On May 24, 3:08*pm, Searcher7 wrote:
I was going to add some of the workshop Practice books to my
collection, but wanted get feedback first. Particularly suggestions
for the best ones, because I'm sure all of them are not great books.

I've read that s possible problem is that they speak in metric and
some are outdated, or geared toward the UK reader. Nevertheless any
advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.

I've got a number of them, some bought back when they were $5, some
recently. There are a number that reference older British hobby
lathes that are probably long since scrap, but I've gotten a few kinks
out of those back when I didn't have a lot of equipment. There are a
couple of vendors off Amazon that have them fairly reasonable, $6-7,
rather than the $20+ that Amazon wants. I've got one on shapers, one
on small foundry practice, the gear-making one and Sparey's Amateur's
Lathe that have been the most useful. The one on home shop milling
was a bit disappointing. Only the most recent ones are purely metric,
doesn't bother me, I can convert either way. There's a recent
offering aimed at the Chinese 7x lathe that's been very useful, not
one of that series, but still useful. There was one on threads that
had just about every thread listed that was used world-wide, lotsa
tables. One of the things about the whole bunch is they're more or
less oriented toward the live steam crowd, locomotives and steam
tractors. Some of the older ones show making things you can buy off
the shelf for cheap, now. If I need Morse shanks, I'll go get some,
not spend my time setting up to turn expensive stock down. Same with
some of the clamps and such, better stuff available now. If your time
was worth nothing and all you had was some scrap steel, then it might
be worth doing some of the shop equipment projects. When I was a
starving student, I did some of those.

Stan