old techniques still in use?

I had to use a chisel during my European apprenticeship. The idea of the chisel actually illustrates the basic cutting tool really well. Force vectors, cutting forces, edge strength, etc.

I've found that I'm ultimately happy to have some experience with a chisel. When you really need a chisel, most other techniques are fairly impractical. Mind you, this applies to fairly specific work (troubleshooting mostly), so I'm not sure a production shop machinist would be very interested.

We only had to chisel out segments of thin plate (too small to use a drill/hacksaw combo). As I understand it, the millwright Meister exam requires the production of a shaft keyway using only a chisel!

I've mentioned it before, but you can use scraping techniques with a well dressed die grinder stone instead of a chisel for flattening a block. Useful when the block has but one planar surface. I'd say this is an "old" technique.

Speaking of the "old" way, I can't say I've ever used my experience in riveting for any serious application. About the only thing that work taught me was to not use rivets! What a pain.

I suppose it's a good education in the importance of balance and attention to detail in press work. If you start a rivet incorrectly, you're making life *very* tough/impossible later on in the process. Interesting education in cold-forming.

Regards,

Robin

A lot of the skills went away when various processes vanished. Why learn to cut a keyway with a cape chisel in the middle of a 50 foot shaft when they took all the overhead shafts out of the plant and replaced them with individual motors.

Do they use babbeted bearings any more? Do people still pour them?

I did once get many brownie points by being able to re-scrape a 4 inch bronze bearing on an old surface grinder but most of the old skills just aren't needed any more.

Hard to find a wheelwright to tighten up your buggy wheels or a good buggy whip maker these days and for quite a while a farrier was damned near impossible to locate - although I hear that trade is making a modest comeback. Looks like gunsmithing is also a dying trade too.

Bruce-in-Bangkok (correct Address is bpaige125atgmaildotcom)

My take on these hand techniques is that the purpose of a modern cnc shop is to eliminate hand work as much as possible in the interests of speed, accuracy and pruduction volumes.. However in the wood working trades and stone masons work chiseling is still an important skill. Now for other metalworking skills like in silver or gold smithing hand techniques are still taught including chiseling. For example removing flases from small castings , its much quicker to chisel them off than setting them up in a mill As many flashes are of different sizes.. also filing is used extensively in the jewellery trade. Also a modern cnc shop would most probably decline the repair/ remaking of an obsolete part for an old machine as they wouldnt have the old tools left any more. In several cnc shops I put work to they dont have a general center lathe anymore. Iknow of a few general machine shops that can turn their hand to almost anything , but there few and far between now. Generally a one man type shop who can turn his hand to almost any one off job. Youll find threm in rural areas repairing farm machinery and the like.

Useful for repairs, kludges, and one-off's, however.

I don't rivet much, but I was able to apply the techniques learned from hanging out with a darned good plate armor armorer who rivets a lot (it's historically correct) to repair my backhoe by replacing a swing-chain pin with an appropriate sized hunk of grade-8 bolt, and peening it in place with a small ball peen hammer, a moderate anvil, and

Given than it's $300 just to get the thing hauled off for someone else to even start looking at it, much less the cost of them fixing it with replacement parts as opposed to rebuilding parts, it's a worthwhile skill to lurk in the skillset, when needed.

Likewise, it's clear that sometimes the ability to cut a keyway with a chisel would get the (one-off, repair or modification) job done faster and with less specialized and costly tools. Have to give it a try when I've got some spare time.

Appreciate knock it off with continuing the crossposting to AMC anytime where it occurs the f****it mcduffee happens to be involved.

Most whip makers are now chinese and they cater largely to the Western S&M trade, though there are still quite a number of US craftspeople still making them for both legit and S&M trade

Farriers are indeed making a comeback, as there are more horses in the US today, than at any time in its history.

Course most are riding stock, not working stock...not many plow horses or milk wagons...

Gunsmithing is indeed a dying art. They have two issues..governmental regulation that is worthless but a huge hinderance and have added huge costs, and gunsmiths have largely priced themselves out of the market for many people.

Thats the reason I first learned machining, because I wanted custom stuff, or to repair stuff, but couldnt afford the prices most smiths were charging even then. I do nearly all my own gunsmithing, and let/teach friends who come over to my home shop to do repairs/mods of their own.

