"aemeijers" wrote in message
...
(snip)

They are as rare as women are here, as far as I can tell. I blame
lawyers
for that. There have been so many schools sued for injuries kids
sustain in
shop class that many schools have just eliminated them from their
programs.
I, on the other hand, went to a technical high school that had a machine
shop with lathes, milling machines, a metallurgy shop and a foundry.
The
lathes were powered by an overhead belt and pulley system that were
labeled
"Dept. of War" - that's how old they were. We started by creating a
drawing
of a tool (a spanner wrench) freehand, then we learned to make
mechanical
drawings from which we made a wooden pattern of the wrench, cast it in
green
sand in the foundry and then machined it in machine shop. It was a
great
way to learn engineering and I doubt very many students get their "hands
wet" like we did anymore.

Now you have me wandering whatever happened to that center punch I made
in 7th grade shop class. I've changed addresses half a dozen times or
more since then, so I doubt it is anywhere near daylight.

Somewhere, I still have a little box of all the toolbits I made for lathe
work. Grinding them from blanks was quite an art and it took a lot of
blanks to get there. At least for me.

I presume that entire setup they had (lathes, casting room, etc) are all
long gone- thinking back, they wouldn't pass OSHA for grownups by modern
standards, much less having a room full of 7th grade boys playing with
them.

I haven't been to any reunions but friends that have tell me the old foundry
is now a garden (it was at the top of the building, with sand floors under a
glass roof). Not sure about the belt-drive lathes, but I would imagine they
are gone, too. The belts were caged and not easy to get tangled up in, but
every few years some bozo managed to do it. They also had a tendency to
break (as you can imagine, anything stamped "War Dept" wasn't very new) and
that was always a bit a fun as they flopped around, wrapped around the upper
shaft and kept slapping away until someone hit the master power switch.
They ran off the biggest electric motor I had ever seen and when it was
first turned on for the day, the room lights dimmed in respect. (-:

--
Bobby G.