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Fergus OMore:
Centrecam anyone? It had only one fault and that was computer programme.

The rest was a poor imitation of what professional car body repairers were doing with laser alignment.  Car chassis were being made with Off Centre alignment- not straight lines as of yore. Anyway, I did a bit of this- hence my interest in Mike Trethewey's Centrecam and also Peter Rawlinson's excellent articles in ME.

It was- and is a lot, lot simpler than first believed.

Norman

philf:
A few days ago there was a discussion about testing the parallelism of a lathe spindle to the bed.

Fergus mentioned two books by Schlesinger & Connelly (which I'm very fortunate to have hard copies of). I've just found pdf copies of the two books as well as two more very interesting looking machine tool testing books on: http://totallyscrewedmachineshop.com/documents/documents.html.

The Connelly book gives a huge amount of info on scraping and correcting all sorts of errors on many different types of machine tools. The Schlesinger book is more about testing than remedy.

I thought Vtsteam might find them of help with his 'New Lathe' project.

Phil.

vtsteam:
Thanks Phil! Yes I will.  :beer:

Fergus OMore:

Thanks Philf!

Two( I think) points arise. When these worthies did their thing, there was no such thing as easily available and cheap laser stuff.
Somewhere in my laughingly called workshop are two or is it three lasers. One is a a plastic affair which is almost a baby rotary table with the ability to send a beam at an angle.  I bought it to supplement my machinist's spirit level whilst aligning my lathe. OK, it somewhare with cheap surveyor's laser level etc.

So going back to CentreCam, it was in its infancy. Trethewey WAS going to bring out a new program or update it- but hasn't.  Peter Rawlinson wrote a lot about lasers in ME or MEW but I forget which. However, he sort of ran into problems of getting the laser pinpoint- to be a pin point.
OK, I'm rambling a bit but another issue is that cars 30 years ago were being re-aligned after collisions with lasers going through clear plastic graticules and being turned- with prisms.
It is 30 or so years since I was being taught as a manure student by Alan Robinson who wrote the Repair of Vehicle Bodies- I had the first or second edition at Gateshead Tech. Of course, this was all part of City and Guilds qualification.

OK- can all this be modified to a cheap alignment system for --us?


Phew!

Norman

Fergus OMore:
Just unearthed these laser things.

One is Strait-Line laser level 120 and the other is a Laser Straight. Both switched on after yonks( Geordie- meaning for ever) but I am getting straight lines. Any bright( oops) ideas to tuurn them into a round pinhole, please?

Norman

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