Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbcurtis | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who likes this sort of thing, the Dave Gingery workshop book series is a hoot! http://www.gingerybooks.com In volume 1, you learn how to turn a 5 gallon bucket, some refractory cement, a shop vacuum, and a bag of bbq charcoal into a crucible furnace. In volume 2, you learn how to melt down your neighbor's screen door to build a lathe.

7 volumes total. Typeset on a manual typewriter.

My favorite Dave Gingery quote: "I spent half my life trying to figure out how to do a fifty dollar job for fifty cents. I spent the other half looking for the fifty cents."

View on HN

Those books are amazing. I wound up building a forge, buying a crucible, and making some tongs out of strap iron.

One afternoon i had my mold ready. Fired up the forge, and melted down some aluminum. Then i realized how wildly unprepared i was for dealing with molten metal. i managed to pour a little bit, but that was a fairly dumb risk.

came up with a new plan for a side loading forge, smaller crucible and better tongs. Then i went and bought a little sherline mill.

The book on casting is amazing, and i have no doubt most people can build real tools. but it's going to take a long time, and it's going to take several tries to get anything worth anything.

I don't regret any of the time i spent on it. And perhaps i should have given it a few more weekends. i feel like i got far enough along to get a sense of the scale of what Gingery did. It's amazing. I think he undersells how much skill he built up over 50(?) years. And i think anyone attempting this will realize how painfully unskilled they are. But there's enough there. you can get there if you're willing to put in the time.

On the book front, I'd also recommend Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy by Wayne R. Moore. It's a great treatise on how you can measure things like one millionth of an inch, and has lots of incredible pictures.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/foundations-mechanical-accura...

Great book!!! I'm working through it myself.

Looks good, but it's out of print.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/FOUNDATIONS-OF-MECHANICAL-ACCURACY-...

There are also a few pdf copies floating around that are acceptable quality.

https://archive.org/details/FoundationsOfMechanicalAccuracy

Gingery lathes are borderline to put it nicely. Here is a good youtube series documenting the build of one: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZPW_dvK6ZS-rZsqef3OX...

It's very interesting, looks like a lot of fun to build, but the end result is barely usable.

They are awesome books, but, really, any of the Chinese junk from Harbor Freight is so much better that it's ridiculous.

If you have any value to your time, buy the basic machines, fleabay for the tooling, and get on with turning metal into scrap ^H^H^H^H^H^H parts.

Oh yes, those. I read those once when a "prepper" pointed me at them. It's how to build a machine shop from junk, if you're a master machinist. He assumes there's lots of aluminum around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com