What have you recycled today?

[Oompa LumpaParticipant @oompalumpa34302]

Well, as I threatened, I melted down the aluminium I had marked as scrap today, this was the result:

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

Nice ingots, what sort of furnace do you have?

Shiny OSB must be the worst photographic background ever!

Neil

[Oompa LumpaParticipant @oompalumpa34302]

Posted by MICHAEL WILLIAMS on 12/01/2014 10:39:41:
Thanks for the several responses to my posting on old suppliers etc .

Makes me a bit sad to think all that once was and is now gone forever .

Perhaps no-one on here under fifty years old remembers when there were lots of interesting shops in most high streets and lots of active factories everywhere .

There are of course still some factories but they are now usually closed secretive places behind razor wire fences . When I was a boy I could walk around where I lived and just look in through the almost always open doors of places and see many interesting things going on . Got invited in for a look a few times as well .

Makes me wonder whether any school leavers now know that engineering even exists as a possible career – they just won't have seen or heard of engineering .

MikeW

I would like to reply to this separately.

Yesterday I endured one of those patronising radio programes where a bunch of well meaning "experts" and "specialists" had gathered to discuss a (new?) social problem.

That of young kids (I use the term advisedly) sitting at home in front of their Playstations and X-Boxes. Wringing their hands in anguish they were. Oh woe, woe, what are we to do. The youth of today, they are so misguided, what can we possibly do? Oh woe!

It is of course self same muppets who created the "National Curriculum" (AKA the death of education as we know it) and the absurd Health and Safety rules that has reduced interaction to the level of very distant observation with a convoluted nonsensical explanation that nobody understands.

Very recently on this forum I read the account of one person whose whole class had to be evacuated by ambulance to the local hospital. Now, I don't know how many people were hurt or how badly. I am not for one second suggesting that there was anything good about this but I firmly believe that it would not be the end of the world if we exposed the youth of today to at least a little bit of risk.

Can you imagine this today? Bloody hell. The writs would bury the local education authority under a mountain of paperwork – would take them six months to dig their way out. So this then brings me to my next point – the parents. A person of my aquaintance (a Primary School teacher) recently told me that the "education system" had realised they might have made a mistake and they were not allowing the children to be adventurous so a new policy has been formulated to allow the children to play with wheels, pieces of wood, and so on and build go-carts or whatever they could create.

So – what happens? The parents, up in arms that little Jimmy might scrape his knee or something, sends him to school with a note: "My son/daughter is expressly forbidden to play with scooter/go-cart/bicycle wheel".
So for the next twelve months, little Jimmy has to sit on the side and not be involved in the class at all during "creative time".

It has all gone to Hell in a Handbag and I just have no answers.

graham.

Edited By Oompa Lumpa on 12/01/2014 19:32:39

[Oompa LumpaParticipant @oompalumpa34302]

Posted by Stub Mandrel on 12/01/2014 19:18:55:

Nice ingots, what sort of furnace do you have?

Shiny OSB must be the worst photographic background ever!

Neil

I have a Carbolite, it goes up to 1100 deg C. It was in a friends shed, the ordinary common or garden garden shed, not a real shed and the relay had broken. He said I could have it if I could fix it and here we are!

I am mid way through building a forge which will go to 1400-1600 deg.C and I will let you know how I get on with that as I go along. It will be Propane powered. This next week I will be ordering up some Green sand as I have a project for all of this.

OSB board is not the best but the floor is concrete and molten metal and concrete just do not mix well. I have become cautious in my old age

graham.

Edited By Oompa Lumpa on 12/01/2014 20:17:55

[Martin WParticipant @martinw]

Hi

I recycled a perfectly good piece of silver steel rod into a pile of swarf and a totally useless bit of shiny metal, misread a digital vernier believe it not, and the rest is history and a wasted day's work . Still on the brighter side of things it kept me away from the idiots lantern for a few hours.

Martin

PS I know the mantra 'Measure twice cut once'

Edited By Martin W on 12/01/2014 21:32:05

[Russell EberhardtParticipant @russelleberhardt48058]

Posted by ega on 11/01/2014 17:16:38:

BTW, we used to hear a lot about the dangers of mobile phones overheating the brain but their present popularity seems to have overridden that concern.

