Blame Mister Lurie

 CAUTION: there is brief mention of self-harm in this post

 I've been asked how I got into machining (please remember, I'm a bodger, not a real metal-worker at all.)

 There is no simple answer, but roughly: A) high school metal shop, B) a friend who was an aerospace mechanical engineer, C) another friend who was a tool & die maker with his own shop, and D) reading books.  More recently, also watching certain parties on YouTube.

 But it was Mr. Lurie, my shop teacher in high school, who really put the bee in my bonnet, even though I wouldn't actually pursue any metal working for a couple of decades later.

 The shop itself dated from the post-war 1950s, when a large percentage of our four year high school graduates were expected to go into vocational careers, rather than college.  I went through high school literally at the end of Peoria's metalworking industry, as Caterpillar pulled up stakes and move their manufacturing, assembly, and warehousing somewhere else.

 The votec shops in my high school were epic compared to what I can find online today.  We had a completist shop for woodworking, for metalworking, and for both auto and small engine repair.  These were not safe spaces if you clowned around.  I took half a semester of wood shop and weirdly I thought, graphic arts, as prerequisites to metal shop.  The machines in wood shop were more dangerous and frightening than those in metal shop.  Also, the graphics art class included learning how to do mechanical drawings, ta-daa!  That was immediately useful in metal shop from the start.

 So our metal shop was informed by the local labor market...

 We had a foundry for aluminum with a gas-fed muffle furnace, using big crucibles and two-part molds, green sand, parting powder, the whole bit.  The ingots we cast were cut into blanks, then turned into pulleys by senior students for their belt sander project. (I still have mine, I use it routinely.)

 We had all the welding things: gas, AC stick (SMAW), TIG (GTAW), and MIG (GMAW/FCAW), plus several heat-treating ovens.

 We had the usual rows of small South Bend lathes, and a handful of enormous WW-II government surplus machines, including: a gigantic drill press with a five or six inche wide leather belt, an engine lathe ten feet long with 18in or so chuck that was a production to mount or unmount because it weighed half a ton, a big turret lathe, one antique horizontal mill, one antique vertical mill, a Bridgeport no one was allowed to touch, a gigantic cast iron surface plate... and all the smaller supporting machines and tools.  A tool crib you had to sign tools out of, just like real world shops... it was brilliant.

 Mr. Lurie, the instructor, somehow had me and a handful of others picked out as being likely to succeed, and gave us extra tutelage.  Of course he had a safety story - and a film - for everything in the shop.  Colorful character, with boundless knowledge if you just asked questions and then listened.

 Hand craftsmanship was emphasized; one of our first projects was an "exhaust port cover" (for an engine). In the real world, if you banged one out, it wouldn't need to be pretty or precise.  But we had to read a mechanical drawing, make the part to the right dimensions and shape (with curves), and except for drilling the two holes, it was all made by filing and belt-sanding.  The point was not to obtain something useful, the point was to learn skills. 

 Then I decided computers were where I wanted to go, I joined the USAF, and forgot about metal working or machining or welding for about ten years.  But high school was definitely where it started.

 I redeveloped interests in mechanical design and metal fabrication when The Denver Mad Scientists Club, of which I was a founding member, came up with The Critter Crunch, the first true fighting  robots competition, which eventually inspired the ones you saw on TV.  Once I started hanging out in my friend's shops, and seeing the fabrication capabilities they had, my old metal working joy resurfaced, and I started thinking about collecting tools.

 It turns out tools are expensive, so that took a few decades, but I am mostly content with what I have, for now.  There are one or two machines (band saw, sheet metal machine) which I need but haven't got room for at my current location.  The only tools I'll be shopping for forever are tooling for the machines.  I've bought the accessories and tooling I needed, starting with the most basic things I would use the most often.  I don't buy tools I don't yet need, just "because it seems like it would be nice to have some day" - homie can't afford that. ;)

 When I'm down to "nothing I own will let me make that feature" then I start shopping for a new tool that will.

