I just assumed Beta project 9 was one of those “Pen” things from Men in black and everyone on the forum looked and now we don’t remember…
Or did the GF help create jkopel’s time machine and we all skipped to 10??? (Can it send us to December???)
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@dean pointed me to “Zotebook” for the iPad. Pretty cool; makes hand-drawn lines into real straight lines, circles, etc… It knows about constraints and dimensions. It’s aimed primarily at people doing laser cutting (i.e. it’s 2D). Unfortunately, it’s not available on the phone.
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If @smcgathyfay doesn’t let me move into her home until I get my GF, I will lurk in @jkopel 's house somewhere.
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So I spent a productive hour watching how to scrape the ways on a mill. At first I thought it was some type of machinists’ code, “Sorry, I can’t come to your party. I’ve got to scrape my ways.” I reminds me of lens lapping for big reflector telescopes. It is amazing that one can come up with some amazing tolerances just all by hand.
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It is how the machines that made the world we live in got built.
For a long time it was one of those “lost arts”, but there seems to be a resurgence of people interested in both the high tech (think Glowforge or any CNC ) and the low tech ways of making things.
I found it to be incredibly satisfying and a whole lot of plain old hard work!
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Bwahaha IDK can you cook, clean and play video games with my 12 year old? If so, you we may have a deal…lol
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I have a friend who by trade is a machinist its darn impressive what he can do with all manual machines no cad/cam/cnc all old school tools. and its just darn impressive making things to a .001 all using hand controls.
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You better be a real good lurker, it is a very small house! 
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Cant wait for winter
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My god man, you have an inordinate assembly of esoteric machine tools there.
Consider the span of technology represented between them, up to the laser you are toying with.
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I used to put together a lot of race cars back in the day. Our cylinder head porter was one of those guys you’re talking about. Accuracy down to the thousandth of an inch, all by hand. It was impressive.
This discussion makes me think about the shop where I learned what little machining I know. University research shop, so a few mils were just the standard. The guy who was teaching us poor undergrads regularly drilled 3-mil holes for low-pressure gas manifolds. Once, for fun, he turned a 3’ long billet down to 1/16" (plus or minus a mil).
But the thing that I thought was coolest (and I wonder if there are potential analogs with laser cut stuff) was the work these guys did with microwave waveguides, where they would machine some intensely complex shape out of aluminum, plate it with copper, and then etch away the aluminum to leave the final product…
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Is that a powered knee? I have a '59 Bridgeport J-head that I am slowly bringing back into shape. Yours looks beautiful!
Thanks, I am pretty pleased with the results!
The knee is “armstrong” powered 
, but if you look on the floor there is a drill motor with an adapter that I made to drive the knee. It does have a built in gear drive on the x-axis. The next model up had x/y from the same gearbox, and they made a separate motor for a powered knee.
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Gotcha, just went and looked it up, thats one heck of a power feed for the X! At one point I CNC’d an older Delta mill and drove the knee vs the quill. I won’t make that mistake again, took a heck of a lot of gear reduction to be able to get a reasonable sized servo to drive it.
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Josh, I am extremely happy that you were picked to be a beta tester. You are doing an incredible job.
I will leave it at that.
Thank you!
Trent
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Thank you Trent!
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