Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bad lathe week

yeah,..

They need to put the trades back in the high schools not everyone is a computer geek or an athlete.

I do not think that it will ever happen though

It will when the damn idiots figure out that a tradesman with 4 years of making money while learning the trade is worth a whole crapload more that a degree will make. The kids coming out of my program will be at about 80k in 2017 before Obama tax without much OT

We need to get the insurance company's out of running every first they were the cause of taking the trades out of the schools in the first place.
And now they are taking the small businesses down like my business and a lot of others just so they can make a buck.

Many's the times when I've thought That looks close, stopped the machine, and miked the part � "right on!"

Couldn't do that on purpose, of course. There's gotta be at least a battalion of special angels, all named Sheer Luck.

two old sayings
I would rather be lucky than good
the difference between a good toolmaker and a bad one is the good one knows how to fix his own f%ck ups

It's Zen,..man.

It starts to come into play once you've done something enough.

Kind of like shooting IHMSA,..when you reach the point that you can shoot the rams at 200 meters in the peter with a 10" .357 Maximum Thompson Center Contender.

The front sight will cover damn near the entire target,....but Zen tells you where the point of impact will be.

Ain't nuthin' more fun that knockin' over a 40 lb ram at 200 meters by hittin' it in the peter with a hand-rifle.,...and it's made possible by Zen.

Zen is all over the place in machine shops too.

You notice it after a while.

I'm convinced that Elgin Gates decided to leave the peters on the rams just to appeal to those who would discover Zen on the IHMSA range.

What other reason could there be?

http://www.inc.com/magazine/19851101/4564.html

I cant even imagine kids today putting up with this.
Even my apprenticship wasnt that bad.

Its a different world today though.
When I started.
I knew I was going to move up.
It was either move up or move out...ie fired.
They paid you for what you could do.
The more you could do the more they paid.
I loved it.

In later years the owners became greedie dickheads.
Now they dont pay kids crap.
I must have trained 10 or 15 young guys.
They would never pay them.And they would get fed up and quit.
The look managments face when I told them I wouldn't train anymore new guys...was priceless.
No wonder they cant get anyone to even consider going into it.
I dont blame the young guys.


dave

Hell,...I've gone 8 fer 10 on the 200 meter rams with nothing but peter shots.

I was approaching the level of consciousness which would have allowed 10 fer 10 when tendonitis in my left forearm,...from holding a bullet mold for hours on end,.. limited my training.

For sure, I'd never qualify!

Whaddya do when you've spent hours milling a part, finally get it right, go to blue it �

� and find that it's stainless?

BTDT

Swatcha get, I guess, for making everything out of scrap. Count on it � scrap gets mixed-up.

the difference between a good toolmaker and a bad one is the good one knows how to hide his own f%ck ups

dave

polish it,..

Ken
That never happens in the real world

dave

make it an accent piece and explain that dissimular metals have different coefficient of friction an moduleous of elasticity thus will work together for a longer period of time without wear, and yes I am a damn good toolmaker

DAMN!!!! By best year as a machine shop stupivisoy was less than half that!

The mentioned pins that I'm making are supposed to be turned from cold rolled steel, then nickle plated...but as any lathe jockey knows,...cold roll don't turn worth a chit at small diameter,....so I've been turning them out of 304 stainless,...giving them a buff with silicon carbide impregnated cloth, then polishing them with Mother's Mag Wheel polish (good stuff!)

I'm sure the engineer thinks it's the finest nickle plate he's ever seen.

Had to make twenty some close tolerance parts out of GrafMo one time. Took a couple of weeks ans to was a fairly complicated part. Ordered the steel just for the job. Sent them off to heat treat and the came out soft. Turns out the steel supplier sent the wrong stuff. The replaced the steel for free but not my time.

I did it a little better and faster the second time and thet came out hard.

Yes...

I feel your pain Bristoe!

ya'll are reminding me I have to take on a machinist project at work.



before I joined this company, we made a lot of these. The shop that used to do them for us went out of business in the slump of 2008, and neither my predecessor nor I have found another shop that will do it. The material is .062 square MP35N, and the last 270� of each end are ground down to .031 thick. For scale, the caliper jaws are set at 1.0"

I think I'm going to try making a jig to hold the formed part, then a dividing head on a Bridgeport, with a stone chucked in place.