brainwagon

I think maybe twenty years ago when I was in the height of my telescope-building mania I started acquiring books about lathe work and machining from Lindsay Books. Lindsay Books made a business out of finding old out-of-print books in the public domain and republishing them cheaply. Such books were usually centered around machining and craft, and it was a cool resource. Their catalogs were also awesome to receive. Alas, Lindsay Books is no more: the proprietor decided to retire a number of years ago.

One of the most interesting was a seven volume series of books titled “Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scratch” by Dave Gingery. Luckily, these books are still available at Gingery Books and continue to serve as inspiration for new generations of people who become interested in machining and foundry work.

For you see when Gingery said “from scrap”, he literally meant from scrap. You begin by building a charcoal foundry, really just a bucket lined with a refractory material and fired with charcoal, melt old scrap aluminum from old lawn mower engines or ladders, and then learn to cast green sand. You cast the first parts for your lathe using this foundry. To get it flat, you use the very old technique of hand scraping against a surface plate. You create additional parts by melting scrap aluminum, shape them with rudimentary hand tools, and eventually get to the point where your lathe can begin to make parts for itself.

This is amazing for at least two reasons: not only do you end up with a useful machine tool, but doing so teaches you far more about machining than you could ever hope to do by simply reading or even studying. It is the epitome of “learning by doing.”

I never embarked upon a foundry project of my own, but I continue to be interested in machining. What is awesome is that platforms like Youtube have provided a place for people to document their own builds along this path. A couple nights ago, I found some good ones that I thought I’d share.

My path began with Paul’s Garage. He’s a somewhat whimsical and self-taught guy who has been playing with foundry stuff for a while, but has recently embarked upon a lathe project of his own, courtesy of some donated parts to get him started. He’s just at the first step (scraping the bed flat) but it served as an entry point into the Youtube activity surrounding this kind of work:

But obviously, he’s just beginning and it doesn’t satisfy your need to binge watch Youtube videos just to have a single episode. I urge you to subscribe to his feed and to go back through his other foundry videos as well.

For your viewing pleasure and a more complete (sixteen parts or more) video about the process, Cressel Anderson’s Makercize channel is awesome. He began his video series about three years ago with a video about making the bed for his lathe, but actually finished his project and has now moved onto making a metal shaper (volume 3 of the Gingery Series).

If you have only five minutes, you can watch his overview video that illustrates a lot of the process.

Again, well worth watching.

And I should also add a plug to the “Stig” of Youtube foundry videos, the elusive (but prolific) myfordboy. For a decade he’s been making cool videos about metal casting in the home workshop. His videos are minimalist works of art: he doesn’t talk or even show his face during the videos, but he embarks upon interesting projects and displays good and proper technique. Strictly speaking, I don’t believe he’s made a Gingery lathe (as his name implies, he has a beautiful Myford lathe) but he seems to like to tinker with machine tools and engines of all sort, and has even begun to stray into 3D printing to help him make cores for casting. Honestly, there are days of material that he’s produced, so I’ll begin at the beginning: Episode 1 of his “Metal Casting at Home” series (there are now 80-ish episodes in this series):

So far, I haven’t done any of this stuff, I just live vicariously through these amazing bits of making. But I do enjoy people doing amazing work and using largely forgotten skills. If you like them, I urge you to subscribe to their feeds, and let me know of any similar people in the comments.