Spring 2024 meetup in Calgary - date Saturday, April 20/2024. discussion Please RSVP Here to confirm and get your invitation and the location details. RSVP NOW so organizers can plan to get sufficient food etc. It's Tomorrow Saturday! you can still RSVP until I stop checking my phone tomorrow More info and agenda
We are having email/registration problems again. Diagnosis is underway. New users sorry if you are having trouble getting registered. We are exploring different options to get registered. Contact the forum via another member or on facebook if you're stuck. Update -> we think it is fixed. Let us know if not.
Spring meet up in Ontario, April 6/2024. NEW LOCATION See Post #31 Discussion AND THE
NEW LOCATION
One the heat guys here where I work was telling me, if you go out the side of the wall for the vent your looking at like another 4-500, just for the vent as it has to be stainless now. And that straight out the top is the cheaper option.
I was asking him because I'm putting heat into my garage also very shortly here.
Slowly. [emoji14] At least that's how it feels. Ceiling is all drywalled. Just need time to figure out venting, go buy it and some gas-line. Then I can focus on nothing but projects until the spring.
Hi Eric,
I found your garage work interesting. I have recently redone the lights in my garage with LED fluorescents and would HIGHLY recommend them. They start instantly [ after one second] even in minus twenty and are more than twice as bright as regular fluorescent tubes, which after several hours of use degrade considerably. LED's do not degrade I can't praise them enough. I bought mine directly from Hong Kong as I couldn't afford the Canadian price but with the dollar now it may by better to buy them from a larger anadian company.
Wayne
Hey Wayne, thanks for the input! I'm definitely leaning towards LEDs in some configuration. Everything is on hold for now while I'm in school and broke, though.
my garage already had fluorescent light fixtures that used the old style T12 bulbs. I found some LED "plug and play" replacements at Costco that just replace the bulbs and used any existing ballast. They are amazing! As Wayne said they are more than twice as bright and only use 19 watts each instead of 40. A lot cheaper than replacing the whole light fixture.
I'm glad you posted that plug-n-play replacement. I had resigned myself to waiting till the prices came down to replace the whole fixture & I've still got a box of fluorescent tubes. The buggers wont wear out. Question: if I wanted to ease into the conversion $-wise & brighten certain areas with those LED, could I replace specific fixtures & leave others on fluorescent (they are all on same circuit)?
Haven't added to here in a while, but these fit more in here than they do in my lathe repair thread. I finally picked up a solvent tank my buddy is lending me. It's a really nice Zep tank, it needed a new filter and a couple new hoses. This thing has a string bound filter in the canister for particles, but then it has a big bag-filter in the basin for taking out grease and oils. Supposedly you should never have to change your solvent, only top it up and change filters. I got the canister filter from Home Depot 2 for $20, but the bag filters are 2 for $200 from Zep! Too rich for my blood on a borrowed tank right now, so I'm just running it as is. I also managed to get 20 gal. of solvent from work for free! (long story)
I also started on a project in my free-time at work (which is ample right now) that isn't necessarily garage related, but it is machining related, and I'm hoping it will pay for at least the rest of the drywall in the garage! It's a Kurt D80 vise that I got my hands on. It was in... let's call it "very used" condition, but these things are bomb-proof so it still has tons of potential in it. All you have to do is re-grind all the important surfaces!
That's the base of the vise getting the bottom reground. It's been fully disassembled, washed in the solvent tank, and I'm almost finished re-grinding it. It'll get a few coats of paint, and then I'll put it up on eBay. I have no need for an 8" machine vise. This bastard is HEAVY!
EDIT: Seriously, how gross looking is our surface grinder? Looks like you could get TB just standing next to it.
Cool! Lucky you having access to a surface grinder for exactly projects like this. I'd be interested to see your Kurt progress pics, how it all comes apart & how you go about re-truing. I've seen some people rebuild some bad offshore iron with hand scraping techniques but it looks like one of those old school, lost art, specialty hand-eye sort of deals & probably confined to non-hardened materials.
When my fasteners show & assuming my plan works out, I'll post some pics of a (new) Chinese mini vise I bought... and subsequently modified so it would actually function. The grinding is amazingly accurate for a whopping 58$ gamble. But the clamping mechanics were apparently made by angry, metal chewing beavers. OMG. Stay tuned.
Haha Peter, I look forward to seeing that. I also now want to see a horror movie about pissed off beavers who can chew through metal!! The best beaver horror movie I've seen so far was:
which was AWESOME, but there need to be more!!
To be honest, I didn't document the refurbish of this old Kurt because this is my first go at it, I didn't do any research, and I won't be QCing it. I'm a machinist, so I have a good idea of what I'm doing, but I'm no expert with a grinder or with restoring old vises. Realistically it's all about just making it square again, so it should be pretty bang-on. At the very least it will be far more accurate than it was pre-grind with hammer-marks and stamp marks ALL over the static and dynamic jaws, and 0.002"!!!! of wear in the sliding surface of the base! I was shocked by that one. Really shows you how important it is to keep your stuff clean, fellas!
Here's a shot of me truing up the tops of the jaws with the vise assembled, though! This ensures that you can use the tops as a square-surface if you put the replaceable jaws on the outsides of the static and dynamic jaws.
