MYSTERY OBJECTS

[PanBiker]

Valve grinding paste and lubricant

[Stanley]

Close Ian but not quite there yet. Can you be more specific? Not nit-picking, they tell two interesting stories.

[Stanley]

A deathly hush. I shall reveal all tomorrow if nobody responds.....

[Bodger]

All i can suggest is that in my days you bought it in a double ended tin, one end coarse, the other fine ?

[Stanley]

You were getting close Bodge but every picture tells a story.
The Victory Compound is a very old remedy for a hot neck, a bronze bearing that has overheated for some reason, expanded and is destroying itself, they could get so hot that molten bronze was running out as they ran and if you stopped the machine you welded the surfaces together, a classic 'seize-up'. Very common and serious with very large bearings on steam engines and water wheels. Victory Compound was actually rotten brick ground down to something very close to talc. You mixed it with very thin oil and flooded the bearing with it while it was still running. This cooled the bearing and the abrasive action, ground off the rags that had formed on the bearing surfaces and because it was very soft material it didn't embed in the bronze. Very often it was flushed with copious amounts of water. Once the bearing had cooled down it could be flooded with normal oil and you kept running. Then you could make a decision whether to leave it as it was, taking up the slack in the bearing, or go the whole hog, make a new bearing, turn of the 'roping' on the shaft and start again. Newton told me that if he had no victory powder with him he would smash up a rotten brick and use it if the bearing was a big rough one on something slow-moving like a water wheel.
The small bottle contains clock oil. It is wrapped round with black adhesive tape to stop the light getting to it which tended to form a precipitate in the oil due to ultra-violent light. Old fashioned clock oil was made using this property. You put bottles of Neat's Foot Oil on a window cill and left them there for at least a year. You then decanted the clear oil off the top and perhaps repeated the exercise to get an even purer oil. They tell me that where a lot was used they had a row of bottles stood in the light at different stages of purification.
Now I shall have to find another pic for you....... Bugger!

[Nolic]

Its amazing what we learn on here. Thanks Comrade. Nolic

[PanBiker]

How many folk would know that? An education everyday.

[chinatyke]

due to ultra-violent light........ Bugger!

Never quite thought of light like that! Love it!

[Stanley]

China, I had a friend who used to talk about 'ultra-violent light', the dry bollick (or diabolic) jack', non-ferocious metals' and 'insulting tape' I'm afraid it's infectious....
I should have mentioned above that the concept of a 'soft' abrasive which breaks down and isn't hard enough to embed in the metal and cause further wear is the same principle that is used in lapping paste, the abrasive used to get a very fine finish on bores.

Here's another one for you. Why would a fitter always have some pure unsalted tallow about his person?

[EileenDavid]

Used for greasing machinery. Dave's great great great grandfather Richard Higgin manufactured tallow but he made candles. He was born at Holling Top. Eileen

[Bradders Bluesinger]

I have to admit to having looked this up , via Google !
Among other things ,it appears that Tallow (unsalted ) mixed with graphite is good for lubricating Fairground Organs (the wood and leather parts thereof) .!
Elsewhere, it's use as a flux ,when soldering, is mentioned . ........
Inexplicably , the French don't seem use it anywhere near food (as opposed to unsalted butter) , but up until quite recently , MacDonalds used to fry their chips in it ...HONEST!
.....Handy to have about.....

[Stanley]

All the answers above are true, tallow is a very useful material, however the question I asked was why would a fitter have some about. It was talking about Victory Compound that triggered the question because there is a sort of link. Remember me talking about 'ragging' in a bearing when the bearing metal starts to fuse to the journal and rips pieces out leaving sharp 'rags' on the surface? The same thing happens when two metal surfaces are slid across each other under great pressure. The most common operation that causes this is fitting keys or stakes to a shaft to firmly hold a pulley or flywheel, particularly when you are doing trial fitting to eliminate high spots and get a perfect bed. Ordinary lubricants are useless as they break down under these pressures and when you withdraw the key to check the fit it is ragged and of course so is the internal surface making it very hard to get a good fit. The old fitters found out ages ago that tallow was the most efficient lubricant for stopping this and so they smeared it on the keys and in the beds before driving the key home. So, the answer in terms of fitters was that it was the best high pressure lubricant they had and with care avoided ragging altogether. Newton showed me another good trick when key fitting, especially in the larger sizes. Harry Crabtree showed it to him when he was working with him as a lad. The trick is to mill or plane out the middle third of the key on both sides. This means you have less surface to fit and the bed is just as efficient with a solid key. The old fitters used the same trick when fitting two flat surfaces together, they chiselled channels in the surface leaving what they called 'fitting strips' which reduced the area you had to chip and file to a finish. Clever stuff learned through experience and passed on.
Now I'll have to find you another pic.....

