Free - Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy

If you know what this book is, you may know that it sells for $200 on Amazon ($150 from Moore Tool Co.). But the Internet Archive makes it available online for free.

If you *don't* know what this book is, and you do any accurate machining, this is the story that defined accuracy throughout the world for around 50 years. It's probably the most acclaimed book in the metalworking industry. It was written by Wayne Moore, son of Dick Moore, who invented the jig borer, the jig grinder, and many other extreme-accuracy machines. A light-emission device made by Dick was used by the National Bureau of Standards as the US standard for the meter for years, before lasers.

This book explains how Moore Special Tool (now Moore Tool Co.) built machines that positioned to millionths of an inch, before today's electronics and lasers. It describes self-checking gages (spelling intentional) that deliver millionths of an inch just by checking the gage against itself, or against a duplicate. This, alone, makes it worth reading the book.

I read it four or five times when I was at American Machinist. It gave me a great start in understanding accuracy and accurate machines.

The only thing I see wrong with the online edition is that the photography, which was the standard in the metalworking industry for decades and was shot by a former LIFE magazine photographer, didn't come through in the PDF edition. You can see what's going on, but the original photography is spectacular.

The Internet Archive is a national treasure. You have to sign up and log on, but it's free.

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Reply to
Ed Huntress
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I've never had to sign up or sign in. Just checked and I still don't. I think you need to if you want to upload content. The book mentioned can be found here:

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If you really want to see the best copy you can always look at the raw scan data. Download the jp2 zip file. With that you could actually build your own copy with pdf, djvu (much better format for books)...

Internet archive used to make djvu docs until about a year ago. They were far superior to pdf. Don't know what happened other than I found other people complaining about the loss too. Some docs come from Googles scanning project and really suck. I always avoid those if at all possible...

Reply to
Leon Fisk

That's good to know. If you aren't signed in, are you able to see the collections?

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Not sure what you mean. I've never been stopped at any point other than uploading stuff. I considered signing up to do that but decided against it.

I also have java script, java and a lot of crap blocked as a general rule...

Give me some links and I'll try to visit them :)

Reply to
Leon Fisk

When I log on to this:

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...what I see is pages and pages of the "Top Collections of the Archive." They're boxed icons, five across, that describe each of the collections. There must be hundreds of the icons. Is that what you see?

It also has a bunch of features for members, trivial things like personal collections and web archives, etc.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Slightly crunched screen shot with images blocked too:

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Reply to
Leon Fisk

Here is a regular search I use to do every week or so:

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I gave up when they dropped the djvu document format. It would show me all the recent old catalogs that had been uploaded. I've saved many of them through the years. Here is a new one:

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The last few pages of items has old tool steel lathe cutters. I like to see what shapes were used back in the day and that is a nice set with descriptions :)

Reply to
Leon Fisk

Hmm. You have a text list of collections. Here's what I see. The first page is the opening, and the second page is what you see when you start scrolling down. There are pages after pages of these icons:

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When you click on a collection icon, I get more pages of icons -- as many icons as are in that top-level collection.

Are you able to scroll down through multiple pages of collections like that?

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Cool stuff. I'm going to have to learn how to use this thing. I only came across it a few weeks ago, and have explored it a bit by way of the collections.

Thanks for the tips.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

If I enable Java script and images I get the same as your screen shot. With JS off like my screen shot it's just laid out different. Read the top two titles on my screen shot. Same as the icons on your first two starting on the left.

I tried to turn people on to this here years ago, pointing out cool old books that are still relevant. Nobody pays attention to old books...

This is the same site that has the old "Way back machine" too. It's the search at the top of the page. You can find a lot of old defunct websites archived there with a little bit of work and deduction.

Reply to
Leon Fisk

Thanks again, Leon. I love the old machining books. I used to have access to the originals at the McGraw-Hill library -- American Machinist had been collecting them since 1877 -- but I don't think they even have them anymore, since they sold AM to Penton Publishing. And there's no way I want to take a 40-minute train ride in to see them, anyway.

