OldTools Archive
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44790 | Bill Backstrom <backstr@a...> | 1998‑06‑15 | BIO |
Hi, I've been lurking here for a quite a while, feasted at the FMM trough had my all questions graciously answered, and benefited vastly from the porch's pool of knowledge. Guess I better remember my manners and introduce myself before Mom comes back from cutting a new switch. My name is Bill Backstrom. I live in Eden Prairie MN, a suburb of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I haven't run into any of the galoots in the area, but I think I saw Aaron (TAAK) a few weeks ago lugging a #8 around Beau's tool swap. I'm 37, and married to a wonderful SWMBO who encourages my vices and finds tools for me. No GITs yet, but we share the house with three knuckle-headed, pure hearted dogs who can't understand why anyone would care about tools when you could be rolling on the floor with them. I work as a software engineer for StorageTek designing network accessable storage systems when the oldtools list is down. I got a late start on wood working and promptly messed up by wasting a bunch of money on power tools. I got curious about hand tool methods when winter came and the garage got real cold and filled with salty, dripping wet cars. Wonder why I didn't see that coming? I now have a basement shop that is roomy enough for a bench, a workmutt, some storage and a small Inca b*nds*w that I bought before the scales fell from my eyes. The table saw still sits in the garage and gets used once in a while when I need to do something that warrants cleaning all the junk off the top of it, which isn't very often. I also have to confess that it scares the pee out of me. Haven't made much yet except for a torsion box workbench from a design by Tom Caspar. Not very pretty, but it meets all my needs so far. Been accumulating tools for about a year or so, and should have enough to build something any time now, maybe. I'm currently taking a class where we are building a simple single drawer desk from salvage lumber that has been sitting at the bottom of the St. Croix river for the last century. Everything is being done with hand tools from stock preparation to joinery. Except for the fact that my top is kind of thin, things are going pretty well. I guess that's about it. Nice to meet everyone. Was that okay Mom? --- Bill Backstrom, StorageTek - Network Systems Group. "Bill Gates is only a white persian cat and a monocle away from being the villain in a James Bond movie." --Dennis Miller Replies Author Date 35738 BIO Frank A. Auge Tue 9/8/1998 35760 Re: BIO Jack Kamishlian Tue 9/8/1998 35868 BIO Mike Stevans Thu 9/10/1998 35874 Re: BIO SWSCPA@a... Thu 9/10/1998 36202 BIO Tom O'Neil Mon 9/14/1998 37487 BIO Jim Tremain Mon 10/5/1998 37488 Re: BIO Ed_Balko@E... Mon 10/5/1998 37553 Re: BIO Jim Tremain Tue 10/6/1998 37501 Re: BIO Bill Clouser Mon 10/5/1998 |
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45708 | Tom Corey <tcorey1@i...> | 1998‑06‑30 | Re: Bio |
CtheL wrote: > the slippery slope to neo-Neanderness. I now own an old #4, #6 > (yes, I know), #60 1/2 and #80 (w/sweetheart iron ... does this mean > I'm a collector?). This doesn't mean you're a col*c**r. If however you had said '#80 (w/a sweetheart od an iron' you would be branded with the c word. Welcome to the list. Tom Corey |
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45811 | Conan The Librarian <CV01@s...> | 1998‑07‑02 | Re: Bio |
Tom Corey wrote: > CtheL wrote: >> the slippery slope to neo-Neanderness. I now own an old #4, #6 >> (yes, I know), #60 1/2 and #80 (w/sweetheart iron ... does this mean >> I'm a collector?). > > This doesn't mean you're a col*c**r. If however you had said '#80 (w/a > sweetheart od an iron' you would be branded with the c word. That one went right over my head. > Welcome to > the list. Thanks, Tom. Chuck Vance |
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46193 | Ed Bell <ed.bell@c...> | 1998‑07‑13 | Re: bio |
amenex@E... wrote: > > Hi OldTools! > > Not having posted any Q's yet and anxious do > do so, here's the prerequisite: > > George Langford, Sc.D. > (i.e., graduate metallurgist) Cool! You'll get *lots* of questions. Pull a chair up front there, so we can all hear ya. Welcome to the porch. Ed |
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46209 | Ian McKinley <mckwood@h...> | 1998‑07‑13 | Re: bio |
