you can start the party now

[normalbill]

good morning. i think.

mornings here are sort of an exercise in getting moving one little part at a time. i do wish i had listened better to them old guys who told me that i wasn't gonna be bulletproof forever. 'forever' is such a foreign concept when you are 19. it becomes considerably less foreign with the passage of time.

and then you have the morning pills, and the middle of the morning pills, and the noon pills, and the middle of the afternoon pills, and the evening pills, and the just before you go to bed pills. it gets to where it is very complicated. i do believe i need a secretary.

being the fng here and not knowing the protocol, i am responding to your post, Ken, in this manner. should i be doing it otherwise, please let me know and i will forthwith change my ways, assuming i can remember in the face of all them pills. thank you.


you wrote: ' Couldn't agree more. I strongly believe that we all have something to learn from each other and that each individual, from the newest builder to the most experienced, has seen and learned something of value for himself and the rest of us, if only he can identify and communicate it. Blatantly plagiarize to your heart's content!'


i believe without question that places like this forum are the future of both that identification and communication, as long as it can be kept [mostly] on topic and 'personality', for want of a better word, can be sublimated for the common good. when you come down to it, metal is metal and tools are tools, regardless of where they are or come from. this whole thing that we are about comes down to the interface of a tool and a workpiece. it really doesn't matter if the machine the tool is attached to came from China or Cincinnati, Ohio, or Timbuktu.

i have seen a lot of bickering in some places because of the origins of tools. i have also seen what i would call prejudice against 'home shop' guys, and disagreements between them and 'full time' guys. in my mind this is pointless and highly counterproductive. we are all in this together and we are all working [or playing as the case may be] toward the same thing[s]. we all want to make parts that are functional, be they for a little air engine or the space station. [i kind of like to make mine pretty too but first it has to work as intended.]

the paragraph i quoted above gives me hope that i have found a place where those petty differences are transcended. certainly we all come to this with different skill levels and ambitions. a 'new guy' will have many questions that seem elementary to some of us, but sometimes we tend to forget that once we were that new guy too. what we do is a dying art. surely there is CNC and 3d printing and probably a lot more stuff that i don't know about. to those who would point that out i ask, 'what are you gonna do when the power goes out?' can you make your own power?

as an example i will present my youngest son. he has a CNC mill built on what started out as an x2 mill i believe. little toy mill. it don't do no hogging. so this kid figured out the parts and made them on my machines and has a functioning CNC machine. his next step was to make up some 'kits' of the parts to convert one of these mills. he programmed the parts and pushed a button and the mill made them. so i got to looking at this and figured out that i could make 3 parts manually on my toolmaster mill while he set up and ran one part on his. obviously, this was not a complicated part. 2 tool changes. toolmaster has x axis power feed only. i know several people who own machine shops. they all tell me that the so called 'machinists' they see are young guys who know how to push that button. they all say that there are apparently no young manual machinists. this youngest boy of mine took a 2 year vocational machinist's program that he says dealt mostly with CNC stuff. [i suppose i should confess getting him started 15 or so years ago on my machines.] i would have to say that he is a pretty good machinist, though he has a problem with patience. he has told me many times that he learned a lot more from me than from the school he went to. i am no 'super machinist' by any stretch of the imagination.

the thing i am trying to get at here is that we are keeping what could very well be a dying art alive and that makes that 'identification and communication' all the more important. there will come a time when the manual machinist is essential for survival. look around yourself. now try to imagine that same image with no lights or power. how many people do you know who could raise enough food for just one person to survive on, much less 4? of those people, how many have either the skills or equipment to repair the equipment needed for even that much farming?

it seems to me that i have been thanking you folks a lot in the past couple of days, but thank you again. this has caused me to do a lot of thinking about 'identification and communicating', and for that i am seriously grateful. i have kind of grabbed a subject here that is a lot bigger than it first appeared to be and there is much more to be said about it, though there is probably a better place for it than the introduction thread.

if there is a more appropriate place, please tell me because i would very much like to continue this discussion.

thank you.

peace.
normalbill

[kbalch]

Good morning. Yep, I just checked: it's still morning here...

good morning. i think.

mornings here are sort of an exercise in getting moving one little part at a time. i do wish i had listened better to them old guys who told me that i wasn't gonna be bulletproof forever. 'forever' is such a foreign concept when you are 19. it becomes considerably less foreign with the passage of time.

True words. Though I don't expect that 20 will ever pay much attention to 40; the gulf of an entire lifetime's experience will always separate them. That said, it all does seem to compress as time passes, doesn't it?

i believe without question that places like this forum are the future of both that identification and communication, as long as it can be kept [mostly] on topic and 'personality', for want of a better word, can be sublimated for the common good. when you come down to it, metal is metal and tools are tools, regardless of where they are or come from. this whole thing that we are about comes down to the interface of a tool and a workpiece. it really doesn't matter if the machine the tool is attached to came from China or Cincinnati, Ohio, or Timbuktu.

i have seen a lot of bickering in some places because of the origins of tools. i have also seen what i would call prejudice against 'home shop' guys, and disagreements between them and 'full time' guys. in my mind this is pointless and highly counterproductive. we are all in this together and we are all working [or playing as the case may be] toward the same thing[s]. we all want to make parts that are functional, be they for a little air engine or the space station. [i kind of like to make mine pretty too but first it has to work as intended.

Agree 100%!!

the thing i am trying to get at here is that we are keeping what could very well be a dying art alive and that makes that 'identification and communication' all the more important. there will come a time when the manual machinist is essential for survival. look around yourself. now try to imagine that same image with no lights or power. how many people do you know who could raise enough food for just one person to survive on, much less 4? of those people, how many have either the skills or equipment to repair the equipment needed for even that much farming?

Definitely food for thought. Manual skills are dying everywhere we look these days and I'm not sure it's possible to stem that tide. Speaking only for myself, though, it's heartening to believe that a significant number of true craftsman yet remain. Guys who are not just capable of doing it by hand, whatever 'it' may be, but prefer it that way.

A hand-made product will always be superior to the corresponding machine-produced version. Maybe not from the perspective of parts accuracy to five decimal places, but with respect to an appreciation of the decades of practice and skill that went into a piece, there's no substitute. That's why some of us (guilty as charged) still love handmade, mechanical watches in a day and age where everyone's got the time on their cellphone. It's about far more than simply knowing the time of day.

being the fng here and not knowing the protocol, i am responding to your post, Ken, in this manner. should i be doing it otherwise, please let me know and i will forthwith change my ways, assuming i can remember in the face of all them pills. thank you.

i have kind of grabbed a subject here that is a lot bigger than it first appeared to be and there is much more to be said about it, though there is probably a better place for it than the introduction thread.

if there is a more appropriate place, please tell me because i would very much like to continue this discussion.

Given that we're digressing a bit from the 'Intro' theme, perhaps the Off-Topic forum would be a good place to continue. Just start a thread there and I'll be happy to philosophize at greater length. Maybe we'll even attract a few others to join the conversation.

Ken