Gingery Lathe

I have considered taking an evening precision machine shop class at the local vocation school a few times, along with welding, and a few others. (I have already taken the cabinet making class and autobody and collision repair classes.) I am always interested in learning something new.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a book from Amazon called the Charcoal Foundry(David Gingery). It is the first of 7 books in a series.

You might say that reading this book has been my obsession o' the week. The first book is about building a low cost foundry out of a metal five gallon bucket, building a sand form from 1x4s, and learning to sand cast aluminium (using play sand, clay, and empty Dr Pepper cans). All this with an eye towards the second book.

The second books is called The Metal Lathe (David Gingery). In this book, you are stepped through the process of casting and assembling a functional metal lathe. An interesting point to be made here is that this tool is actually used to make itself. Once it is partially functional, you use it to make some of the remaing pieces. How cool is that.

The remaing 5 books cover building a metal shaper, a milling machine, a drill press, a dividing head and finally a sheet metal brake. To be honest I don't know what a dividing head is or how a metal shapper is used. I will have to do some more reading on these two. [And I already have a drill press.]

I found the first book to be extremely interesting. My friends just rolled their eyes at lunch when I was telling them about it. I will definitely put this on my long term list of things to do: Build your own machine shop tools. As the book says, if a piece of your tool breaks, you no longer have to call 1-800-Who-Cares. Instead you just fabricate a new part.

If you find this remotely interesting, Google it, or better yet order the book. There are definitely worse ways to spend $7.95.

On a similar but slightly diffent subject, did you know that you can melt pennies in a cast iron skillet on the stove? Don't try this at home boys and girls. It recently became illegal.