At 07:42 PM 7/13/98 -0000, you wrote: >Hi OldTools! > >Not having posted any Q's yet and anxious do > non-Normie acivities with machine-tool > building, e.g. hand scraping and > general restorations (make it work > as good or better than new) > >George > >-- Hi George I am also very interested in old machine tools, how they were built and how to restore or reproduce them. Unfortunately I have not found any that I could afford. :-( Welcome to the list. Ian |
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46220 | "George Langford, Sc.D." <amenex@e...> | 1998‑07‑14 | Re: bio |
Hi Larry ! Thanks for commiserating. I took apart a P&W planer once, down to the last nut & bolt, then cleaned it all up, painted the surfaces that originally had paint on them, and put it all back together. Wasn't that hard; the nuts only went on their original bolts, they were all so different. I don't understand OldTools' aversion to the wire wheel. If used carefully, all it does is remove the red rust, leaving the blue/black magnetite (the hard stuff) underneath to form that magical "old tool" patina. Of course, used to XS, the wire wheel does make an ugly white mess ... Antique microscopes are routinely restored by polishing them to the nth degree; and those fetch the top'est dollar. Old furniture is worth umpteen times as much when left in the ugliest possible condition; I guess the dolts with the biggest bucks want to reserve the refinishing of those "gems" all to themselves. As to old machine tools, the only reason we can afford them is that they have been worn out or have been neglected to the point that they look worn out. So, if we want to use them, we have to fix them up. To me, that means doing it as right as we'd like to have found the thing in the first place. I scraped & fit a South Bend shaper to better than new (0.0005 inch in six inches). It's run 30 years and still there's no metal-to-metal contact between the ram and the dovetail in the head - no scratches at all. It usually makes a surface flat & parallel within 0.001 to 0.0005 inch. But that's a recreational.crafts.metalworking gloat, I guess. Best regards, George amenex@e... Lawrence H. Smith wrote: > > Welcome to the porch, George (I just got back here myself)! > >The old machine tools also have to pass the usable hurdle; I'm way behind > >in restoring > >the ones I already have, so "usable" is a > >touchy subject in this context. > > Oh yes, sounds fairly familiar. The big metalworking lathe was bought in > Februrary and moved in May, the big woodworking lathe was bought and moved > in November, and the little wood lathe was bought last May. The little wood > lathe has had some use, but needs an idiot bearing replacement fixed > (babbit replaced with bronze - but the bronze is (very) oversize, so the > thing stalls if the caps are tightened, and worse yet, is out of line with > the tailstock). The big ones are scattered over about half the shop trying > to get cleaned up so I can put them back together without perpetuating > years-o-filth. Eventually I'll worry about way-scraping, and I'd take > advice on that if you have any to offer, but there's plenty to do yet > before I get there... > > -Lawrence H Smith, Librarian/Computarian for Buxton School and Woodworker > -lsmith@s... Cats, Coffee, Chocolate... Vices to live by. |
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46222 | "George Langford, Sc.D." <amenex@e...> | 1998‑07‑14 | Re: bio |
Hi Ian ! Keep trying. I subscribe to an agricultural newspaper called Lancaster Farming. It's a Pennsylvania publication, but it lists want ads (both freebies (one per month, the rules say) and paid ones. It also lists all the farm (and some machinery) auctions in the Northeast. Every weekend there are about 500 such auctions. It takes the patience of a saint to read all the copy in the auction announcements, but one can get some real gems that way ... cheap, if you've got the patience and the nerve to know your (and your competitors') limits. Ian McKinley wrote: > > At 07:42 PM 7/13/98 -0000, you wrote: > >Hi OldTools! > > > >Not having posted any Q's yet and anxious do > > non-Normie acivities with machine-tool > > building, e.g. hand scraping and > > general restorations (make it work > > as good or better than new) > > > >George > > > >-- > > Hi George > > I am also very interested in old machine tools, how they were > built and how to restore or reproduce them. Unfortunately I have > not found any that I could afford. :-( > Welcome to the list. > > Ian > > |
