Thread: Melbourne Scraping Class reunion

Hello Phil,

We made it home safely with the gold shipment. My daughter is feeling richer with that and a visit from the tooth fairy. The little fella took a few pieces of timber from the workshop today and hammered a couple of nails in them and proudly exclaimed he'd made a steam engine ). So the day made an impact on him also.

It was a great day.
Thanks, Christian

Fantastic Christian.

Phil

Originally Posted by CGroves

The little fella took a few pieces of timber from the workshop today and hammered a couple of nails in them and proudly exclaimed he'd made a steam engine ). So the day made an impact on him also.

It was a great day.
Thanks, Christian

Now there's something that brings a smile to the face....

Regards
Ray

I am a great believer in getting kids working on projects in workshops early in life.
They benefit greatly & learn a lot.
Well done on the "Steam Engine"
regards
Bruce

Originally Posted by Abratool

I am a great believer in getting kids working on projects in workshops early in life.
They benefit greatly & learn a lot.
Well done on the "Steam Engine"
regards
Bruce

Yes I agree and not just work shop skills. Although it can come with some side effects, like when they try to disassemble your machinery. This is what I caught him at recently, spanner in hand:
disasemble.jpg

When "cornered" his response was "Dad, go, making it too dark."

Christian

It looks like it's in his blood Christian

Phil

Hi, saw at the very interesting youtube video of the scraping class a couple of years back. Are any more planned down the track? thanks.

Originally Posted by dave4

Hi, saw at the very interesting youtube video of the scraping class a couple of years back. Are any more planned down the track? thanks.

Dave, drop me an email, and I'll put your name on a list, if anything comes up, I'll let you know.

Nothing planned at this stage. I think after the second class we exhausted the pool of Aussies. There's been 23 people so far. You need a dozen blokes to make it viable.

Regards Phil.

machtool at bigpond dot net dot au

I couldn't get to the first and second one, but put me down for the next one.

Dave

Dear Phil,

Please put me on the list for the next scraping class. I'll PM you my email address.

Ken

Its a small world. The new guy Dave 4. Turns out we worked together at Zenford Ziegler, half a life time ago.

Dave. Have a look at this thread.

https://www.woodworkforums.com/f65/xi...ometer-166550/

Have a guess which H.P Laser that one is? Its the same unit, that we nearly lost in Newcastle, all those years ago, when the cleaner left the hotel door open all day, with that laser sitting in your room. It went from Zenfords to Kirby, then was sold to Production Machine Tools. Its currently resident back in this state.

My email, has 4 blokes that have put their hand up in the past 6 hours. So we are a third of the way there. So I've gone from thinking there probably wont be another one, to lets make it happen.

I'll start another thread to gauge interest, and maybe talk to the moderators about making it a sticky like the last one.

Regards. Phil.

Great to see that the laser has been well looked after and is still in good working order! I doubt whether the original data logging gear is still around, HP walked away from the nixi display unit by the mid late 80's. That was major investment for ZZ at the time, equal to a small NC mill.

Originally Posted by dave4

Great to see that the laser has been well looked after and is still in good working order! I doubt whether the original data logging gear is still around, HP walked away from the nixi display unit by the mid late 80's. That was major investment for ZZ at the time, equal to a small NC mill.

Well looked after it may have been but it sat idle for a long time, and the foam packing for the optics degraded to a gooey mess. It was lucky that there was no major damage but some of the surfaces are a little worse for wear: the stainless bodies that the optics are made from has picked up some mild pitting on a few of the surfaces (although that not quite the right word for it, pitting is to severe a word) which throws off the absolute accuracy a little.

We have the data logger/HP calculator, printer/ploter/etcher sketch, cables, metrology software, etc. It seems as though it was always keep together. We added a few extra bits from ebay to get a little more complete package most notably an Automatic Compensator and the sensors and a 36X resolution extender. We have not been able to get the data logger going yet, there is a problem with the tape reader, the rollers also turned to a gooey mess and have yet to be clean up/replaced to see if any of the tapes are still usable.

I bet it was a major investment, the original ordering information sheet dated 1 December 1979 states a total value of $39,706 or about a $170,000 in todays money (yet another testament to how complete this was when we got it). And we added an extra ~$7200 of 1979 of value with the extra from ebay (I think for a couple of hundred) .

I have been thinking in the past week that we should get an extra display to do simultaneous axis.

I really like this machine, the Nixi tubes give me a nice warm feeling, I have been trying to talk Ray into designing a modern interface for the display so that it can plug into a usb port, and have a nicer interface without fumbling around with the HP calculator (a full keyboard and mouse is much nicer).

There are also a few photos with the unit of it in use. One of yours????

DSCN2611[1].jpgDSCN2612[1].jpg

Date 16/10/81

-Josh

I too like the glow of Nixi tubes mocking my ham-handed efforts at accuracy. I have a cherry Heindenhain display here that needs (expensive) scales to be employed. i might just keep it powered up over the bench as a peon to nostalgia

The reason for my post is this: I am delighted that such a cool piece of industrial pinnaclism remains among the fold of fellow travellers on this forum. How improbable, yet unspeakably cool is that?

GQ