The Home Machinist!

If you have several guys who want to build a locomotive as a project, with some have machining experience and others having none, why not all join a machine shop night school as a group. Now this is an intriguing idea, IF the instructor would go for it. I am wondering, are there any machine shop &q...

I made a built-up frame. I'm the world's worst welder. I'm sorry but I can't let a clearly inaccurate and even intentionally misleading statement like this go unchallenged. Make no mistake about it, I am the world's worst welder and I think I have the evidence to prove it. that's like the old joke....

Ken: I don't know how you do it. Here in the raisin capital of America even stuff that's barely of scrap value goes for big bucks. In the 31 years I've lived here there have been exactly two machine tool auctions. Went to both and saw most anything a HSM could use go for way too much money. A thorou...

It was my observation when I worked with a large number of machinists that no more than two out of ten were above average----men that could do the work, do it reliably, do it without instruction, and do it in a timely fashion. I expect that this represents people in general, be they machinists or d...

Harold_V wrote: You learned to do it right, and fast.

Somewhere I heard that the difference between an amateur and a professional is that the amateur makes it perfect and the professional does as you say, does it right and does it fast.

I am drill press poor, I have 4 of them. One in the wood shop and 2 in the machine shop. The one drill press in the machine shop is a bench model Jet made in Japan that I bought about 40 years ago and it has been a very good and accurate drill press. The other machine shop drill press is a Swedish ...

Here's a snapshot of the drill I mentioned in my original post at the beginning of this thread. I admit to having cleaned up the corner where the drill resides. Usually it's got chips scattered around along with a radio and a few other bits of clutter. In the picture is the end of the tender frame b...

The recent thread "Minimum lathe for live steam work?" causes me to wonder about drill presses. Machinists seem to talk about lathes and mills frequently but rarely does the subject of drill presses come up. Yet I think I spend more time at my drill press than any other machine. In buildin...

A related thought: Beware when buying imported Asian machines. There is a wide latitude in quality. I once spoke to a dealer and the only machine he sold was in the $7000 price range. The lesser ones, he said, just didn't live up to expectations. Exceptions abound -- some folks are quite happy with ...

I really can't vote in the poll because for me it all depends. I'm not working in 2.5 scale, but I would say that 98 percent of what I do in 1.5 scale is less than three inches in diameter and within six inches of the chuck. (By the way, this is what a machinery dealer once told me about most all la...

As I try to visualize this, it seems to me that .010 out would cause undue wear on rod bearings. As I try to visualize this, it seems to me that an out-of-square crank pin would wear the bore of the rod bearing into sort of an hourglass shape.

With Rustoleum, when spraying, I thin with acetone to speed setting. Then I put the parts in the oven which has a pre-set for "warm." I put them there at night and by morning they are as dry and hard as I need them to be for working with them. Wasn't able to get the whole tender frame in t...