 It took years before I found a lathe I could afford, and despite that it's a clapped-out 1970s pile of Chinesium, I have made it do what I needed it to do, right down to holding less than a thousandth for things like shrink fits.

 It took years before my Bridgeport fell into my lap, and it was entirely because I'd developed a treasured friendship with a guy who owned a machine shop.  When he traded up, I got the old machine at a very good price.  It came with no tooling, not even a vise.

 I still don't have a lot of machine tooling; I have exactly what I've needed to do stuff I couldn't do otherwise, and nothing more.

 When it comes to hand tools, and assuming you have a job/income, I recommend budgeting $100 / month.  In a year you will have every hand tool you can use, then you can start saving up for a tool chest.  For me, a tool chest wasn't a big priority; for most of my life, I kept my most-used tools on a pegboard backboard of my workbench, with the remainder kept in a Craftsman (Kennedy) "machinist's chest" sitting on a wooden chest of drawers that smelled bad when it rained.  A "machinist's chest" is one with the funky shaped middle drawer which is sized to hold a copy of Machinery's Handbook.

 It wasn't until my mother died and I received a small cash inheritance that I finally bought a quite large, professional grade tool chest.  I think I've written up the path to my purchase choice but even if not, I'm planning to do a "ten year review" or however long it's been, so I'll revisit that stuff then.  I haven't done it because I really want to go to a Home Depot that has the Husky Industrial line in stock, to see if they still measure up.  They could have changed anything at all since I bought mine, for better or for worse.

 I was at peak performance before I got the fancy tool chest.  Doing citizen science, over-employed as usual, ball of stress.  Then one day I had a record-contending fever that confounded everyone from Denver Paramedics to the ER doc, and left me with some drain bwamage.  Suddenly I couldn't figure things out in my head any more.  I couldn't remember anything.  In short, I had become slow, whereas before I'd been well above-average.  I almost did not live through the period that came after.  My intellect was all I had, all I was.  I didn't have personality, I didn't have charm, I didn't have looks, I had BRAINS.  And then suddenly, my major self-identity was gone, along with my day job career.

 "Improvise, adapt, and overcome."
- an unofficial slogan of the USMC
inspired by Clint Eastwood's movie 'Heartbreak Ridge'

 Suddenly we  were very broke.  I sold all my pulsed power / science kit for a pittance to a liar in my extended family.  I couldn't see any future at all.  For a while, I intended to tidy up my life and then kill myself.  I was in a very bad way.  Fortunately, I got help.  I am in a less-bad way now, and probably forever more.

 A reasonable question I asked myself then was: "whither the shop?  If I don't need machine tools to fabricate advanced switches or other pulsed power parts, then what DO I need it for?"  For a while, I considered selling the remainder of the shop, and most of my tools.

 After some years, especially after I had to go work in retail (BRAINS) for a while before being forced to retire fore real but early, one of several answers came to light:

1) The rise of fascism.  If you believe serious civil unrest and/or government totalitarianism is on its way, metal-working shops can be handy, 'nuff said

2) It doesn't matter!  So long as you're doing something, anything, with your hands and your tools that you enjoy, it doesn't matter what you actually do, if you're not hurting anybody

"Do What Keepeth Thou from Wilting Shall Be the Loophole of The Law."
-- J.R. "Bob" Dobbs

 And that is where I am at now.  I putter.  I fiddle with my not-quite-banned 3D printer.  I make tools both large and small for the shop itself.  Once in a while, I fix something for the house or for a friend.  I don't have goals or interesting personal projects.  I am no longer able to do science or even much in the way of engineering or electronics.  I have CRS real bad.

 On the other hand: my hands don't shake unless I've had too much coffee that day.  I'm still articulate even if I sometimes can't remember a word.  My health is not terrible for my age; I will breathe hard on a hike these days, but I can still go on a hike- a short one.  At altitude, I mean, not in town where we're only a mile high.  I don't have hypertension, the diabeetus, CPD, or organ trouble.  If cancer wasn't a thing, I would live forever.

 And you know what?  At the end of the day, pointlessly puttering beats the roiling tar-muck out of drinking myself to death, as some of my brothers chose to do.