Storage Screwed; Trouble in DC (this just sucks!)

The post title is a tad dramatic perhaps, but accurate.

In recent weeks I have been working on organizing and cleaning my shop. One area that has long vexed me is how to store commonly used fasteners in such a way I can easily access them and assess stock, without the storage comprising open compartments that fill with wood dust over time.

I’ve tried a variety of approaches to storing screws, rivets, nails, etc., the most recent being a wall-mounted plastic bin with clear plastic trays that you pull out to get at various fasteners. It worked okay, at best, but squinting through the end of a little plastic tray turns out to be not the most clear method for knowing where a given fastener might be located, and how many you might have.

I’ve taken in recent years to moving away from the ‘tools on display’ mode of handing stuff on the wall, to storing tools in rolling cabinets. A cabinet drawer can be lined with material to keep corrosion at bay, and the tools in a cabinet are much better protected than otherwise, and contents don’t get caked with dust. Contents can easily be secured with a turn of a key. I still have hammers and saws hung on the wall, but eventually they will both be going into some form of cabinet storage.

As for cabinets, new ones that are decent are pricey, so I buy them used, partly as I try to avoid offshore (i.e., made in China) products by and large. I’ve found Kennedy tool cabinets to be a good choice so far, as a used Kennedy roller cabinet can generally be found in the $200~300 price zone. So far over the past 3 years or so I have acquired three roller cabinets, 2 of which are 29″ models, and 1 of which is a 34″ model.

Looking in Kennedy’s online tool catalog the other day I noticed a couple of things. One is that they have decreased their range of products somewhat. I guess the company was bought out in the past year or two by Cornwell Quality Tools Company, and as that company owns other brands with certain product overlaps to Kennedy, they have ‘rationalized’ Kennedy’s product line somewhat, reducing the scope of offerings. Hopefully these aren’t the first steps in rationalizing the company out of existence, as has happened elsewhere.

I also noticed while perusing their website that Kennedy makes a series of drop-in tray liners for their cabinets. I thought I’d obtain a couple and see how they work, in the hope of getting some semblance of control over fastener storage.

I chose a couple of trays for one of the 29″ cabs, this one residing at the infeed end of the jointer:

I ordered the trays directly from Kennedy’s online store and they came a week or so later. I was impressed with the trays out of the box as they were considerably stouter than I had imagined they might be. They were both a perfect fit inside the cabinet.

The lower drawer has the liner with the deeper 4″ compartments and thereby stores larger fasteners:

And the upper drawer has the smaller fasteners in shallow 2″ trays:

I think this storage solution works very well for me, and I’d recommend the solution to anybody. The drawers keep the dust out, and simply pulling the drawer open makes everything perfectly accessible and it is obvious what you have and don’t have.

I plan to get a couple more of these insert trays in the near future so that I can similarly store my overflowing collection of larger fasteners, including bolts, washers. lag screws, cap screws, etc.. I think it will only be a matter of time before that 29″ Kennedy box is entirely devoted to fastener storage. Another used Kennedy box looks to be in my future as well, so I’m keeping my eye on Craigslist and other places.

Now, onto the problems I’m having with DC. By ‘DC’, I refer to my dust collection system. Not to say that the other, more well-known DC doesn’t have an extensive list of defects to address….

Dust collection is one of those things that is absolutely essential to a shop yet is entirely unglamorous if not generally forgotten about. Many shops, I dare say, entirely underwhelm in their choice of (marginal) dust collection equipment, and I’m even aware of some folks somehow trying to run modern machinery without dust collection.

There are certain kinds of machines, particularly of the old ‘arn variety, where you might be able to forgo a dust collector, and indeed many older machines have poor provisions for collecting dust anyhow. I’m thinking of classic machines here like jointers, where chips can fall out the bottom, or shapers even, where chips can just spray everywhere if that works for you.

Even planers can be run without collection, however anyone who runs a planer like that will attest to the startling volume of mess very quickly produced, so, unless your style is to take all your day’s shop footsteps in 6″ of chips, or spend half your day sweeping up, then dust collection is mandatory. And if wood dust is a health concern, then a focus on good dust collection is absolutely essential if you want to have powered stationary machines.

