480volt

Personally, I wouldn’t buy one new. They are frequently available on CL in various sizes, most often in the one-ton range. If you are patient and you care about such things, you can find good deals on ones from old line US manufacturers like Dake, Famco or Greenerd. Precision is not the hallmark of most arbor presses, even good ones from the US or Japan. That said, even the worst cast iron junk from the Far East will probably be adaptable to whatever you want to squeeze. I haven’t attempted to adapt my Dake 2 1/2P for leather purposes, I use it to press bushings and bearings and it’s just too big for delicate work.

Thanks for the reply, it’s like voodoo having that kind of information. So if I’m doing the math right, at 6spi, that works out to about 47 miles of stitching. A heck of a lot.

Just out of curiosity, if you do the math, how many stitches has it recorded over it’s lifespan?

There are several threads covering making coad/shoemakers wax on this forum. I went 50-50 rosin to beeswax by weight and formed it into balls, and use it on most threads I hand stitch with. It really improves your grip on the needles. I cut a length of thread, taper the ends and drag it over the wax a couple times till it’s sticky. As I understand it, the type of wax used by shoemakers varied by season and temperature: the black wax which contained pitch was used in the summer and the blonde wax, which is what I made, does not.

Wanted to take a better photo, but here ya go, this is what I have on hand.

I made a full length apron for myself for blacksmithing. I used a pair of Carhartt bib overalls for a pattern for the upper half and just continued the line where the bibs button at the waist all the way down. Material was chrome tan maybe 4-6 oz. Upper edge was folded over and glued, then riveted with #12 solid copper rivets. Neck and waist straps are three strand braided lacing. Works great for blacksmithing, also great costume piece for reenactment.

My kids are hard-core LARPers. It’s probably my personal conceit that I use armor terminology to describe them, but that’s what I intend them as when I make them.

I’ve always used vambrace for forearm protection pieces. Not sure where bracers originated

Bob Douglas sells a tool called a “stitch line channeler” and put up a video about a year ago on Facebook demonstrating how to use it to cut stitches.

If you drive the burr down too far, the compressed leather can force it back up, ruining the interference fit between the burr and the rivet. Might as well toss it at that point. When I cut the shank of the rivet, I try and cut from several different angles if possible, to minimize the ridge left by the sidecutters. When I’m at home, I set rivets on an anvil (Peter Wright) or on a 1/4” steel plate. I’ve also set rivets out in the field using the cheek of a two-pound single jack as an anvil.

RJ Leahy of San Francisco has good information on rivet sizing on their website. https://www.rjleahy.com/

In regards to your Bernina problem, it’s a bit vague to say “they installed solar”. Is this a completely off-grid house, with panels charging a battery bank? I’ve seen such a system struggle with motor loads (table saw, skil saw, etc). If it is off-grid, I’d ask your customer to hook up a big load like a table saw or appliance and meter the voltage output. The more the voltage sags, the more current will be drawn by the load. In regards to your other solar installation, if you are putting in a system on a building with an existing service from a utility, than you should have no problems. The inverter is typically tied to the panel via a breaker, and feeds the panel in parallel with the service. You won’t see any difference on circuits fed from this panel, as the contribution from the inverter is just supplementing what the utility is providing.

If you buy Douglas tools, you are dealing direct with Bob and Lee Douglas. Lee is quick about shipping, the flat-rate box usually hits the mail in a day or so. Quality has been uniformly excellent, and for those that care, you are supporting a small domestic maker of fine tools, though I could say that of others as well.

He’s pretty active on FB, much as I despise it, that may be the best way to get his attention.

Their website seems to be up and running...

Uwe has forgotten more about sewing machines than I’ll ever know, and using an RPC is sound advice, that’s how I would do it. I work with three phase equipment frequently and motors from fractional HP up to about 50 HP. Three phase motors will continue to run if they lose one phase (single-phasing) at reduced HP and torque, but they cannot start themselves on single phase. They just sit there and hum and draw excessive current until you shut it off or it burns up. You can get one to start on single phase if you get it spinning before you apply voltage, but it will happily run in either direction. If the motor rating plate does indicate three phase, and you buy an RPC to feed it, be aware that it can be made to run either direction depending on how you connect it and you likely won’t know what that direction is until you bump it. If it’s wrong, reversing direction just requires swapping any two phase conductors feeding the motor. Good luck, don’t let the smoke out.

10-4

You an expat American? Don’t know who else would use “suicide knob”.

Rating plate should tell you what you need to know. Since it says single-phase, first thing I would do is verify if all the conductors in the cord are actually in use. If it really is single-phase 220-240, it should only need two hots and a ground. Ground is always green, everything else is arbitrary.

It’s slightly possible that Anthony Luberto might have information on the machine. I corresponded with him about five months ago regarding an ASE #9.The Windham Cub web site has since expired, so I don’t know if he is still actively responding to email. classiccub@frontier.com

I didn’t get to see how they moved it, but I once hooked up a big autoclave at Lockheed that had been relocated from an adjacent building. The riggers claimed that the whole package weighed about a million pounds.

VFDs are great, they are the standard for motor speed control in industry. The only downside I know of, and I have never personally seen a case of this happening, is that old 3-phase motors or those not designed for multi-speed use, lack cooling capacity to run at slow speeds and can burn up. Motors that are designed for this say “Inverter Duty” on the rating plate. Personally, I wouldn’t hesitate to use a VFD on any three-phase motor I wanted to control, I would just limit speed reduction. I know of one case where a machinist added supplementary forced cooling air to a motor he was controlling with a VFD, but who can say if that was really necessary. I have a few machine tools that have motors with cases that are specific to the application, and cannot be replaced with off-the-shelf components. I opted to build one RPC to feed all these loads. Just some musings from a commercial/industrial electrician.

You can also leave the original motor in place and get a phase converter to generate your three-phase. This option would probably cost more than just buying a replacement single-phase motor, but OEM three-phase motors are generally well designed and very long-lived (the motor on my milling machine is 75 years old and still running fine).

If using an iPhone, email the picture to yourself using medium size, and save that back to the camera roll. That should be small enough to post.

There’s room for a 97-10 right next to that Clausing vertical. Or maybe a Monarch 10EE lathe.