Witness Me, Blood Bags

Sorry for the Mad Max references. I couldn’t resist.

What an awful movie.

To get back on track, I had a couple of good experiences this week, and I felt like I should share.

Since about 2007, I have been trying to become proficient with tools, and I’ve bought lots of stuff. Table saw. Three lathes. Milling machine. Plasma. I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’ve also done lots of very, very bad work. It turns out owning the tools is not the same thing as being able to use them. What an unpleasant surprise.

Sometimes I do good work, though, and I improve all the time. Occasionally, something happens that makes me feel like I’m making progress.

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of tool Youtubes. There are some wonderful providers out there. They’re just regular guys, shooting video in their garages and shops. They do marvelous work (sometimes), and they share what they know. These Youtubes certainly beat the garbage available on network TV. I think. I don’t actually watch network TV, other than Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

I’m not sure who hosts the current crop of late shows. I know Jimmy Fallon and that other guy have shows. I had his name a second ago. Kimmel! He has a show.

There are still some tools I would like to have. I want TIG and an acetylene rig. I want a surface grinder. I would love a CNC mill more than life itself. But from watching the videos and seeing what professionals get by with, I realize I’m not doing too bad.

This week, while I was watching tool videos, I had a wonderful realization: the guys in the videos were doing things wrong. They did things I could do better. Now that I’ve said that, I can’t say who I was watching, because for all I know they Google themselves.

One guy is a professional machinist, and he uses manual tools. By that I mean he doesn’t use CNC. He has been working for maybe 20 years. He has a huge TIG machine, a stick welder, and a bunch of machine tools.

He was making a part for a machine, and it was a long job. Lots of videos in one playlist. He did a lot of things I couldn’t do if you held a gun to my head, but he also did things I can do, badly. He oriented parts in inconvenient and inefficient ways while machining. He used the wrong tools for certain jobs.

I felt great about that, not because he screwed up, but because my perception of his mistakes showed that I had learned a few things, and that I was not as hopeless as I had thought.

He machined a long part, and I would guess the ratio of chucked metal to unchucked metal was 1:6. It was way out there. Ordinarily, you want at least a third of a part to be in the chuck, so it doesn’t fly out and kill you. I was practically punching the couch, hollering that he could just center-drill the far end and put a live center in it for support. It would have taken two minutes.

I watched a CNC guy do his thing. He has wonderful tools and a clean, spacious shop that makes me swoon every time I see it. I can’t believe he makes a living with that much empty floor space. You could literally roller skate in his shop. Anyway, he’s great with CAD, but when the time came to machine a part, he made workholding and locating errors I would not [necessarily] have made, and he sometimes did things the hard way. The part he ended up with was not that great.

I can’t mention his name, either.

It’s nice to feel borderline competent.

The CNC guy had a part in his vise, and one end was a few thousandths lower than the other. What do you do when that happens? You loosen the vise and bump the part until it’s level. Hello? You can use a screw jack. You can use a shim. You don’t just leave the part sitting there, because the measurement isn’t critical. Saying a measurement isn’t critical is like saying an ugly loaf of bread is “rustic.” It means “I am not very good at this.”

I’m not picking on him, because let’s face it: he knows a thousand times what I do. But it’s great to know I could have offered him a useful suggestion.

Now that I think about it, I had another similar experience. A guy was “restoring” (painting) an old lathe, and it took him forever to realize a wire brush was better than a putty knife for removing paint.

Why do people call paint “restoration”? How would you like it if you went in for a knee replacement and the surgeon painted your leg and sent you home?

If you’re not scraping or grinding your machine to remove the wear, you’re not restoring. Deal with it.

I love watching these guys. I learn a great deal every week. I even ordered a couple of their promotional T-shirts, to support their channels.

Maybe this week I’ll get back to CNC and make the lathe work. I’m 99% of the way there. I just have to conquer one programming glitch which has proved to be elusive. Then I can order a proper ball screw and make the lathe accurate.

Then I’ll still wish it was a mill. Oh well.

Guess I’ll go out in the garage and move things around until I can see the floor. Maybe I can get a few things done this weekend.

More

To make up for all the criticism, I’ll post one of the videos I’ve enjoyed. This guy has a hilarious, but typical, problem. A relative wants something fixed, and HERE YOU ARE, WITH ALL THESE TOOLS AND NOTHING TO DO.

He’s not one of the people I mentioned above.