With several of the larger machines I have – jointer, planer, and shaper in particular -they won’t operate properly without a dust collection system drawing a certain CFM rate – the shavings will just jam up inside the works.

When I got my shop running – and I continue to use that term loosely – my first piece of bigger equipment was a 16″ Oliver jointer. I was able to run it without dust collection, however when I could at last obtain a planer, I knew I was also getting myself into dust collection as part of the bargain. I wrote a post nearly 10 years back about the system I obtained from a High School in the midwest, entitled Shop Vac Review. A later follow-up post detailed the relocation of the system to a corner of my space and some of the preliminaries in getting the parts together.

Later developments ensued with the system as I gradually configured the system for the shop, adding new parts as new machines came on the scene. This resulted in a post series entitled, far more appropriately than I realized at the time, “This Just Sucks“.

That turned into a 3-part series spanning a few years.

The most recent changes to that system formed a post from 2014 entitled Down a Dusty Road,  where I detailed upgrading from the bag house which came with the system from the high School, to a Oneida set up with dual 55 gallon collector drums, dual paper filters with removable catch bucket system. That filter set up set me back $1500.00, and the mods to the cyclone and cost of support stand were close to $1000. If you manage to wade through those posts in those three series you’ll be more or less up to date on the dust collection in my shop, save for extensions and additions I have made over the years as equipment has been added. Every time a new machine comes in, what comes along with it are several hundred in electrical components (conduit, boxes, receptacles, plugs, wire), and usually a bit more, $500~750, in additional dust collection components.

The new Hofmann long hole boring machine is a case in point. I’ve already done the electrical work and have it hooked up, but it has three chip collection ports requiring several meters of 120mm flex hose. Also needed are a couple of custom duct work pieces. It only takes a few bits and pieces and I’m soon staring at a $700 bill. You might call the electrical and DC parts the hidden cost of machinery.

I’ve made therefore a not inconsiderate investment in my dust collection system to date. Probably there is as much money in the dust collection components as there is in my SCM 24″ planer, or there is in the Hofmann mortiser.

I’d now I’d like to offer some new observations having lived with the system for a few more years now. Is is a dream set up? Am I completely satisfied or does it fall short in some areas?

Here’s a pic of the collection end of the set up, taken yesterday , with cyclone on stand over the two chip collection barrels, and the venting side with dual paper pleated filters:

A closer look at the filter set up:

You might observe in the above photo that on the side of the filter mounting bracket there is a gauge, which tells at a glance – if you bother to glance at it (ahem!) – whether the filters are allowing good air flow or are operating at less than optimal levels, that is, filter efficiency. The gauge is a $114 option from Oneida. I’ll get back to that gauge in a moment, but first let me describe how things go sometimes with the set up I have put into my shop.

I had an episode with the original bag house (the one that came with the cyclone) where the concealed collector bin filled up with chips while planing some stock, and the fill up continued right up the cyclone, and the rest of the chips went into the bag house before I noticed a problem. The clean up from that took many hours and was an unpleasant exercise to say the least. I felt afterwards that by upgrading the system to one having greater chip collecting capacity via a pair of 55-gallon drums, along with clear flex hose connecting the chip collection barrels to the cyclone base which would allow me, theoretically,  to spot chip overflow, would go a long way to reducing the odds of a similar over flow incident. The pair of filters replaced a 6′ x3′ pice of floor space, so it gave me a little more floor space, and the promise of improved air flow. Well, the set up I have hasn’t quite met that promise at all times, unfortunately.

Over time the clear flex hose sections above the two chip collection barrels have become permanently darkened, likely some combination of sunlight and loads of wear from the chips, and I can no longer simply tell at a glance whether the bins are getting full or not. I have to unclamp the lid from each barrel and inspect. It’s not a great inconvenience, but nevertheless is sometimes overlooked and I have made some lucky late catches – and sometimes I have been too late.

One might think it is a simple matter of replacing the flex hose however the stuff is not cheap and the shortest length I would be looking at – and having to store for years afterwards, is a 12.5′ length. And around $300. So, I’ve procrastinated on that. It’s doesn’t take much to become mentally preoccupied with a stack of wood to plane – for it is the planer which contributes the greatest pile of chips by far – and to thereby take one’s eye off of the situation – or underestimate – in regards to the immediate fullness of the chip barrels. And all it takes is to push one wide piece of softwood through taking a heavy pass and suddenly you got lots of chips.

