Headlamp Adapter Rings

[slob]

oh yeah... because you can’t do serious engineering without metricating.
even when imperial was the standard you still had to use ‘thou’ for precision work, that’s inherently metrication

i’m sure the ‘smidgen’ and ‘gnat’s cock hair’ will make a comeback for precise measuring.
you won’t need the conversion table if you remember it’s 4.28 $hitloads to the £uck ton

[Darkness]

Originally Posted by slob

oh yeah... because you can’t do serious engineering without metricating.
even when imperial was the standard you still had to use ‘thou’ for precision work, that’s inherently metrication

i’m sure the ‘smidgen’ and ‘gnat’s cock hair’ will make a comeback for precise measuring.
you won’t need the conversion table if you remember it’s 4.28 $hitloads to the £uck ton

Having owned V8 Land Rovers, I’ve still got a wide range of Whitworth, AF, BA and Metric hammers and screwdrivers in my tool box.

[slob]

I have a bunch of AF tools, doesn’t mean it’s a superior system. Although I think most of my hammers and screwdrivers are imperial (due to being made by a well known American company). The staunchly non-metric US put men on the moon, I’m pretty sure NASA use metres and grammes to calculate shizzle.

... I just looked that up and they’ve been ‘mostly metric’ since 1990 rofl

they lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999, when somone failed to convert units to metric, and it burned up entering the atmosphere :-O

[hhmunro]

... I just looked that up and they’ve been ‘mostly metric’ since 1990 rofl

As I understand it, the Americans are going Metric Inch by Inch...

True it’s hard to find metric here. But I wanted to see how this would work and I believe it came out great.

[slob]

thanks for the correction Jeff. I’ll edit my original response to avoid confusion.

I guess with lathes etc. you’re basically stuck with whatever feed and lead screws the manufacturer provided and have no choice but to convert.

I ended up buying some feeler guages from Germany since it seems impossible to find natively metric ones here.

[Mr Gazza]

Not a battle at all Sandro, but rather an interesting topic.

So Jeff, it's actually No6 gauge, like woodscrews used to be, and 32tpi, and not 6/32" at all?

I spent yesterday morning with my engineer friend, carefully measuring the Norton journals, bores valves and guides. The book gave all the sizes in thousandths of inches, while my mate painstakingly converted it all to mm!! Presumably his gauges are all metric.
Anyway everything passed with a clean bill of health and I'm ready to start preparing the engine... Oh yes!!

[utopia]

Yep, some kind of gauge .. though beyond that I'm baffled.
I did wonder whether it has something to do with the series of number gauged drills .. maybe the no6 drill is the tap drill or something .. but I checked and its nowhere near.
Maybe its just a gauge series specific to screw threads only.
I guess it must have been adopted as a useful shorthand to describe the smaller diameter range of screws which didn't fit conveniently into fractions of an inch .. like the BA series.
And yes, the 32 refers to 32 threads per inch .. though this number varies between both the screw size and the pitch range (ie UNC or UNF .. coarse or fine). eg as in 6-40 UNF.
Actually there is also a UNEF .. extra fine range too.

On the lathe .. yes I'm stuck with imperial units anyway because that's what my old machine is calibrated in (and my micrometers and calipers are all old school imperial too) but that's not really what I was getting at.
It seems to me that the "thou" is just a more appropriately sized unit for the degree of accuracy usually required in engineering machining work .. ie one thou is pretty damn accurate and ten thou is about as inaccurate as you're likely to get.
On the other hand with millimetres, you're either working in tenths (which are 4 thou and not really accurate enough in most cases) or hundredths (which are less than half a thou and are really too accurate most of the time, unless maybe for grinding tolerances).
I guess its one of those things that you have to experience first hand in order to fully appreciate what I'm getting at.

Of course all of this is just there by chance, being based around systems of measurement that were originally adopted for measuring fields or lengths of cloth or the height of horses or somesuch, long before engineering machining was invented.
And just in case anyone is wondering .. yes I am very much in favour of a "decimal" system where everything is quoted in multiples of ten.
I just think that the length of the platinum/iridium bar that is (or was) the metric standard doesn't lend itself naturally to the task of engineering machining.

Here endeth the ramble.
Hope it makes some sort of sense and maybe provides a little entertainment in these barren days.
I do apologise for cluttering the thread up with this stuff.
My only real intention was to correct Rob's original comparison between unc thread sizes and metric ones, lest anyone be mislead.

And while I'm at it .... lets hear it again for Gazza's adaptors.
The epitome of what's best about a club of like-minded enthusiasts working together for the common good.

