On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 11:40:09 -0400, "Wild_Bill"
wrote:

I've always appreciated reading your metalworking related posts, Ed.. and
I've read quite a few of the OT posts too, I just don't respond knowing how
wasteful it would be of my time.

Your comments regarding the public's and potential buyers' perceptions of
the little black rifle were right on target, IMO.. for example.

I definitely noticed when you were gone, and was beginning to believe you'd
just moved on to something more worthwhile. I've seen it happen with so many
good contributors here that it's depressing.

There are some very good forums such as Chaski where it's all-on-topic, all
the time.

Thanks for your kind comments, Bill.

Before I go, there's something I've wanted to leave here that I think
some machining hobbyists can make use of. I met Dick Moore and
interviewed his son Wayne, and Dick's work and writing was a huge
influence on my hobby interest. He wrote a book in 1955, _Holes,
Contours and Surfaces_, which explains how extraordianry accuracy was
achieved before CNC and all of the closed-loop compensation we have
today. I'll post a link to it below.

Moore's son Wayne is famous for _The Foundations of Mechanical
Accuracy_ (1970). It's also a great book and is available in reprint.
The first book is about how the work is done; the Foundations is about
how Moore built the machines that lifted us out of the very early era
into the pre-CNC Jig Borer and Jig Grinder era. It's worth seeing just
for the outstanding photography. LIFE magazine had just collapsed and
Moore got one of their laid-off photographers. The work shows how
black & white photography can be done, and it beautifully illustrates
many of Moore's principles, including his insightful work on
self-checking gages and making ultra-accurate leadscrews. I used to
watch his scrapers achieve 20 microinch flatness, corner-to-corner, on
the Moore measuring machines. It was amazing.

That's my interest in this hobby, particularly in how things were done
in toolmaking and gage-making before Moore. I've read three of his
earlier books that aren't even listed in the Library of Congress,
probably because Moore Special Tool self-published them. They may be
gone but we had them at McGraw-Hill's library several decades ago. One
was on the design and operation of the jig borer; a second on the jig
grinder; and the third was a predecessor to the book linked below,
_Precision Hole Location_ (1946)

This is not like the old Colvin and Stanley books, which were about
general machining. This is about the bleeding edge of accuracy. And
keep in mind that most tooling work before CNC was drill jigs. The
extreme examples -- master jigs for clock and watch plates -- required
+/- 50 microinch accuracy. They could do it in 1920 but it was very
slow (I have three custom faceplates and two sets of toolmaker's
buttons, which were used for that work). When Moore got involved in
the 1930s, the focus switched to making machine tools that would do it
on an every-day basis, and to machining contours to the same degree of
accuracy:

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?i...view=1up;num=7

So, enjoy. Hasta la vista.

--
Ed Huntress