Two adverse things have happened, more than once now, under the sudden heavy load of thick curled chips from milling a wide piece of softwood. Neither of these things are a good time for me.

The first is that the heavy load of chips can foul the impeller on the bottom of the motor, which in turn lays atop the cyclone some 13′ in the air.

The second is that the second barrel can fill up and an additional blink of an eye seems to be all it takes before the cyclone is full. The excess proceeds into the filters. Those are intended for fine dust, something I don’t produce much of. I’m a chip man it seems.

When the impeller is fouled there is a bad noise from way on up there telling you that all is not well with that end of the cyclone. Then I have to drag out a ladder, go up and down on that ladder several times and remove a bunch of the p

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Wadkin Resurrection: Back Miter Fence (II)

For Part I of this Wadkin saw revamp sub-project, click here.

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When working on an irregular object, like this rough back miter fence casting, I would like to think that I could find an initial fixturing position and then generate perfect surfaces, one after another, from that starting point. That hasn’t worked so far quite like I might have hoped. Instead what I find is that I get better results by fixing an initial position as best I can, taking light skims off of a face and then an adjacent face, and this in turn allows the piece to better register to the initial face and base of the vise, and eventually subsequent passes on those surfaces, once I circle back around to them, gradually draws the part into a good geometric form with adjacent faces being 90˚ to one another. The key point being, I suppose, don’t bite off more than you can chew and proceed with a certain degree of caution and an abundance of observation. No different than joinery work really.

Here I’m taking a skim off of the inner edge of the base of the casting:

I’ve changed cutters after a reader comment in a previous post mentioning a fly cutter. While I don’t have a dedicated fly cutter, I do have a Mesa Tool accessory boring bar with coated insert for my Criterion Boring head which works superbly as a fly cutter:

I dare say that cutter gives exceptionally clean results, much better than the previously-used router bit(s). The boring head normally is a tool used for precisely fly-cutting the perimeter of a hole – i.e., the cut is in a sideways direction proceeding downwards. In machining work, it is not considered accurate to simply drill a hole if precision is desired, rather, one drills a hole undersized, then uses a boring bar to skim it to the desired dimension. The Criterion boring head is one of the standard in the field, though by no means not the only quality boring head made. Mine is the medium-sized one, and is adjustable on a 0.001″ (diameter) basis. In using it as a fly cutter though, there is no need to adjust anything but the depth of cut.

Here I’m decking the underside of the pivot boss portion of the casting to a preliminary depth relative to the base plane of the casting:

A couple of recent improvements to my mill I might mention in passing. One is a mounted proper machine lamp:

You can see in behind it the original wire for the lamp which would have come with the machine from the factory, now long-gone. Fortunately, the spacing pattern on the lamp mounting was very close to the original lamp mounting holes, so I was able to simply bolt it on without any messing around.

The other improvement is a cast aluminum Newall DRO mounting arm I found on Ebay for cheap ($45):

Previously the DRO was clamped to a plywood frame on the machine table, and was in the way half the time. I was able to mount the swing arm to the machine column using a lifting hook hole so no hole drilling was required.

After working my way around the back miter fence casting, I am on to final clean-up on the base:

One more light skim got a clean surface there. Then it was on to decking the underside of the sweep arm portion, taking it to the target height dimension relative to the base:

In the interim I also took a very light skim off of the front miter casting to make sure the mounting bolt boss on that casting was clean and flat, and also cleaned up the upper surface of the sweep arm portion. You’ll see the cleaned surfaces in a picture further down this page.

