I don't usually post links to commercials, but I saw this on on TV tonight and thought about Gary. ; )

[www.youtube.com]

Haha. I've seen that. Just call me Dave.

They must have had fun shooting that one. If you look closely, it's not just the same guy dressed in all kinds of clothes, it's the same guy with a dozen different haircuts from Afro to combover and everything in between. They made him taller, shorter, younger, older, etc., but it's all the same guy.

HEY! That's the secret solution for your shop! Just pinkslip all those slacker elves, and get a dozen more Garys. Better make them the 30-ish year-old Garys...much lower maintainance costs, you know.

Yeah ... But I hear they were all recalled.

Yeah...something about them catching their tail feathers on fire when you back one too close to a blueing tank.

Worked hard on your 308 insert today. I have pics perhaps in the morning. I have a fre things to show but they need to be Photoshopped. A lot of single point lathe threading today. I didn't want to go to the range before the undergrad ready

"till the undergrad ready"...eh? I'm getting that AUTOCORRECT vibe all over again, the simultaneous blessing and curse of the "smart"phone post.

I've always wondered how the single-point threading thing works in practice, I assume that it's the reason why there are a gazillion different combinations of chuck speed versus carriage travel rates on the lathe. The only threading I've done is with a tap or die, and it's for sure not single-point anything. It's also damned hard to get even reasonably straight, probably a good thing I never did any precision work.

I'm starting a community-ed class next week on welding. We just hired a new shop teacher this year...ahem...a new Career and Technical Education instructor, to be more precise. The guy that retired was a pretty good woodworker and a fair hand at auto mechanics, but the new guy has got the welding booths rehabilitated with new fume extraction hoods and has got the metalworking end of the shop spiffed up quite a bit. I took welding back in high school, but we never got to touch anything with an "ig" in it...no MIG, no TIG, and certainly no plasma cutters. We got quite a bit of practice with oxy-acetylene and stick arc welding, but the high-dollar fancy stuff was strictly demonstration only back in the day (mid '80's).

It's amazing how cheap a wire-feed welder is these days, and you can buy tungsten electrodes for TIG welding in auto parts stores in many cities, they're so commonplace. That stuff was super-high-tech back thirty years ago, only found in aerotech and space industries for the most part. When you say you want to weld something with gas these days, people look at you like you crawled out from under a dinosaur. It's time I got caught up with the current methods, I guess I'll see how far I get.

Our new teacher also updated the planer and joiner cutter heads when he took over the woodshop here. They both sport new multi-blade carbide cutter heads where the rotating spindle sports a bunch of little square, carbide cutter heads instead of just two flat steel knives. If one of them gets chipped, you just loosen it's holddown bolt with an allen wrench and rotate it 90 degrees to a new cutting face. The planer is about twenty-four inches wide, built back in the '50s. It's a fantastic tool for turning roughcut stock (mostly spruce and birch around here) into finished lumber, and for reducing the thickness of planks. Although the planer was bought used back in the '60s and has been used pretty hard by generations of ham-handed students ever since, it's still turning out great work with the new cutter head, which was custom-built just for this individual machine. It's pretty impressive that you can e-mail a couple of dimensions to a shop half a continent away, and a few weeks later you've got the parts to update a machine that's been around since Eisenhower was president.

Sounds like you have a great place to learn and build some "stuff".

Those two knife planner heads are called "Hammer Heads" and have been illegal in this part of the world since I was in the cabinet business. They had a nasty habit of flying apart as I'd been told. Get out of balance pretty quick if something loosened. That was the story I was told by the old timers who used to plane some planks for me. That was back in the 70's. Old tools last well, cause they were made to last. Like my 19th century Gorton 1-A Laser cutter ... I mean pantograph. A bud in the 80s found two in a warehouse. We each bought one - I had it shipped from Michigan. Cleaned it up - oil ... I did put a new high torque modern electric motor on it because the one from the dawn of the 1900's or late 1800s weighed about 85 pounds, was mounted high about your head, and was run by a cotton round belt that ran all over the place so the belt could follow the moving head. I manufactured an articulated arm system with the light motor on it to track with the spindle head. But the machine itself will last forever ... must weigh 800 pounds for a small engraving tool.

My Clausing lathe is older than me. And, I don't have room for a nice lathe I have that is actually a Pratt and Whitney from Civil War Era. Now - my Chinese version has a few more features ... but not the class. I have an eclectic accumulation of tools where most are augmented by tooling, altered in function, or actually designed and built in house. It all comes together with a nice precise ... "snick".

Gary

Hammerhead, eh? Probably named after the noise they make if one or more of those big razor-sharp knives come loose and punch their way through the thin metal cutterhead cover, flying across the shop like lethal shrapnel.

The best thing about the new carbide multi-head cutters is that it doesn't take hours to change and set the knives like the old ones did, so you don't have to put up with dull, nicked blades that make for a lousy finish. If you nick an individual cutter, you just rotate it to a new position and get a new cutting edge. They're a bit brittle, sometimes even a hard spruce knot will knock a chip out of one, but they're cheap and super easy to replace when you use up all four edges on an individual insert.

You know what the best thing is about using the school woodshop? Is it the variety of power tools that I don't have at home? Is it the fact that it's well-lighted and heated? The stockpile of local roughcut spruce and birch planks? Perhaps the assistance from the shop teacher? Well, all of the above are great, but the best thing is that I don't have to move all of my STUFF out of the way just to get to work. My garage is so stuffed with seasonally used items, boxes of books that we don't have room for in the house, a couple tons of wood pellets for the pellet stove, and sometimes even an actual car, that it's a project in itself just to make room to work on stuff. Sound familiar somehow?

I've been building stuff on my knee, for 40 years Sean. Any shop will fill up to exceed the actual volume.

In my current shop, my feet have grown twice the length. I know because they catch on everything. My shoulders are several times as wide as when I built the shop 32 years ago. I'm taller, wider, several times as old.

In fact, I better get back out there while I can still get inside.

Gary