Clever Things We Do In Our Shops

Keep your calculator in a zip-lock sandwich bag. It keeps it clean and the chips out of the buttons.
When removing small springs and clips that can fly across the room or into another dimension and never be seen again work inside of a large clear plastic bag if you can get the part in one.
 
cathead said:
When working on wiring on a VFD or 3 phase motor, Take a photo of the wiring so you can
refer to it later if needed.. This is also handy if disassembling a complicated mechanical
thing to know better how it reassembles.
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I started doing that as soon as I had a digital camera. Without any mechanical training I did a complete teardown, rebuild and restore/customize project of a 25 year-old motorcycle because I took detailed photos from multiple angles before removing each part. Printing them out in color (just cheap-ish color copy grade paper prints) would have really helped the reassembly process. They were not so clear as black-and-white prints so I ended up at the computer looking things up too often.

Ever since then I've taken photos as soon as I think I might need to disassemble something, just in case I forget later. There is basically zero per-shot cost with digital photography (barring running out of room for the files).
 
cathead said:
When working on wiring on a VFD or 3 phase motor, Take a photo of the wiring so you can
refer to it later if needed.. This is also handy if disassembling a complicated mechanical
thing to know better how it reassembles.
Click to expand...

My cell is full of various pics of things I recently disassembled or wired, I do this often.
 
4gsr said:
Be nice now!!!:finger wag:
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I don't mean it as a deragotory comment. It's called no Korrode yet it seems to corrode everything. It fluxes good just corrodes copper more than other fluxes if not wiped very clean. Even though it's not water soluble Oatey #5 works great as a flux and doesn't corrode as bad if not wiped.
 
Ok here's another one......

One of my lathes is an old South Bend 9", my first lathe, and I used to do everything on it until I bought a 12" lathe a couple of years ago. Its a great lathe but I always had trouble turning larger diameter parts (4 and 5" diameter aluminum) because the leather flat belt would slip with all but the lightest cuts. It would take hours to remove the amount of material required to make the parts I wanted. I bought a "better" belt but although it was stronger than the old leather belt it still didn't have the grip, even with higher tension. Hmmm.....how to improve grip? I thought about converting all the pulleys to V but that would be a ton of work. So I put 3M rubber tape (got it at Home Depot) on all the flat pulleys, two wraps on each. WOW!! The machine was suddenly transformed into a workhorse! I could get the parts machined much quicker 'cause now I could take decent cuts. A side benefit was the machine ran quieter...no more click click of the belt joint. The tape lasts for a few months, maybe more or less depending on the workload, and sometimes it seems to attract chips that get imbedded in the rubber, but it only takes a few minutes to cut the old off and put two new wraps on. This one simple idea made a big change in my little shop.

Wayne
 
toolroom said:
Wow, great idea. Thanks for sharing. And I thought Plumbers only knew two things... Poop flows downhill, and Payday's on Friday!
toolroom
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Three, don't chew your fingernails is a biggie
 
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