The maximum RF output power of a mobile phone is typically 250 mW. The heating effect this produces on the head (mostly on the surface) is an order of magnitude less than that produced by sunlight so, unless you spend your life in the dark it is insignificant.

Another common worry is mobile phone masts near schools. The received radiation from these is much lower than that from the phones themselves which most kids use. The closer you are to a mast the less power the phone radiates to communicate with it so, if there were any danger, you would be safer close to a mast!

Russell.

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

Here the worry of RF is Wi Fi for school computer net works, one parent at one school thought that theRF had caused a brain tumour in his son, so the school closed its Wi Fi system.

Much more fun on dial up——not. Ian S C

[Oompa LumpaParticipant @oompalumpa34302]

Posted by Ian S C on 13/01/2014 10:59:58:

Here the worry of RF is Wi Fi for school computer net works, one parent at one school thought that theRF had caused a brain tumour in his son, so the school closed its Wi Fi system.

Much more fun on dial up——not. Ian S C

And therein lies the issue.

Instead of telling said parent to "prove it" and the judicious use of that Russian word finishing with OFF, they immediately fold.

If I was a parent there I would be sorely tempted to sue the school for discriminating against and disadvantaging my child. Just for the hell of it.

graham.

(who fortunately has no children in any sort of "education" establishment and therefore suffers none of the angst of today's thinking parent)

[jason udallParticipant @jasonudall57142]

Posted by Russell Eberhardt on 13/01/2014 10:27:13:

Another common worry is mobile phone masts near schools. The received radiation from these is much lower than that from the phones themselves which most kids use. The closer you are to a mast the less power the phone radiates to communicate with it so, if there were any danger, you would be safer close to a mast!

Russell.

Quite….as to the "heating" effect…the 'phone when 'on'..dissipates much more than 250 mW..which appears as heat

thus causing a much larger impact than the rf……..much a kin to wearing a hat…..or hoody….

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

There is not much scrap in the world, only when it is too small to grip to carry out further operations, or when already in small curls of swarf. (although isn't that what those stainless steel scourers are?)

Somewhere there is a plastic bottle containing all the screws removed from old VHS cassettes. There MUST be a use for them sometime.

After ten years of retirement am now reduced to buying material sometimes! Boy; do I miss the scrapyard at work!

[jason udallParticipant @jasonudall57142]

Reduce Reuse Recycle….
Sash weights to pistons etc…this ia part of the fun..what else could I use that for..

[Sub MandrelParticipant @submandrel]

I spent ages in the summer trying to scratch together lead for ballasting my shunter. Now I find I have about 20 feet of lead water pipe… how much for me and how much to weight in with the green, furry bits of copper.?

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Real lead pipe should be more valuable as pipe for repairs. Could have done with some myself last year for fixing hinges into granite gateposts.

[Oompa LumpaParticipant @oompalumpa34302]

Posted by Bazyle on 13/01/2014 17:23:40:

Real lead pipe should be more valuable as pipe for repairs. Could have done with some myself last year for fixing hinges into granite gateposts.

I can tell you right now that it will have been the wrong size!

[Thor 🇳🇴Participant @thor]

I found a fairly large piece of 18mm thick steel in a skip, it's now residing in my garage waiting for my hacksaw.

[Danny M2ZParticipant @dannym2z]

Posted by Stub Mandrel on 13/01/2014 15:39:27:

I spent ages in the summer trying to scratch together lead for ballasting my shunter. Now I find I have about 20 feet of lead water pipe…

Aaah, lead pipe, very useful stuff to melt down (do it outside). I use beeswax for a flux (also salvaged when a local tannery closed down, 20 kg in the 100 year old chimney. Until a builder mate demolished an old church I used to use discarded wheel-weights from a local tyre depot, but it is a pita to remove the steel bits with a magnet over the simmering pot.

The lead is put to good use as fishing sinkers or as projectiles for my .45 muzzle loader. This in turn means that I can recycle a feral deer ( As they are here in Oz) into steaks, trout flies or sausages.