Glad to hear that the Norton has passed its dimensional tests btw mate ... even in metric.
For those who don't know, this is a 750 Commando that has been in my possession since 1979 but has always been in various boxes ... that's how I bought it and it has only ever become more dismantled during my ownership.
I flogged it (hopefully cheap) to Gazza a couple of years ago when I realised that I loved my M750 Monster so much that I didn't really need any other bike .. ever !!! (well apart from my custom thumper runabout / winter hack anyway).
He is in the process of doing an excellent rebuild/revamp job on it .. but gets distracted every now and again with Ducati stuff.

[hh93]

Gazza,

i googled “Ducati Monster headlight adaptor” and this thread is fourth down on the list so it’s already out there in the ether via whatever means the www gatherers such info.

I reckon a change of access to the Forum is required to stop you being bombarded.

Regards
Howie

[Nickj]

Anyone ever done a search in a web browser that dumps you into a page that says you need to be logged in to view this, or gives you the text but won't let you view images??
It's down to how the search engines compile their indices of web site contents using robot crawlers. BTW they aren't actual clanky robots that crawl, though they might be they're just searches that look at the contents of web sites.
All the threads on here get crawled and added to search engines terms used for searches. The permission for this would need to be explicitly turned off for everything, well you could do it per area, specific strand or even single strand message content..
That's could as in 'could be done but' real granular control would be a PIA and eventually make it difficult for anyone not knowing about the site to find it.
Some times even the internal searches use the external search engines as their index generators so it's actually a useful thing.
And of course using the meta tag (search for Robots.txt if you really want to know more) in a site doesn't actually stop anything, it's just a pretty please don't request, as the crawler can just ignore it.

I think you're stuck with the noteriety/infamy/fame (delete as required). Just take it as a compliment, maybe get the numbers of queries and sell the idea/product on?

[Mr Gazza]

Yes I realise that if you put something on the internet it can be searched for and found, not much I can do about that.
However I have removed my email address from the op and made it clear that the kits are only available to UKMOC members, so they'll have to register to pm me.

I was a little bruised by a few (US) clients trying to treat me like some mean ebay seller.
I've had objections to a little over £10 postage to the US which works out at something less than a thousandth of a penny per mile to get it 6000 miles. I've been asked if I can send the file so they can print one themselves.. No reply when I said I make 'em in my shed with an mdf jig and a router.. Would it be cheaper if I left the clips out? Yes by about 25p.
I don't get the penny (or nickel) pinching when the equivalent in the US is over twice the price?
I've been to the US and noted an abundance of please and thank yous' in normal life, strangely absent in the communications I've had. In fact they are quite abrupt and demanding.

I'm a little thicker skinned now and I will just give a short sharp internationally understood two word phrase to anyone who wants me to play games in future.

This isn't a racist rant by the way, up until now all the Americans I have met or dealt with have been great.

[Nickj]

Originally Posted by Mr Gazza

I've been to the US and noted an abundance of please and thank yous' in normal life,

LOL That's rather like the pathological desire to join queues you find over here. It's more habitual than anything else.
Y'all have a nice day now

[slob]

Always pays to be polite to someone who might be armed ;-)
Maybe didn’t help that you spelt it ‘adapter’ rather than ‘adaptor’?
Might be worth editing the OP, which is the link Google finds.

[Albie]

Originally Posted by slob

Always pays to be polite to someone who might be armed ;-)
Maybe didn’t help that you spelt it ‘adapter’ rather than ‘adaptor’?
Might be worth editing the OP, which is the link Google finds.

Google says do you mean adapter or adaptor heres what we found regardless

[Mr Gazza]

Originally Posted by slob

Always pays to be polite to someone who might be armed ;-)
Maybe didn’t help that you spelt it ‘adapter’ rather than ‘adaptor’?
Might be worth editing the OP, which is the link Google finds.

Well you got me going there Rob and I had to check my spelling, as I get quite embarrassed if I make a spelling mistake, especially in the title bar.

It turns out that the internet, in all it's wisdom, has an awful lot to say about that and at the end of the day nobody knows if it should be an "e" or an "o", so both are right really.

Just to adeptly adapt this thread back on track; I have a Hella lamp unit in the bike now with a very powerful LED H4 fitted and it's the best yet.
Nick "The Clockie" gifted me the Hella, which was brand new and I bought a couple of LED H4s from him, that he gets from the good ol' US of A, the land of milk and honey!
I will need to ask him the identity of the LED as it came un-boxed.
The lamp is a parabolic reflector type with a refractor lens, ribbed in a similar way to the oem. It's a stonking bright light with a good dip cut off for the MOT. I've yet to test it in the dark, but the workshop wall test looks good.