I’m not either 😀 I just had time to look up the answer before a seven-year-old asked an awkward question 😉

No, it was handled with tongs taking it from the bag where it would have been placed after slicing by machine. The surface there is lots of small colonies of airborne yeast (which is everywhere worldwide) joining up (which is why it’s so light in colour but so widespread) while the hand-touched colonies are much much deeper and “healthier” which is why they’re single deep-coloured points outcompeting smaller colonies.

Oh yes!

One of these days Ken I’ll have a bigger shed and then I can laugh at all these workarounds…

…any year now…

…just as soon as property prices in Dublin stop being higher than in Silicon Valley…

The problem with an M8 nut is that you need to immobilise the nut while you thread the bolt through and then into the casting Sylvain, you wind up needing three hands throughout the whole process. I’d just shim the lathe stand itself if it wasn’t level (which I had to do at one corner because the floor itself isn’t level), and then screw the lathe to the floor through the shims if it became a problem. It’s a minilathe, it just doesn’t build up enough vibration to be an issue (at least not yet 😀 )

I don’t think I could get away with a metalworking lathe *at all* in the shed, the floor just isn’t up to that level of stress.

Also, mounting two magnets would confuse the tachometer, and you could mount a stronger magnet readily but you’d only gain yourself a few millimeters more range; the sensor just has to be up close. I’ll probably print up a bracket on the 3D printer or make a metal one, and drill and tap the headstock proper to mount the sensor. The position will be awkward – the only space that seems viable is literally underneath the spindle, inside the drive belt. There’s more than enough clearance, but it does just look hairy if the support was to fail through vibration or material fatigue. Proper tapping into the casting and loctite should suffice though.

And I think I have space problems :-). Wood storage is hard, hunks too good to burn but too small to make much can really take up a lot of space.

ken

– “the sensor close enough to the spindle to sense a magnet mounted on that.”
Two magnets for equilibrium? or, if you don’t want to read twice the speed, at least some counterweight.