So, now I have something for cold winter nights.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

You're most welcome. You can study my search and build off it. Use the "Advanced Search" page to learn/do more. I've got ~5gb stashed away locally. Most of it came from there through the years via 56k modem. Lathes, Machining, Engineering, Agriculture... lots of old catalogues... Nowadays I have slow DSL so the local copies aren't nearly as important. But stuff on the internet has a way of disappearing...

Here is another search you may like:

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A really good djvu viewer is:

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Reply to
Leon Fisk

OK, I have to look into the workings of the advanced searches. I see that yours are very useful; I have some other subjects I want to study, too.

The djvu viewer looks good. I'l download it tonight. Meantime, I'm going to download that 331 MB version of "Foundations" and see what the photos look like. I want to pass it on to the editor who replaced me when I retired. I'm glad my ISP just upgraded my connection to 100 Mbps.

This is great stuff, Leon. I appreciate your tips. BTW, did you ever read "Foundations"? It's one of the very best metalworking books I've read. Dick Moore's earlier books are great, too. I'll bet they're availalble on the Internet Archive, eh?

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Snagged. The TOC looks very interesting.

Hmm, I don't recall seeing the djvu format, or maybe just overlooked them as not a format I recognized. What readers read them?

Speaking of which, I miss the hell out of DejaVu, the wonderful pre-Google site.

Yeah, I downloaded a book which was supposed to be over 60% pictures the other day and found that it had NONE in it. Paragraph descriptions of everything followed by no pics. It's criminal, Google!

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Reply to
Larry Jaques

I've been a fan for awhile now, thanks to you.

"Can I get it on my phone?" LOL

Yeah, that's fun.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

-Robert A. Heinlein

Reply to
Larry Jaques

No I haven't. I use my stash like an encyclopedia or dictionary. Pickup little snippets here and there as needed. You might recall I would come up with answers for Rob's "What is it?" on occasion. The well illustrated old books and catalogues were very useful to run down hunches. When certain terms, methods over my head are discussed on the group here I have good material to look it up.

If the books you're interested in are out of copyright and were held by a large library they may be available. Search by title or a couple of unique words from the title work well too. Some of my settings just help reduce the chaff produced from a broader search.

The Archive has started using a more highly compressed pdf format (pdf/A-2 and jp2 compression I think) much of the time that just brings my computer to its knees. It takes several minutes to render a page, which makes the docs pretty much useless for me. Oh well, I gleaned a lot of cool stuff while they were still producing good djvu docs :)

The older djvu docs were quite nice. For instance "Cyclopedia of engineering":

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Which is only ~14mb as compared to the pdf version which is ~26mb

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Pretty nice for a 438 page book with illustrations...

Reply to
Leon Fisk

Windows:

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Linux, I usually just use Evince. DjView4 has more options and also has a windows port as does Evince:

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On Android I've been using Document Viewer, but mostly for pdf files. I haven't tried reading any djvu content with it recently.

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Yeah, I miss it too. It got the job done fast and simple. Using Google Groups is like going for a run with cement block shoes...

If that came from Archive try searching for another copy that wasn't uploaded by Google. Some books have multiple copies uploaded from different sources. If you look at the search strings I posted for Ed you will see how to filter Google copies out. Interestingly Google scanned/kept good content. They just uploaded crappy pdf copies to Archive and the djvu copy was created from the crappy Google pdf so it is even worse...

Reply to
Leon Fisk

Awesome, never heard of it. Thanks. I got a tablet for Xmas and am filling it with good books/ articles.

George H.

Reply to
ggherold

Yeah, it's very nice. I downoaded the reader and I'll look at some more.

Of course, coming from the publishing business, I've been using Acrobat from day one, for authoring and editing, and for print production as well as for online readers. So I recognize what they could be doing with Acrobat and my guess is that they just did a poor job with the photos on that Acrobat copy of "Foundations."

Anyway, it's another useful tool, and thanks again for pointing it out to me.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Are you referring to the book or to the Internet Archive? If it's the latter, take a look at Leon's posts in this thread. He's the expert. I know the book, and have spent many hours with the author, but I'm new to the Internet Archive..

Reply to
Ed Huntress

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