T&L Publications

Here's a couple of items that may be of some interest to the dwindling members.

I use a CNC router to cut many things, and one project requires cutting etched FR-4 boards into a donut shape. The FR-4 boards produce a lot of fluffy, light weight waste in the process. Aside from just cleaning it all up, I saved a cup full of fluff and experimented with it. I found that it can be used as a filler, or thickener, for epoxies that may be too thin. Since it is a fiberglass resin to start with, it mixed well, cured hard as nails and based on how much fluff you add it can be made to be thick enough to fill voids or build up an area. I'm not sure how it will work with Cyanoacrylite, but that will be the next test.
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I am always doing fabrication and assembly tasks, and most involve cutting and stripping more quantities of wire than I care to do by hand, plus chopping hundreds of pieces of shrink tube and lengths of PVC tubing. I recently purchased an SWT-508 series automated wire cutter and stripper, and can almost justify it's cost. To help soften the expense I am considering doing cutting/stripping for anyone that needs that bothersome bunch of wire or tubing prepped that nobody, including you, want to do by hand, and the big houses won't talk about it either.
I'm still struggling a bit on the learning curve because of the broken language manual, so no, don't ask about the cost, or ship me reels of wire yet.
But do comment on any aspect of this idea, positive or otherwise so I can decide if it is something to consider going deeper into.

And...If anyone has a similar machine and has located parts, I would appreciate the info. Plenty of machine sellers are out there but nobody has spare parts, except the basic blades.

That's crazy!

Using the FR4 dust reminds me of using wood dust / leavings with wood glue to make filler. Ends up being a lot stronger / durable than just the glue itself, as you said, having the extra substrate to hold onto. The big aesthetic plus is that it looks more like the original substance than just "glue". As for working with Cyanoacrylate, that would have to be an experiment with how much you can add before it starts to set up. I can see that being a razors edge between workability and a throw away batch. You'd have to be god-awful fast. Heck, even fast set epoxy would give you more time to mix, place, and shape the schmutz.

Hope you can get some work in to help offset that machine. I'm so low production I have to sharpen things due to oxidation before use. Lol!

To the lack of repair parts, that seems to be the direction most things are going these days. And it's a sad statement, especially to those of us who can remember being able to get parts to fix just about anything we owned. Planned obsolescence seems to be creeping ever closer to first generation products. There's plenty more I can say, but I won't. That's not what this forum is for.

Let us know when you get done with your translation of the manual.

Indeed, wood dust/chips have been used to vary the properties of concrete!

As for that wire stripper, might contract with a local metal recycler to strip the miles of insulated wire they get in.

No, this is not a scrap wire stripper. It preps new wire for assembly by precisely cutting to length and stripping the ends. I can also do some limited terminal crimping with another machine.

After reading this ie reminded me of some machines I used to work on at Carrier Air Conditioning. They would pull wire off a spool, cut it to length, strip both ends, and terminate both ends with either the same or different terminals.. I can't remember the name of the machines, but I do remember they were headquartered in Hershey PA.
I remember that fact because several got to go to their school, and I didn't.. I did a search just now for a wire cutting/stripping/terminating machine and got a blue million results. None of them were it.. We bought the machines in the 80's and the plant closed in '06 and we were still using them, we had about 15 of 'em..

!!! they closed in '06 'cuz they made machines too good to sell replacements??? (they didn't break much)

And they sent our jobs to Mexico...