This page provides only a very cursory look at just a few of our research and production assets. More to follow . . . 12", 20 Speed Delta Wood Lathe c/w Delta Compound Slide Rest Here's a Delta 12" wood lathe I bought as a "junker" and completely rebuilt. It was stripped to bare cast iron, the bed reground and the headstock rebuilt with precision, pre-loaded bearings. The cabinet was built in our woodshop Rockwell 8" Jointer     This is an 8" Rockwell long bed jointer bought new in the '70s and -- just for fun -- rebuilt in '00. When new, the machine was disassembled for inspection prior to being put into service. It was discovered that the tables had been incorrectly ground due an incredible amount of swarf being present in the dovetails at the time of assembly, prior to final grinding. When Rockwell refused to honor its own warranty, the dealer from whom we purchased made it good. We sent the machine to Dominion Bridge, here in Calgary, who at that time had a huge Snow, surface grinder capable of working a 36" x 72" surface. What we now have is a very accurate machine. Although not evident from the photo, the cutter knives are "back ground" to reduce the effective rake angle with respect to the work surface. It's not generally realized that most jointer and thickness planer cutter heads are machined so as to provide a rake angle optimized for working soft woods. When such a steep angle is used with hardwoods, "tearout" is a common effect, notable and problematic with burls. curly, crotch and "birds' eye" grains. When back ground to reduce the rake angle from 30 to 20 deg. such problems are practically eliminated and cutter life is greatly extended due the cutting edge being better self-supported. Any discussion of cutting tools would not, on this site at least, be complete without mention of the life-extending benefits of cryo-treatment. While not common knowledge amoung audio folk, such benefit has been known in the metalworking industries for some time . . .

. Rockwell 17" Drill Press   Here's a 17" Rockwell drill press bought new in the early '70s and rebuilt in '00. Although it has seen a lot of hard use the machine has stood up well, the only problem having been a poorly designed motor-mounting bracket that allowed the motor some real latitude of motion. This repaired, the machine runs beautifully.   A Classic Holbrook C10 - 12" x 20" Toolroom Lathe     This is one of the truly great British lathes and one I prefer to even the likes of the venerable, US-made Monarch 10EE. While I could go on to some great length over this machine's manifold virtues I'll leave it to you to download partial copy of the 1960 Holbrook literature on the 'C' Series of machines here to see what these machines are truly all about . . .     DeVlieg Micropoint Tool Grinder     . This machine is presently completely stripped to bare metal and is going through a complete rebuild. You can download copy of some original 1958 literature here.     Our 1971, Scratch-built Glass Beading Machine     A way back in the early '70s I had a motorcycle shop where I repaired British iron: Triumphs, BSAs, Nortons and the like. It happened at one point that I came across a small glass beader/ sandblaster in the faculty of engineering machine shop on the U of C campus. Falling in love with the critter on the spot I determined to build one, one that suited my needs. So, I bought a little Lincoln, 200A "buzz box" stick welder and taught myself to arc weld -- on 14 ga. sheet metal. I had to build three before I got the one seen here. The first was a mess but I learned enough to do a good enough job of the second one that I was able to sell it to a company who wanted it for some sort of oilfield work. By then I pretty much had myself around the task and mine went together with relative ease. Having cut my teeth some years earlier in an auto body shop, the subsequent paint work was no great challenge. 34 years and a new paint job later this machine still works like the day I put it into service. It is immeasurably valuable in the overhaul of any piece of equipment such as a machine tool. At the lower right is shown the side panel from the floppy disc drive of a Data Precision 6000 FFT analyzer being cleaned prior to being sent out for powder coating.     Loudspeaker Testing Facilities     This is an outdoors measuring lift I built in 1985 and subsequently sold to the U of A's Acoustics and Noise Unit in Edmonton, AB; home of two quite large reverberation chambers and, on the campus proper, a small Eckel Industries anechoic room. The lift will hoist a 200lb payload, typically a loudspeaker, to 25 ft. above ground where essentially "free-field" measurement is possible. Short of a large anechoic room costing many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars, like this or this, outdoors testing is the only way to get truly accurate measurements of low frequency loudspeaker performance. At the time I built this unit it was, to the best of my knowledge, the only such dedicated lift in Canada. Above are shots of a small anechoic chamber I scratch built in 1982 for use in the development of midranges and tweeters. Having a useful lower limit of approximately 300Hz. it served my research needs admirably and somewhat to my surprise turns out to be useful at lower frequencies provided one measures in the immediate near field Bruel & Kjaer 2035 Signal Analyzer     Here's a beautiful late model dual channel signal analyzer that might be the most capable such analyzer Bluer & Kjaer ever produced. Along with the rightly famous 2012, it's certainly amoung the of the last of the great "knob and button" boxes produced before the introduction of the now-ubiquitous PC-based Pulse software. In terms of 1,8Hz to 102kHz acoustics measurement, this piece lets me do everything I can think of and a lot more I don't yet know about. A 3.7MB, 26 page product data brochure from B&K on the Multichannel Analysis Systems Types 3550, 3555, 3556, 3557 can be downloaded here. .           Spectral Dynamics SD 380 Signal analyzer     Text to follow . . .         General Radio 1630-AV 200 Watt AC & DC Inductance Measuring Assembly     This is piece that came along by dint of a lot of plain old hard work. Assembled from instruments purchased hither and yon over a period of a couple of years, it allows the measurement of, amoung other things, the inductance of iron core transformers and chokes over a range from 20Hz. to 20kHz., from voltage levels from millivolts to kilovolts and current levels from hundreds of microamps to several amps. As well, it can be set up to do BH curves on an oscilloscope Essential in the design and production of power supply components, plate load and power supply chokes and output transformers for either single-ended or push-pull applications. This is a fairly rare piece and one seldom seen in NIST-traceable calibration. When last produced by GenRad in the mid-'90s the 1630-AV cost some $US38,000.00. .         Quan-Tech Transistor & FET Noise Analyzer     Text to follow . . . .             Visitors since Feb. 1, 2009