Now decking the pivot boss to final height:

Critical surfaces now nearly done, given the clamped position for the part I could take the opportunity to work on tidying up the casting otherwise. I put a 0.75″ (19mm) 4-flute spiral end mill in the collet holder, turned the rotary table 17.5˚, and started in on machining the angled side face of the casting:

Done, about 12 passes later, with a pass or three now afterward to clean off the end of the casting:

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The Unknown Known (Bandsaw)

Today’s post title comes from a humorous, if not infamous, Donald Rumsfeld press conference:

I have two Hitachi bandsaws, as regular readers of this blog have likely observed. One is the CB75, which I have set up with the optional blade guides for small blades. Thus the machine is dedicated to using blades to cut curves. My other Hitachi is the larger brother to that saw, the CB100FA, which is a dedicated resaw and accepts 4″ wide stellite-tipped blades. They are both excellent machines, though I have had some unsatisfactory experiences with them at times as well in terms of cutting issues. While I thought I knew bandsaws well enough and could set the machines up to work well, I’ve now come to realize that I was relatively clued out about certain aspects.  In life, if one is open to learning, then, as the saying goes, the more you know, the more you come to know that you don’t know. Thus it is for me with bandsaws and a whole lot of other things I’m sure.

I thought I was having problems with blade drift on the bigger resaw, and was finding myself fighting the machine a bit while in the last stages of work on the Colgate project. so, over the last couple of months while I was laid up, I spent some time researching this issue. I wanted to know, if I might be cheeky, if others caught my drift.

Well, you can read about and watch videos on people dealing with bandsaw blade ‘drift issues’ until the cows come home. I’ve been reading articles on this topic at regular intervals in woodworking magazines until, in the past few years,  I have stopped paying much attention to woodworking magazines – and magazines in general for that matter. I used to go to bookstores with some frequency, but that habit has gone by the wayside. Anyhow, bandsaw blade drift has been, and continues to be, a common touchstone of discussion and analysis.

Some people get into quite complex undertakings when addressing the topic of blade drift. This video would have to be the most over-the-top example of that:

I don’t suggest watching the entire video, but it’s your life.

If you search on Youtube for ‘Bandsaw Blade Drift’, you will discover quickly that the term should be added to the list of uncountable nouns. It’s unbelievable how much energy and analysis is devoted to this topic.

So, for years I had accepted the info I had come across regarding tuning your bandsaw to deal with drift as being gospel. Brand new blades somehow drifted all of their own accord and you need to adjust the machine to the blade’s peculiarities whenever you changed blades.

There were two videos which opened my eyes however, to see that maybe drift was not all it was cracked up to be. The first was provocatively titled “The Myth of Bandsaw Blade Drift…”:

If you didn’t find his argument convincingly demonstrated by making a good resaw cut with a bandsaw having the guides pulled away and the blade tension slackened, then you weren’t paying attention.

Obviously, the narrator wants to sell that resaw carriage, which is an item of little interest to me, but the point he makes applies all the same. What I learned was that it was likely that the wooden extension fences I had attached to both of my bandsaw fences, had likely led to my last saw blade getting worn so that they started to drift. It’s not so easy to get a 4″ wide blade to drift, but believe me it can be done.  The cut begin wanting to drift away from the fence, toward its sharper side. Indeed with my resaw this was the exact problem I had been battling, though I had carefully adjusted my fence to the line of cut and had done other things to adjust for drift. The extension fence, what I thought was an added extra to improve stock control and cutting was in fact having a negative effect.

You see, even after you set the blade fence, etc., to deal with drift, with every new stick you run through that happens to release stress  and opens up after the cut, will give more of the same: pushing the blade once more against the near side teeth, wearing them more on that side and thus increasing the tendency of the blade to wander away from the fence because  it is now the sharper side. Got it.

The next time I got to my shop I removed the secondary wooden fences from both of my bandsaws. The factory metal fences on both machines end right as the blade starts cutting, so maybe Hitachi had some good sense in their designs that I might have been better off leaving well alone.

The second video I watched which was highly educational and convincing was one taken of a talk given at a woodworking show by Alex Snodgrass, who has been working for Carter Products for many years:

For me, the gem of information in that video concerned the set up tricks for small blades, in which you use the upper guide’s back wheel to push the blade forward, then use the tracking to pull the blade on the upper bandsaw wheel back into position, teeth gullets centered on the tire.

So, when I got back in my shop after having absorbed the content of the Snodgrass video, I went to set up my smaller bandsaw accordingly. All was well until it came time to adjust the lower guide, where I ran into a problem I had noticed previously with these guides. For small blades, the lower blade guide has a mounting arm which is too short. At full reach forward it it sits too far from the correct position, and this problem is exacerbated by following Snodgrass’s approach of loading the small blade forward in a bow, as it moves the blade even further out from the guide.

