Category: Miscelaneous

So in this post a small dan buoy was found stored to the ceiling on the boat deck; I decided to add a few for colour and for fun.

The buoy is fairly standard equipment as found the manual of seamanship, vol II (though not to scale).

There are many pictures of the buoys aboard sweepers or so-called danlayers. At left (IWM images A 7915/7916) two dans are shows stored in the mast of HMS Rockall showing both the buoy and elliptical floaters; the entire buoy is quite large. There is a drawing in the Anatomy of the Ship Agassiz showing the buoy at an 18ft diameter with a 16 ft staff.  Various creative paint scheme’s appear to have been applied and I expect the colours to be bright and vivid; usually each ship appears to have its own unique(ish) colour scheme for tracking and pickup . Perhaps the danlayers who carry many dozens have a collection of paint schemes but I haven’t found a good picture yet.

This image shows a few more buoys, but post WW-II showing a slightly different type of buoy but a similar range of patterns.

Although I see only one buoy aboard Hood I decided to build around ten. The staff was the most tricky part with a small eye to attach the sinker at the end. I made a small soldering jig and bent a 0.1mm wire around some 0.3 rod using the Hold&Fold, then trimmed to size with the chopper. I ordered a few milling bits for my new Proxxon MF70, amongst others a 0.5mm bit and a 0.3mm round bit, and milled a small 0.5mm channel in MDF with a small 0.3mm trench. This made it a bit easier to align the small eye that  was then soldered very carefully (i.e., re-soldered until looking fine). The buoys themselves were made on the lath, it was far easier to first add a chamfer to the end of half a buoy part and then joining both halves on some Albion Allows 0.5mm tube, rather than adding a chamfer to both ends of a single part. The milling machine was again used to drill in the lifting eye near the tube ( that cost me about 5 drills because I was impatient); the lifting eye is now relatively sturdy and well aligned. I threw the buoys in alcohol to remove the flux after soldering and alas; the buoys do not float… At bottom right the buoys are ready for priming.

An update for update’s sake with the first batch of ship’s boats nearing completion.

I bought a mini vernier caliper by Shinwa. Do I need it? No. Was it cheap? No. But just look at it!

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I hadn’t used the lathe for some time so it took a whole afternoon until I could reliably produce parts again, if it weren’t for a small offset on my drill fixed in the tailstock of my Proxxon PD230/E. This offset has always been present and trying other drill chucks didn’t solve my problem. I took a few chucks to work and they measured an offset in the Morse Cone I of about 2 to 3 hundreds of a mm, just enough to be troublesome with thin-walled parts I was trying to make (20″ signalling projector). I ordered a ER-11 collet chuck with a MC1 fitting that is supposed to fit in the tailstock, but it doesn’t; the Proxxon PD230/E tailstock has a much shorter run.

The collet chuck is comparatively pricey but I just had to take a bit off.  Using drills with a 1/8″ shaft and ditto collet worked quite well. Nearly all my drills have a 2.2mm shaft and a 2.5 mm collet didn’t center them properly, so I ordered a new set of drills (only 30€ for 30 drills running from 0.1mm to 3.0mm in steps of 0.1mm) .

Postscript: I didn’t properly ‘snap’ the collet in the collet nut that may have been the reason the 2.2mm drills had an offset. In the nut there is an eccentricity on an internal flange that will cause the drill to be poorly centered if you just tighten the nut after placing the collet in the chuck. If the collet is first gently pushed past this internal flange (click!) and then placed in the chuck, not only is this problem solved (the problem being a poor user of fine tools), this eccentric flange will also pull the collect from the chuck when untightening the nut. Really clever engineering (post to be updated after checking the 2,5mm collet fit).

So it’s good news that the Proxxon tailstock that cannot be adjusted is well centered when it leaves the factory but a decent chuck apparently is not on the Proxxon menu.  So, now the cost of a 20″ signalling projector is €60 each, but who’s counting…. At least on of the two major problems I have the with lathe is solved; the other one is that the top slide for tapering doesn’t have an accurate angle read-out.