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Thanks, Harvey! I've been a member here for several years, under one email address or another, though I don't actually have a SIEG mini-mill. My mini-mill is an Atlas horizontal mill. Larger than the SIEG, but not really large, for old American iron. A lot of the stuff you do on the Chinese mill can also be done on the Atlas,just rotated 90 degrees, and limited to an MT2 spindle for tooling.
Looks like a horizontal X1, almost. In this game, size does matter. However, you can do lots of good things.
Barry seems to have decided to abandon the group. Do YOU mind if I save as much as I can on the groups.io Mini-Mills group I started?
I've recommended that everyone download and archive as much as possible before the content is moved. I can't see a problem there.
The difficulty with the groups.io move is simple enough. (I'm elaborating for the benefit of anyone joining the discussion late).
Firstly, nothing stops you from making a basic (or better) group on groups.io. Other than the basic group, they'll want money per year. 200 dollars or so for the "premium" group (next level up).
Many people have moved groups from yahoo to groups.io. However, to have the entire group moved, with archives, memberships and the like, and seamlessly, you'd want groups.io to do it. Their regulations state that any group so moved must be a premium group for a year. That says 200 dollars up front, and now. Only the owner can give such permission.
There are 28 of your members that have joined me there to try to make this work, so far. I understand being tired of something, and wanting to move on to other things, but there are people here like myself who value the work you guys did. I'm a long way from Tacoma, so I took a class in machining here in Oklahoma City, started about 4-1/2 years ago. I'm not likely to do this long enough to become a professional, but this and other groups like it kept me going through some pretty bad times, and I'd really like to keep it going. I'm not Barry, I'm not a professional machinist, but I've been keeping some other groups going at least limping along, and in a couple of cases, doing OK.
Oh, I'm not a professional machinist either. No worries about that.
And I'm not burned out on managing a group yet. I've also been a member of some groups that lost their owner, mostly the mini-lathe groups owned by JW Early, who died unexpectedly a few years back.
I was a member of the mini-lathe groups as well, but I left when it got too political and too little lathe.
The new group I started at https://groups.io/g/Mini-Mills already has two owners, including myself, and will shortly have at least a couple of moderators as well, so no one has to burn out trying to keep the group going.
Because of what happened when JWE died, I see having two owners as a reasonable thing. From personal experience, more than one moderator also tends to split the workload, although it's never been too much. Mostly deleting the Chinese language spam and "your account has been suspended, sign in here...." scams.
From what I understand of the way all this works, anybody can download, copy, etc any material as needed from the archives (although you must be a member). The owner needs give permission only for the group move with the membership and data intact.
Harvey
Posted by: Harvey white <madyn@dragonworks.info>
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