message in a blog-all

by sheltech on October 18, 2008

Ouch!…. if it wasn’t for bad puns I wouldn’t have no puns at all. No good, clean, pun here .

Anyways, I think this here blog idea/function is fairly cool ; never tried it anywhere before but am no stranger to posting strange ideas that come to mind. Having  a(nother) (not thatI’m one of those people that think ‘nother’ is a real word)  place to place  actual, meaningful, work-related thoughts can only be a good thing .  Not that I have much time for much of anything besides work and moving right now.  Moving SHELTECH ….yep, but more about that later.

I’m still fighting with the rolling mill project , since I have another client seriously interested , one that could make some r&d time worth doing . The latest problem is keeping strips flat as they go through the mill, which I solved by sandwiching the copper strip between the texture plate and a flat plate . This forces the mill to operate with the rollers separated by close to their limit, which turns out to be bad for my poor Pepe millthat I had to replace the drive-shaft/ roller of . This time the shear pins sheared right away , and I’m not even doing anything as demanding as before, when I was rolling steel-to-steel to transfer texture . I just gave up on Pepe  and have been looking around at more sturdily built mills. I haven’t decided but I have to say that the folks at Durston have been VERY helpful and informative about my specific needs, answering a lot of questions I wasn’t sure anyone would be comfortable answering . An enthusiastic ,and now public ,THANK YOU !!! to Matt and Will there . A shout -out, you betcha ! (GOD I didn’t really just say THAT, did I ? …  but maybe there’s ‘HOPE’ for me yet , nudge nudge wink wink) ((American-political inside-humor)).    Ah… so… time to stfu and get back to it.

Y’all come back now… hear ?.

Dar www.sheltech.net

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

Ruta October 20, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Thanks Dar! I will keep it on back order then – – it seems everyone is out of stock on Pepe’s for now – – hoping the company I purchased/backordered from will get them in first!!!

One day I’ll look into getting a hydraulic press and asking if you make some dies for me – but that is a long time coming!

Thanks again!

sheltech October 20, 2008 at 1:19 pm

I would say “get it”. I found out the hard way that if you overload the
Pepe , one of several small “shear pins” holding certain gears in alignment with their shafts will break, but they are relatively easy to
replace and it’s unlikely anything else will be damaged. I did that by trying to roll tool steel plates together to transfer hammer texture from one to the other . Running Cu and Ag against etched plates
is unlikely to cause any problems. One other thing to watch out for is the thickness of plates /sandwiches being run . About 3-4 mm is
a cap you want to try not to exceed. The nice people at Durston told me that using the mill at it’s thickness capacity is very sressfull to it, and that’s why I was shearing pins most recently, running a 18g Cu strip between a hammer textured plate and a flat plate , with a sandwich thickness of about 5.5 mm.

Dar

Ruta October 20, 2008 at 9:50 am

Thanks for the post Dar! I’ve never really posted anything before either so I’m been watching these blogs and thinking they are probably going to be a great thing. Wish I had more time – day job comes to mind and only doing metalsmithing on a hobby basis.

Hmmm . . . I have a Pepe mill on backorder – and am wondering whether to let it stay or not – – based on your comments! I can’t reallt afford a Cavalin or Durston but don’t want to buy one from Harbor Freight either (having read that they are not so great) – – I basically want to texture copper and sterling with the mill – – using either copper or brass etchings or other more organic things (leaves, paper, etc.) What are your thoughts on whether it would hold up to this kind of work???

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