Metal Work - Watermill Blog
15th to 29th October 2009

The second half of October seems to have contained a lot of metal work after all the woodwork in the first half.

Headley arrived one day with a finished guard to fit under the arch that take sthe PTO shaft across the path. He had decorated this with a hand made brass rising sun emblem.

It consists of a flat semi-circle with separate rays fixed to the back as you can see in the picture. It seems a shame that it is fixed so low down that most visitors probably won't notice it unless someone points it out.

Dick has spent some time cleaning up and painting a hand operated pillar drill with an interesting cam driven feed mechanism. It is now fully assembled and mounted on its own table.

We can't find any maker's name on any of the castings or components so we don't know an awful lot about this drill. It appears to use drill or auger bits with a tapered square shank and the main casting has slots cast in as if to take some sort of mandrel, but this is just guesswork.It makes an interesting addition to our collection though.

At the end of the month the metal work got hot as Headley gave Dave and Jonathan lessons in arc-welding.

The objective was to produce a bench to take all the spares for the Wilson lathe.

We have two chucks, three and four jaw, as well as a large faceplate to accomodate somewhere handy for the travelling hoist. They are a bit too heavy to move around by hand.

There is also a large collection of chamge gears that need sorting out and labelling up. it could be nice indoor job when the cold weather arrives.

The enthusiasm for working at the mill when it is cold and wet is hard to maintain now that the bulk of the work is complete and there is little urgency about the jobs that are left. We will continue to meet through the winter months but there will be fewer blog entries, probably one a month.

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