I contacted Carter Products and asked if they had a guide package for my saw, and as it turns out, they did not, which I found a little surprising considering that the CB75 certainly sold in adequate numbers to make it a more or less common machine.

So, I decided to modify my lower guide. Not the first time. While I praise Hitachi for their excellent machines overall, when it comes to this factory-made guide kit for smaller blades, there are some shortcomings. The biggest problem with the lower guide in particular is that the mounting post is too short, but another issue I had with it is that when you try to tilt the saw table, a portion of the table casting runs into a portion of the guide. I rectified that issue by milling a small clearance out on the guide last year, so to revisit this guide for more work is kinda like saying hello to an old friend now.

I figured I could extend the post by milling up a piece of brass and bolting it on there. Found the perfect piece to start with:

Here’s where the rotary table on the mill comes into its own:

The flat is machined:

The piece is separated from the base with some tedious hack-sawing, then I deck off the mating surface on the mill:

Combining a vise with a c-clamp gives the required alignment for the two parts:

Perhaps time to look at renewing the tape on the jaws, as it isn’t doing much anymore.

Next, I transfer the bolt centerline over to the guide post with a transfer punch:

After drilling and tapping the end of the guide post, I attach the extension piece with a cap screw:

Done:

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Wadkin Resurrection: Back Miter Fence

The previous post in this series dealt with the first stages of milling the rough casting of the protractor head. In this post, we look at the back miter fence, the rough casting for which was obtained recently from a dedicated Wadkin fan out on the west coast.

As I mentioned in that previous post, the design of the quadrant, that is, the pairing of independent front and back miter fences, seemed to lend itself to the processing of miter cuts for various polygons, while the later Wadkin one-piece cast mitering fence set at a 90˚angular relationship between front and rear fence faces was only going to be especially useful for 4-sided polygons (a tetragon, to use the technical term). Now, the 45˚ miter is the type of miter cut that will be executed by 99% of woodworkers in 99% of cases involving miter cuts, so as far as that goes having a one-piece miter fence is no great disadvantage at all.

Still, I do process a fair amount of other polygon miter cuts, and wanted the functionality promised with split front/rear miter fences to achieve the capacity to readily cut polygons from 3-sided (trigon) to 12-sided (dodecagon).

Ah, such hopeful imaginings. I took the rough casting for the back miter and decided to stick it in place, mocked up as it were, to see what was what. That’s when I discovered, to paraphrase a line from a Bruce Springsteen song (“Racing in the Street”) that, “all my pretty dreams had been torn”.

The way the pair of castings are configured does not allow for nearly the swing range I had imagined. The swept arm which allows the fence to be clamped at a given setting can only swing so far inwards before the end of that circular arm runs into the back face of the front miter casting. In order to get in much further than a 90˚ relationship between the two fence faces, the length of that swept arm needs to be on the shorter side. Anything beyond that, the base portions of the castings will run into one another. I found the tightest placement it appeared to be capable of would likely make it possible to cut the miter from a trigon, at 60˚ between fence faces.

Swinging back outward, the short swept arm now presents a constraint as to how far the back miter fence may be swung open while still being capable of being bolted tight to the front miter fence. This is as far out in swing as it looked like it would go:

Keep in mind that this is not the normal relationship of the paired fences for miter cutting. In this case I have the front miter fence in its the normal 90˚ relationship for cross cutting and have simply placed the back miter fence against it to check the relationship between the two fences. If I were to fix the fences together as you see in the above picture, obviously I would risk slamming the blade into the back miter fence, which would not be among the list of desired activities in my shop.

I reckon that the widest setting between fence faces I could obtain would be on the order of 108˚, which would allow pentagon miters to be cut. The back miter fence can open plenty wider, but then it cannot be clamped to the front fence, and given the lack of capacity on the sliding table for affixing hold downs, it would involve some head-scratching, and maybe an extra locking bolt hole in the table, some sort of pad upon which it could rest, and provide a means of fixing it all in place.