[Bodger]

I think youre scraping the bottom of the barrel now

[Stanley]

Very good Bodge. Let's see if anyone else gets it. They don't get used often but when you need them they are essential. The ones with the Brown handles are Moore and Wright, lovely quality.

[Nolic]

If Bodge is hinting are they coopers tools? Nolic

[Bodger]

The "barrel" is misleading, the top one looks like the ones i used to make from old files, heated, then flattened, quenched and ground to look something like this > on the cutting edge

[Stanley]

Bodge has been there. Comrade, they are scrapers used to get the final finish after chipping and filing on flat surfaces in old-fashioned fitting. Before the days of the planing machine this was the only way of generating plane surfaces and the last stage for a super accurate finish was lapping on surface plates. Scrapers are still used to fit large bronze bearings and sometimes followed by lapping with very fine soft abrasive but I don't like this in bearings. Small discrepancies in the surface help oil to cling and distribute so that the surfaces never touch if properly lubricated whilst in use.
Now I'll have to put my thinking cap on again......

[Stanley]

That's right, it's a Morse Taper shank drill. But why do the flutes extend to the taper?

[Bodger]

Dont know, but would it be a way of feeding coolant via the drill spindle ?,

[Bradders Bluesinger]

Was it re-made from a longer (older) drill ...
...or just from a longer "blank" , perhaps ?

[chinatyke]

This is the part of the drill bit that fits into the holder (was it called a collet?) and my guess is that this thread allows the bit to be mounted more firmly in the collet for when high axial loads are encountered in order to prevent sideways movement.

It sounds a good explanation even if it isn't correct!

[Stanley]

Bodge, sounds feasible but I've never come across coolant feed via a spindle.
Brad, again it's feasible but all that trouble? And the drill is the same size (25/32) marked on the shank.
China, it's Morse taper not collet and I don't see how putting flutes in would improve the grip.
The bottom line is that I have puzzled over this oddity for years and showed it to many of my mates and nobody has ever comer up with an answer. Apart from anything else, setting a Universal Miller up to mill the continuation flute on the taper is no easy job. If you ever come across anyone who knows I'd be glad to hear from them!

Here's another one for you.

[chinatyke]

China, it's Morse taper not collet and I don't see how putting flutes in would improve the grip.
The bottom line is that I have puzzled over this oddity for years and showed it to many of my mates and nobody has ever comer up with an answer. Apart from anything else, setting a Universal Miller up to mill the continuation flute on the taper is no easy job. If you ever come across anyone who knows I'd be glad to hear from them!

Courtesy of Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_taper

End types
Morse tapers are of the self-holding variety, and can have three types of ends:
tang (illustrated) to facilitate removal with a drift
threaded to be held in place with a drawbar
flat (no tang or threaded section)
It also mentions collets available for morse tapers but I'm not certain that is the right term to use, perhaps it is held in some other tool mounting device. I'm not an engineer.

Out of my depth and clutching at straws...

[Bradders Bluesinger]

Hello Stanley...I got the impression from your photo that the taper had been machined after the flutes....Looks like the same pitch and depth from the "original " diameter of the part machined blank...Could it have been made in times of shortage ('39/'45) ,from existing stock , to fill an order perhaps ?

[Stanley]

China, nothing there I haven't taken into account. Never seen a collet for Morse taper. Collets are for parallel shanks.
Brad. Sorry, not so, the flute on the taper is slightly narrower than that on the drill and is the same depth form the surface all the way down the taper. You can see where the cut finished as it passes over the tang. At one time I wondered whether someone had done it so that the taper could be used to clean up the inside of the Morse taper socket but if so why use a drill and how would you turn it? It's a mystery.
How about the next drill.......