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46235 | Paul Pedersen <perrons@c...> | 1998‑07‑14 | Re: bio |
George Langford writes : >I don't understand OldTools' aversion to the wire wheel. If >used carefully, all it does is remove the red rust, leaving >the blue/black magnetite (the hard stuff) underneath to form >that magical "old tool" patina. I've noticed that no one is answering this kind of statement anymore. You may not get an answer, these days, but you would have started a long and very interesting discussion had you asked it two years ago. I find it a shame that the subject has become taboo, there are surely more people on the porch now that haven't discussed the matter than those that have. I started out being the type of person that felt that a tool, regardless of it's age, was something that required keeping in pristine shape, and if one that I acquired wasn't in such shape, it was my duty to make it so. I figured that had :I: owned the tool the last hundred years I would have continuously maintained it and it would look today as new as the day I bought it. So it was natural for me to want to make an old tool look like I'd been the owner all that time and make it new again. Part of it was also that I didn't want someone else to come along and think that it was :me: who had been neglecting the tool (I grew up under heavy criticism and ridicule so what others think has been a pretty important thing in my life, at least until very recently). This point of view is based strictly on mechanical engineering type reasons and does not touch anything like history, aesthetics or feelings. Rust is bad so rust goes. Period. So I polished the brass, reground the machined surfaces, stripped the crackled varnish and refinished the wood. Trouble was, when I put the tool on a shelf with a bunch of other old tools, this one didn't look old anymore. It didn't look new either. It looked :gawdy: . This, to me, has become :the: reason for leaving an old tool the way it is. I have found that it is impossible to make an old tool look new. You end up with clean surfaces with dirty dents, rounded over corners, dull japanning, wood that looks nothing like it's supposed to, and that awful shiny brass. If I look at an un-restored old tool, one that has been given a bath to at least be presentable, there's something warm about the tool. There's a glow to it. It's mellow. It's got everything to do with feeling and nothing to do with mechanics. There might be some interesting aspects of wear, as well, like being able to see how and where previous owners put their hands. Seeing some long-dead person's hands come alive on a tool suddenly brings back the long-dead person. What did this person do for a living ? What working conditions did they labour under ? Who were they ? Sometimes there's an owner's mark and you can refer to the spirit by name. Everytime I see the mark on a tool it's like I'm meeting the guy to start our day's work together. "Good morning Mr E.COLE !" or "Hi there, S.ROBBINS, how's it goin' today ?". Now, if I renew a tool (and I still do at times), I kill the spirit. It'll be a good tool, a nice tool, but it'll be empty. Sometimes you don't have a choice, it's either that or throw it in the garabage. Hopefully once I pass those on they'll have accumulated a little bit of :me: and future owners will be able to resurrect me for a few minutes of galooting together, every once in a while. Paul Pedersen Montreal (Quebec) http://www.cam.org/~perrons/Paul/Woodwork/woodwork.html |
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46237 | STEVEB@e... | 1998‑07‑14 | Re: bio |
Adds Paul Pedersen: > George Langford writes : > > >I don't understand OldTools' aversion to the wire wheel. If > >used carefully, all it does is remove the red rust, leaving > >the blue/black magnetite (the hard stuff) underneath to form > >that magical "old tool" patina. > > I've noticed that no one is answering this kind of statement > anymore. The faq says somewhere that we don't reveal our secrets to the new guys right away. Truth is, we use belt sandahs, moves the metal twice as fast. --Steve-- Stephen Butti University Hospital Denver, CO w 303-372-2215 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Being Politically Correct means Always Having to Say You're Sorry. ______________________________________________________________________________ |
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