Regards * Danny M *

[robjon44Participant @robjon44]

Hi all, I too had "always having an eye out for useful gear" drummed into me at an early age. In adult life I worked on the outskirts of Leicester as a manual turner at a company who sub contracted to the Rank Xerox factory there & can vouch for the amount of useful items photo copiers contained when they were more mechanical than electrical, as we made the parts. Much later when I became an auto lathe setter, I had access to a scrap skip about 40 feet long, 10 feet wide & 8 feet deep crammed with "treasure", a seemingly endless supply of fractional horsepower motors, some brand new, redundant tooling, the much sought after small office equipment containing all sorts of stuff, but often beautifully made bases or stands of cast iron or aluminimum with ground surfaces, machined grooves or slots, cranks with bearings both ends & black crackle paint ! Some of these morphed into fishing rod lathes, mini wood lathes for making own design cork or balsa fishing floats, a combination arrow straightening & fletching jig we had some world class competition archers round here in those days. Elsewhere in the world, top picks are cast iron weights for weighing scales, available in many shapes & sizes, well weathered probably for decades, I have made raising blocks for lathes, bases for tapping & staking stands & mini drills, & my own particular favourite, the hexagonal ones for various sizes of the triangular toolposts of Mr. David Lammas, after all your three quarters of the way there with a bit of turning & milling ( or shaping? ) & people complain so bitterly on here about the cost of the simplest iron casting.

And now a cautionary tale, one day having executed the mandatory perfect swallow dive into the skip in the dinner hour, I was 3 parts of the way through salvaging a set of hardened & cadmium plated gears out of just such a photo copier, to make a fine feed train for the Pools 38 Special lathe that I had in those days, the biggest one was 105 teeth, the smallest 30 & umpteen others in between. But the clock had beaten me. After a decent interval, about 5 minutes I think, I loaded a very large ( near 3 hundredweight ) forging into my big CNC lathe & pressed the green button, knowing that it would be in there for 40 minutes I slipped out of the end door & made my way to the skip humming the original theme tune of Mission Impossible by Lalo Schiffrin. Enter skip, complete mission, sit down, put gears in pockets, check all hand tools present & correct when I heard a loud reversing bleeper nearby, not wishing to indulge in a trip to the local scrapyard I stood up, firstly the lorry was about 100 yards away backing into Goods Inward, & secondly the superintendent of the machine shop was standing 3 feet in front of me, fortunately facing away from me, gulp, he was a small man with the disposition of a rattlesnake with a migraine so I silently submerged, after a decent interval I slipped away, through the storage area for castings, forgings & large fabrications which covered several acres, this time to the theme tune of the Pink Panther. Managed to get back to base without further incident, when he came looking for me I was between the doors in the back of the machine carefully topping up hydraulic fluid & the one shot lubricating system, he stomped off & no more was heard about it, how I suffered for my art. Its all go being a PSO thats Programmer Setter Operator, which is what turners are called these days. Bob H

[Ian S CParticipant @iansc]

Called in to the local second hand shop at lunch time today, and got two parting tool holders, and a 3/32" width blade, straight one Jones & Shipman, the other a left hand one by Armstrong Brothers of the USA. Total cost $NZ 8. Going back to look at a hole saw set with $NZ18 on it, its got two arbors in the set, and a mate needs one, got to see if they are the right size. Ian S C

[OuBallieParticipant @ouballie]

Was given the mattress from GD's prison (cot), she has grown out of it, to lay on whilst working on my 1935 Austin Seven.

I will no doubt fall asleep, being so comfy

Geoff – Need to jack the car up higher now

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

I have, by posting this, recycled someone else's brilliant idea.

… a Whetstone fixed to the backing-pad on an Orbital Sander.

He is using it to sharpen Microtome Knives, but the idea surely has application in the Workshop.

MichaelG.

[mechman48Participant @mechman48]

A neighbour has had a small extension to his kitchen completed this week, had a nose round the skip, nothing but brick & wood flooring, did have an old dishwasher stood outside.. but nothing sprang to mind as to what I could salvage immediately.. but ! there was a splash back..600 x 700 x 1.0mm 'Stainless Steel' , needless to say that got 'recycled' to my cave

George

[robjon44Participant @robjon44]

Hi all, someone else on this thread extolled the virtues of farms as being good places to find treasure, in early married life I lived on one of the largest arable farms in Lincolnshire, as my recently aquired father-in-law was Lead Forman this meant that I also got a large detached "cottage" for the princely sum of 50pence a week, yes you read it correctly ! The farm had a workshop containing a mid size centre lathe, floor standing drilling machine, & various benches with vices & many hand tools, most of which were hammers! However what they didnt have was anybody who knew how to work them, it wasnt long before I got roped in, but now I had a workshop to play with until the house that I'd bought in town was refurbished. So I honed my agricultural mechanic skills whilst simultaneously making all the special tools etc for an elderly AJS motorcycle I was restoring, busy times.

