Sunday, July 17, 2011

Apparently inevitable

As listed in the preamble to this blog one of my hobbies is small scale engineering. My interest in this has been almost lifelong but it has only just (over the last eighteen months or so) been allowed to resurface.

We go back to South West London circa 1966. World Cup Willy is the national mascot, the filthy Argies and Portugal have been seen off and its 'Two World Wars and one World Cup' time. The Obald tribe has just returned from a camping holiday in foreign France and its back to school. Favourite subjects maths, chemistry, physics, biology (well sort of for biology) and metalwork. Called to see the Transitus form master (and how terribly archaic is that - just left the Remove and about embark upon Transitus) who delivers the bombshell. 'If you want to read medicine at university (and there is no other place to do it) metal work has to go and you have to study Latin. You what? Swap the micrometer for Caesar's Gallic Wars Book II? Mr Glanville (only redeeming features were the possession of elastic sided boots and an Austin Healey 3000) was adamant - I would never be able to prescribe digitalis to the nearest minim unless I learnt my mensa, mensa, mensam.

The resentments engendered by this encounter were only enhanced as I trudged off to fight losing battles with the ablative whilst watching my mates get warmed up for a session with the second cut files. I was very keen on rock climbing at the time (a compression fracture of L1 in 1970 soon persuaded me it was not a good lifetime pursuit) and my climbing buddy was one Richard Borisiewitcz (Borrie) who owned an ex Police minivan (lust) and was an apprentice toolmaker (mega lust). We get over all this. I realise that the possession of a cool sports car is no excuse for idiocy as I discover that having a grounding in Latin is no more required for the study of medicine than having a good collection of knitting patterns.

Life moves on over the next forty years and circumstance dictate that I can at last get my revenge on bloody Glanville. I, at about the same time, come into the ownership of three things; a big barn with a three phase power supply, a bit of spare cash and a considerable amount of spare time. Although I now am grateful for a basic grounding in Latin the hidden toolmaker inside me can emerge. I will take up metalwork again but as it is now the twenty first century we will embellish it by calling it small scale engineering. I am not going to call it model making as I have no intention of constructing one fifth scale models of the Flying Scotsmen or building a track on the property; oh, hang on, there's an idea.

How to start? Well, of course, nowadays in any new venture Google is your friend. I spent about three months trawling the web and getting the grounding I left behind in Merton as Bobby Moore led the lads onto Upton Park. It soon became obvious that the first (of many) purchase I would need to make would be a lathe.

The choice here is relatively simple. For about the same money you can buy a new made in China effort or a vintage model made in Great Britain. The word seemed to be that Chinese lathes were of variable quality (there is some good stuff about, but the trick is picking it and this is next to impossible for a neophyte) and had negligible resale value. On the other hand some of the old British stuff was superb, and if well cared for, would last a lifetime and had excellent resale value. So old British it would be. This also seemed to be 'right' considering the genesis of this interest. With Great Britain's manufacturing heritage there are (or more correctly, were) literally hundreds of British lathe makers but the name that stands out in the small machine field is Myford. After another couple of months keeping an eye on TradeMe I buy, sight unseen, a Myford ML7 from Ranfurly in Central Otago. When it arrives its serial number tells me it was manufactured in the year of my birth (which for the slow learners makes it the same age as me) and the original sale papers showed it to have been sold to the vendor in Dunedin in 1954.

It was filthy and took a couple of weeks to clean and reassemble. The manuals for this are easily obtainable from the web in .pdf format (you didn't know they had PDFs in 1951 did you?) and I had acquired a virtual machining buddy from joining a Myford Bulletin Board. This virtual buddy has since transformed into a flesh and blood buddy and has become a mentor filling in (and much more) gaps in my embryonic knowledge of this art. I soon became aware of why the Myfords had such a good reputation. My sixty year old machine could cut to tolerances which were limited only by my puny ability to measure accurately. This thing could, after sixty years, still cut better than I could measure. Measuring (and marking out) properly is, to my mind, easily the hardest bit of engineering. And setting things up for the cut. An hour centering things in chucks or collets and setting tool height etc is followed by thirty seconds of cutting.

We progress. I buy a milling slide for the ML7 and start doing some milling. Compared with the gentle art of turning when ribbons of swarf flow off seemingly inert metal with a low hiss, milling is brutal. It is soon obvious that small lathes are not a good thing on which to do a lot of milling if you want them to retain their accuracy. I also start hankering after a more versatile lathe. I want more spindle speed and I really want, even need, a quick change gearbox. Changing the gear train to cut a single point thread on the ML7 was taking at least half an hour and I was getting impatient.

We need new machinery. Milling easy. Mentor is selling his superbly cared for Arboga mill (circa 1974) and that is that sorted. A new lathe? Has to be Myford again and I opt for the Super 7 which fills all the deficiencies of the ML7. The old lathe goes to its third owner in 60 years via TradeMe for considerably more than I bought it for proving the resale value part of the equation at the start of this journey to be correct.

A 1971 Myford S7 takes its place and it is superb. A Mercedes compared to the Ford Cortina of the ML7. All this while, nothing I have learnt has led to me any other conclusion than that Myford make the best small lathes around. The S7 (admittedly up specced) is still in production and all spares are still available. Original Myford stuff is excellent but bloody expensive. The ultimate complement for any product is there in the shape of knock off spares from China and India. Cheaper by far but you get what you pay for; definitely curates egg here. Myford will even regrind your lathe bed and put it back into factory condition after years of use and wear. For a price. Deep in the English Midlands Myford carry on like England still held the World Cup.

Until last week. Myford has gone to the wall. Apparently the catalyst was the death of one of the family that owned the company but there was an underlying malaise that made the end inevitable. Unfortunately running a company along the lines briefly illustrated above is not going to cut it in the real world of the early twenty first century. There has been a fire sale this weekend and, in true Myford style, this was not at fire sale prices.



End of an era? Well I have been in this game for too short a time to judge properly, but I would think so. Am I saddened by it? Yes, but not because Myford is no more. It affects me not at all as I have my lathe and there are so many spares in the wild that it is never going to be a problem. But I am saddened that the world of elastic sided boots, Austin Healey 3000s and manual lathes is one step further away.

Velcro fastened trainers, Toyota Supras and CNC lathes have no soul.

No comments: