Visited Motown recently and spent a few hours touring the machine shops
in Ford's Greenfield Village.

Ran into a fellow HSM at Edison's shop so that's the one I enjoyed the
most. We puzzled over the workings of the dynamometer, and he came up
with what seemed to be a good enough explanation for me and his wife.
(What could be better than having a wife interested in measuring
horsepower *and* accepting your explanation.)

Anyway, what caught my eye while checking out the machine tools was
that only one lathe had a compound - and it was immense, considering
the size of the machine - but about half of the rest of them had
pivoting cross-slides: a hinge point at the front and a screw to
elevate the rear.

Is this news to anyone else but me?

At the Armington & Sims shop I learned that 'grease monkeys' were
originally the 12 year olds that climbed up to clean the overhead
shafting. Teddy Roosevelt signed laws limiting child labor to farms
and shop owners weren't about to pay 14 year olds to do the job, so
they installed disks that travel the length of the shafting to remove
the crud. Still, it fell on the machinists' heads and that's why all
those guys in the 'Bull o' the woods' cartoons wore hats.

Dick Hamm
Nashua NH