Back on the job.  Stiff neck gone and dust from sand-blasting cleared up.  Tip, seal all door and window joints with duct tape on the inside as well as the outside, saves a lot of muck.  All the old gears are bushed, staked and with the lathe, next job was to find some non-ferocious blanks.  I had a redundant gear wheel thick enough to split....

I have a fancy to make a 127 tooth metric conversion wheel so I thought I'd clean up thei old feed valve blank.

Here's the result of an hour's machining, now I need to search for more blanks....

Onward and upwards........

The blank search was productive....

A bit of swarf later.....

The moral of this picture story is never pass a piece of non-ferocious metal without attempting possession!

So, I have some useful lumps for gear blanks.  I decided to have a reckon up of what gears I wanted to make and work out the blank sizes I needed.  There are 17 gears needed from 20 teeth to 127 in order to make a full set of fives plus the odd sizes in sixes I already have.  I shall never use them but I want the lathe to be complete when I finish the refurb.  So I sat down to calculate all the blank sizes.  I have always assumed that the gear pitch was 6tpi but had noticed when making gears for the lathe that the geaqrs, whilst they ran OK, weren't spot on.  I decided to do a bit of checking.  Number of teeth + 2 divided by the pitch and divided again by Pi gives the blank diameter.  I used this formula but worked it backwards from the OD of the existing gears.  I got a big surprise because the pitch was 6.35tpi.  As you can guess I did several double takes and went back and measured everything up again.  Same result.  I hope I haven't missed anything obvious and I have no explanation of why they are this strange pitch.  All I know is that all my calculations give the same result.  Of course, the pitch doesn't really matter as long as the gears mesh well and are the right number for each wheel.  I have one blank wich has finished up at 4" and according to my figures this will do nicely for a 75tpi wheel which according to me needs a 3.86" blank so before I do anything else I shall cut this gear and see how it works out.  I shall report further when I've tried this..... 

They've done well today, I now have a new roof on the shed! 

The masons have walled in the spar ends and are waiting for the concrete copings to arrive.  I've spent the day cleaning up....

Talking about excuses for being late. I one worked with a chap who lived in a large caravan on a farm, and it was midwinter. He came into work about two hours late. When asked why he was late he told the following story.

I woke up this morning to the sound of the farmer who owns the farm I live on. He told me that a cow had fallen into a water trough (apparently this was an old bath with the plughole sealed off) overnight and the water had frozen with the cow in it, its legs in the air. We decided to apply some heat to the underside of the trough to thaw out the ice so we could pull the cow out of the trough. When we had done this we attempted to pull the cow out of the trough. Unfortunately, when we pulled the cow over the trough was still attached to the cows back. The cow on standing up, was mortified to find that it had suddenly grown an armoured shell, so, panicstricken it went speeding down the field and disappeared from view. It took us all of an hour to recapture the cow and remove the trough from its back. Thats why I am late.

Our boss just turned round and said, "that story is so far fetched it has to be true, and I accept your reason for being late".

I can just picture in my minds eye, these two guys chasing a cow with a steel bath on it's back down a field.

While I was doing the motor it was raining heavily and the contractors decided to take my window out and replace it with a new one!  You wouldn't believe the amount of gear I had to shift......  Big reorganisation needed this morning and they have still to replace all the plaster that dropped!  Still, it's all an improvement so we should look on the bright side I suppose....

Careful you don't overdo it, all that shifting heavy machinery...I've got back probs at the mo and it's making me cringe just to think about it.

 Inver, the excuse I liked the best from our builders was...the doctor had water pouring out of some pipe or other (all the excuses seemed to involve burst pipes at some stage!) and had called F (the builder) frantically in the morning, could he just come over and have a quick look before he started his work proper. (We were in a very rural environment at the time, and as the doc lived in the same vilage as F it would be unthinkable not to help a neighbour out, even if work was delayed a bit!) The doc had to go off to morning surgery but had left the key under a stone in the garden. "Could we find the b***** stone" said F "we must have turned his whole garden ower and not a key in sight. So there were nothing for it but to go down to the surgery (by this time his second in command K had joined him)and ask the doc where he had put it. Trouble is it were pregnant womans morning, and the receptionist wouldn't let us in to see the doc, told us we had to wait in the queue...so there we were sat down wi all the pregnant women..." K weighed over 20 stone and had a massive beer belly, so i just replied "  Your lucky they didn't take him off for a scan!"