How it all got started

[mklotz]

It's time for a bit of nostalgia; please indulge me.

I attended high school '55-'59, back when they still had shop classes. Wood shop was an annoyance but in sophomore year we took metal shop. After making a folded metal dust pan and forging the obligatory cold chisel, we could select a project of our own to make.

My Dad had a wood lathe at home. It was a strange Sears Craftsman item from the 40's that came with a compound rest that could be clamped to the ways to provide a rudimentary (and totally unsatisfactory) metal-cutting capability. I had made numerous attempts to make small metal items but never really produced anything satisfactory.

So, when I saw all those gleaming, REAL metal lathes in the high school shop, it was love at first sight and I knew my project would have to be something made on the lathe.

I found a rough sketch of a pin vise in one of my ship modeling books and from it, "designed" what I was going to make. The shop teacher liked the project and gave me permission to make it, offering to help me with some of the more complex operations, e.g. single-point threading.

By the end of that school year I had, with his help, produced this...

and had become totally infatuated with making stuff with machine tools. The teacher liked it enough to include it in the end-of-term display for visiting parents. It was supposed to have a turned wooden handle; hence the pivot at the top and the collar to retain it in the handle. Girls and cars intervened and it never got made. I prefer it the way it is.

Now, as pin vises go, it's really pretty terrible...

It's too chunky, that 3/8-16 thread is way too coarse for a pin vise, and the chuck is too heavy. The hand-sawn slots in the reversible collet should have been done on a mill and the knurling is uniformly imperfect. Still, with all its flaws, it will always have a spot in the Gerstner tool chest; a fond reminder of how I became involved with precision metalworking.