It’s an advantage to have the two fences capable of being bolted to one another as a unit, as that makes for greater convenience for those cases in which one is cutting unequal miters due to the framing members being mitered having different dimensions from one another. For example, you might have a 2″ wide frame to joint to a 2.5″ wide frame. With a front/back miter fence paired and connected to one another, then all one needs to do is leave the pair bolted in their same orientation and swing the assembled pair of fences out of the regular cutting angle to the blade to a position which produces the unequal miters. If the front fence and back fence are to be instead bolted independently to the table, then resetting for unequal miters becomes much more of a PITA.

An alternative idea would be to make a second version of back miter fence which would have a special longer swept arm and which could be placed in position when you want to cut with the fences more obtusely related than 108˚. If I went that route, I’m not sure I would go the way of wooden pattern and sand cast and then hours of milling. It’s not efficient, especially when there are good alternatives these days.

So, as a stock factory option, the front/rear miter fence pairing gives a functionality of cutting polygons in a range from 3-sided to 5-sided. That’s better than being able to cut only 4-sided polygon miters, but only very slightly better.

You know, as mentioned above, a vast preponderance of miter cuts are going to be for 4-sided right angled frames. Now, it seems to me that the next two miter angles one would expect on the basis of ‘likely to be done’ would be for 6-sided (hexagonal) or 8-sided (octagonal) frames. And the stock miter quadrant set up does not provide that functionality. As it only provides the capacity beyond the 45˚ miter to cut 3-sided and 5 sided frame corners, which are rather unlikely choices it seems to me, it might as well really only be a fixed unit giving the standard tetragon’s miter. Better to have a fixed 90˚ miter fence where you can be sure it is set at the right angle, no pun intended, than to have a device with fences which can move independently thus opening up a greater possibility that an error will occur in setting up which will lead to undesirable results, not to mention the inherent inefficiency of having to perform a secondary step to set the angular relationship between fences after the fence halve have been set onto the table. Sigh!

Still…what I want is a miter cutting device which allows me to quickly establish the angles required for any polygon up to 12 sides. The factory design and execution of quadrant does not allow for that. So, if I want that functionality, then I’ll have to find another way beside the stock set up.

I’m working on that other way presently, and have some percolating ideas which I have to exercise tremendous self restraint not to just spill the beans about. I’ll save that story for when concrete steps get taken towards that end. Right now I’ve settled upon a design approach and have executed a sketch which is most of the way to completion now.

In the meantime, I have this rough fence casting which I paid for, and is of no use until it is machined to final form. I’ve decided that I will machine it to produce an accurate replica of a factory back miter fence, which I will then have as a very desirable accessory for the saw, and the connected pair of fences will be perfectly usable for regular miters, which are going to be the most frequently tackled. So, it will still be useful. A rough casting is frankly not going to be useful to a lot of folks, unlike a machined one, which is at least going to be useful for cutting the standard miter.

So, on to some more cast iron machining. This back fence can be clamped in my Kurt vise, which is most helpful. What remains unhelpful is the shape of the piece, from the inside of which I must obtain the perfect back miter fence. There’s nothing to reference from to start, so it is unwise to mill too much off of any surface until you get your bearings and have a plan, so to speak.

The back miter fence millwork is slightly complicated by the fact that, in order to fit well to the front miter fence, three separate surfaces, at three separate heights, all have to be co-planar with the front fence, and all meeting at the same time. If one surface meets ahead of the others, then tightening the fence down with the lock bolt will introduce distortion to the casting which may throw it out of square or cause other unforeseen headaches. So, it seems I have one chance to get it right, though it seems like even if I get some of it wrong there are probably remedies involving shims or special washers that could address problems. I’m hoping though to get it right the first time without having to take such ‘plan b’s’.

I went initially with an orientation for the part which was easy to locate and clamp in the vise, and then took a couple of skims off the lower edge of the fence:

With the same clamping position, I also skimmed the underside of the pivot:

Another view:

Not shown was the taking of a skim off of the swept arm portion. Once that was done, I flipped the fence over, placing it on the cleaned and flat-milled surface, atop a pair of parallels, and clamped it using a brass block in the middle of the vise jaw:

A pass or two also off of the top of the pivot:

At this stage there is plenty of extra material on the pivot boss for adjustment, and the fence section remains about 0.06″ fat of the mark.

My next step will be to deck the clamping pad on the front miter fence, and obtain a height which I can match with later millwork on the back miter fence:

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