News

Following a period of restrictions. the Society of Model and Experimental Engineers (SMEE) is planning to run its popular training courses for newcomers to model engineering, in 2022, starting in February. See our training page for more details.

This web site has now been moved to a new server platform, which we hope will fix a number of  the long-running problems that we have been experiencing. In particular, you should now be able to get notifications for new forum postings, and the password change mechanism should be working again. I am optimistic that the other changes will be invisible to you – it should just work! However, this will give us the opportunity to introduce some new features.

It is possible that a few things have been broken during the transition, so if you see anything odd, or you find something that does not seem to be working, please contact me so that I can investigate.

Many thanks,

Brian

webmaster@sm-ee.co.uk

Thanks to the good offices of Mike Tilby, the online collection of back issues of The Journal now goes back to 1976, and right up to the latest version hot off the press (April 2021). Many thanks to Mike for his work in scanning back copies which are now easily available to all of us via the web site.

The index to the list of available issues of The Journal is available HERE.

I have had reports from several members that they have received emails which mention “SMEE” in the Subject: line, usually with mention of a general meeting presentation topic or similar. However, the “Sender” address is unknown to the recipient, and the addresses that I have seen have nothing to do with SMEE members.

I cannot see any obvious connection between these emails and the SMEE website, and the most likely explanation is that a SMEE member, or possibly a non-SMEE member who has a number of SMEE members in their email contact list, has had their email hacked and a copy of their contact list taken. How or when is impossible to tell. Scammers will then use these email addresses to send emails which either have malicious content, or which have pointers to web sites containing malicious code and encourage the reader to click on the link.

The best advice for any email that you receive from an unknown source is to regard it as suspicious unless proved otherwise. In particular, do not click on any attachments in the email or on any links to other web sites unless you are confident that you know the real sender of the email. You can also report suspicious emails to the National Cyber Security Centre; more information on how to spot and deal with suspicious emails is available from their web site here.

Brian Neale
SMEE Webmaster

We now have an area of the web site dedicated to reports of SMEE competitions. The results of the 2019 Annual Competition, along with pointers to notes on the models concerned, can be found via this page. Congratulations to all competition entrants and especially prize-winners. Even if you were not awarded a prize, there’s a good chance that your entry on display has put ideas into the heads of other members and maybe will inspire them to enter next year!

We now have a number of discussion forums on the web site, available to SMEE members. As well as a couple of “special interest” forums for the Engine Builders’ Group and Digital Group. we also have a general discussion forum (ask questions, make suggestions, answer other members’ questions) and a buy/sell/exchange forum where you can post details of items for sale or wanted, or just to give away to get them out of your workshop!

All forums are open to all SMEE members and everyone is invited to participate. This is a way for members who are unable to get to Marshall House on a regular basis to participate a little more in the activities of the Society.

Just go to the “Members” drop-down menu above (just under the title bar on every page) and select “SMEE Members’ Forums” to see a list of all forums, or click on the links above. Look forward to seeing you there!

Some of you might have suffered because of the website problems we have had a couple of times in the last month or so. It seems that it is nothing to do with our site, but the hosting service we use has had some issues that have affected us. They believe that they know where the problems are, and are looking for a suitable solution.

In the meantime, if you go to one of our pages and get a “404 Page not found” error, don’t worry about it, and try again later. I try to keep track of the site but you can always drop me an email just to warn me that something isn’t right. Emails to webmaster@sm-ee.co.uk, please. As soon as I see or hear of a problem, I shall chase the hosting service to fix it as quickly as possible – unfortunately I cannot fix it myself.

Thanks for your understanding,

SMEE Webmaster

A further episode (part 23) of this series on a home-built CNC-milling-machine-from-scratch has now been added. Take a look and see how the project is progressing.

The 3D CAD and Fusion 360 tutorial series has now started running online. The first session was held on 4th March with more to come and was presented via a live video-conferencing link to around 15 participants.

All sessions are being recorded and are available to all SMEE members. If any member is interested in taking a look or even joining in, the recordings are available via the Digital Group programme page. Just click on the date of the session in the programme grid to run the recording. There is also a support forum on the SMEE website where participants can post questions or discuss techniques. They can even find their homework there!

If you would like to know more about these tutorials, please contact the Digital Group Coordinator via digital@sm-ee.co.uk. If you were unable to see the initial sessions live but have been watching the recordings, you are also welcome to join the forum to ask questions and see all the discussions to date. Again, contact the DG Coordinator to get access to the forum.