Fast forward 45 years, all done & dusted, my ( new ) significant other has a horse stabled on a farm, her car has a towbar, your mission Mr.Phelps is to retrieve everything not bolted down in her uncles home & redistribute it, step 1 creep round farmer, step 2 hitch up 10 foot by 6 foot trailer, go to house load up 8 by 6 free shed ( mine all mine ) all hand & power tool tools, vices, composting bins,& many large pieces of new wood, then redistribute, sum total around 1 gallon of diesel.

However, back at the ranch, I still do odd machining jobs for the farmer, in my own workshop now. One of his sidelines is renting out an area to a man who has litterally hundreds of wheelie bins from all over the country, sometimes he is there & it seems to me strips them, puts scrap in skip, axles, wheels are thrown because they are perished, & the bins are pressure washed & stacked, another man comes with lorry & trailer & takes them away. But there are brand new containers about the size of a supermarket basket, complete with lid & handle, there are boxes of new locks of the type used office desks, lathe cupboards, & electrical cabinets, with 2 keys, who locks their wheelie bin? also I dont think they give away the 6 inch solid rubber tired wheels seen on the large tubs used in laundries & food factories, brand new, fixed, swivel, braked.

Finally, the axles, a 440mm by 21.5mm (ish) diameter is a b******d size in imperial & metric, zinc plated & passivated, as an experiment I selected a fairly ratty example, ketched it in my lathe, ripped it down to nothing in 3 passes about 20mm long, broad faced the end & took a skim along the o/d & thus drew the conclusion that it was a mild steel of a far better quality than the "monkey metal" (technical term) that I spent the last 6 years of my working life trying to beat into submission, therefore if you find such a thing dont turn your nose up at it. robjon44

[Chris Pattison 1Participant @chrispattison1]

Here in Auckland, NZ, they have an annual "Inorganic collection". All you do is put your unwanted stuff out on the street, and they come collect it. HEAVEN!. I used to get old copier and VHS machines for my boys to dismantle. Kept them out of mischief for hours. Old speakers are a great source of strong magnets. One I have used to make a stand for a chip screen – one magnet, split from a woofer (careful, the rare earth magnets make sharp splinters), a swan neck from a lamp attached to a suitably sized piece of Perspex. Now I can stick it anywhere on my lathe or milling machine.

I also retrieved a steel stand onto which I have mounted my circular saw. Even better, the saw can be mounted inside for protection when we moved.

Nothing in my house gets thrown out without being dismantled and bits recycled.

[steveteeParticipant @stevetee]

When I was a youngster we used to go scavenging on the tip round the back of Woodford Aerodrome or as older people would have called it Avros. It was a good place to get scrap aluminium not un surprisingley. The dump was beyond the wire fence bearing the legend 'This is a restricted place within the meaning of the official secrets act'. We wondered if it meant the tip , but I guess they were talking about inside the fence. And what could we see…. Dozens and dozens of Vulcans Victors and Valiants all parked up, presumably semi – redundant. What a sight. Until they built the second runway at Ringway Woodford had a considerably longer runway and the two were probably only 3 or 4 miles apart. Its all gone now knocked down to build houses, I can see it now 'Vulcan Drive ' 'Lancaster Avenue' and so on. Anyway I'm still here re using whatever I can, nothing gets thrown away here until it's been picked over.

[mick70Participant @mick70]

Posted by Bob Perkins on 09/01/2014 07:20:43:

The cover for my power feed was made from the top of an old CD player I picked up whilst I was at the recycling centre. My wile is worried that I'm going to start to bring back more than I take!

SWMBO as already given up on that.

took old freezer other day and came back with trailer and car piled high, mostly bikes as another hobby of mine is building custom bicycles.

also 3 dyson hoovers as same type as our old one repaired ours and built another good one.

boss won't let anything go to skip till i have checked it.

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