10 and haven't even switched it on yet.
.after years of self bodging or paying people to make spacers / bushes etc for motorcycles I thought I should add another lump of metal to my workshop…and maybe even learn how to use it . anyone close to junction 20 0f the m25 who has time to show me the absolute basics while earning a contribution to the beer fund please get in touch . thanks
the link sounds very interesting , there is also a college in herts not far from me that does a 10 week once a week evening course in hobby engineering with access to lots of equipment including lathes and mills .
starts in January and only 100 pounds so I will almost certainly enroll .
would still like to have someone to show me the basics on my lathe though , so any interest in that would be much appreciated .
Those sort of courses have been very popular with model engineers in the past – they often weren't too bothered about what people actually made. Once people do know what they are doing reasonably well it was a good way of making more expensive tooling using decent equipment that was perfectly capable of doing the job.
As far as I am aware there are none of them about round here now. Once schools had a lot more metal working equipment than they tend to have now and offered evening classes.
There has been another change as well. Eg A local astronomy club had excellent facilities for making telescopes buried in the basement of a university. The powers that be didn't know it was there. Last thing I heard was that they found out, decided that it was unsafe so no one can use it any more.
Paul, I passed you about 7am this morning as I joined the traffic jam.
If you had posted 24 hours earlier I would have told you to come along to the St Albans DMES last night but now you will have to wait a month for the next meeting. If you knew about the small engineering works in Hunton Bridge that retired last year he is one of our members and quite a few more members are nearby. We have a couple of motorbike types and can introduce you to driving steam engines and yachts too.
Not sure which engineering course you are talking about but another of our members was running sessions at a local school until retiring this year and not sure if he will be able to continue that.
Unfortunately i'm within a whiskers mark of being quite close to you (north herts) but i don't drive! so i would love to help but unless i can get a bus to watford i can't see it happening.
will be along to your next meet for sure , as regards the M25 jam … I am a mobile industrial refrigeration engineer who is in it for 3-4 hours every day ! cannot fit all my tools on the bike unfortunately .