As a service tech, its damned surprising how few shops have even a bench vise, drill press or much in the way of hand tools. Few have a manual mill or lathe either.

Been a number of times Ive had to clamp something in a CNC mill vise and cut it off with a hacksaw...which is an extremely odd concept if you think about it.....

Gunner

Wheels and carriages, in the US you can hire the Omish. They can restore things to like new. Karl

And that is nearly the only place that you can get it done, but damn, it is a long drive back from california to get the wheels fixed.

Bruce-in-Bangkok (correct Address is bpaige125atgmaildotcom)

It looks like Google made it to this book. See:

I'm on dial-up, have to wait for a slow day and then maybe I'll take a closer look.

Pouring babbitt isn't all that hard. You just need to follow a few rules. I pour babbitt, hand scrape bearings, hand file journal caps and quite a bit of the old techniques do a better job, IF DONE CORRECTLY, than any machine out there. Plus there are more than a few times that using high tech equipment wouldn't work because of the location of the part. Or to keep the item accurate. I even ran across a weird engine a few years ago. It had two tapered throws on the crank and I was ready to have them ground true when I discovered that the castings for the bearings areas were cast with a taper. Turned out that the designer had decided that the taper held the crankshaft in position better than a thrust bearing.

I have absolutely no need to do it, but it seems like the process would be satisfying.

Dave

Gee, seems normal to me. ;)

======== Anyone that has an interest in Babbitt bearings should take a look at

Makes me glad that I can buy off the shelf ball/roller and sintered bronze bearings in about any size I need.

However from what I have seen in the machine shops in the smaller communities, many of the local manufacturing plants continue to use old equipment, frequently with babbitt bearings. While new equipment *MAY* be available, it will be imported, and the price is such that the operation would no longer be economically viable with new expensive machinery.

While replacement parts may be produced on cnc equipment, these are frequently "reverse engineered" from existing worn-out parts. In many cases, the U.S. companies that produced the equipment years ago are no longer in business, so these machine shops are keeping a number of small-town manufacturing operations (and thus the town) going.

From what I could see, the "reverse engineered" parts tended to be "blockier" in that a "machined from the solid" or weldment was replacing a casting. Also a fair amount of flame spray/welding and remachining. I did not notice any "chipping" to complete the part, but some die grinder work.

Unka' George [George McDuffee]

------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

========== Does this seem to be more of a problem in shops run by accountant types rather that traditional "hands on" people?

Seems to be very similar to the person who gets a brand new car and has no tools of any kind, not even a jack and lug wrench. The slightest problem brings everything to a stop and is very expensive to correct. (Keep the cell phone and credit card handy...)

Unka' George [George McDuffee]

------------------------------------------- He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils: for Time is the greatest innovator: and if Time, of course, alter things to the worse, and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better, what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman. Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).

I carved one out with a hacksaw, files, and used a wood chisel to cut the dovetail. It was not a thing of beauty, but an hour after I started, I was out in the woods testing my scope. (which turned out to be a piece of crap... LOL)

Jon

You gotta remember that what they were chipping was grey cast iron for the most part or cutting keyways in wrought iron shafts. Most cast iron these days is alloyed to one degree or another, a whole different proposition, and soft wrought iron isn't a current structural material. I've worked on some old tools made out of the old grey stuff. Very soft, you could cut it with a pocket knife. So chiseling parallel grooves in a surface with a cape chisel and peeling off the lands with a wide chisel to get a surface down to size probably wasn't the ordeal it might seem at this remove in time. Grey cast iron was the pine wood of the industrial revolution.

I've got an Audel's machinist's book from about 1905 that details those old techniques. Overcome by power tools and made obsolete by material improvements. It's nice if you developed the skills, but what are you going to use them on these days?

Stan

Actually the Omish carriage repairers can come to you in the US Don't know about Bankok. They're some of the few or possibly only Omish allowed to drive motor vehicles. Karl

The cast iron in my Duracraft drill press is like that. I chiseled off the lip at the top of the hole for the column so the head could be lowered. The down side of soft cast iron is that it didn't hold the threads for extra clamp bolts very well.

I bought a dumbbell to machine into pivot balls for the base of a hoist, hoping it would also be soft. WRONG!, only carbide would cut the stuff. The skin was only a little harder than the interior. In the winter I would have left the CI in the wood stove for a week.

When I replaced the rusted cab mounts on my pickup I used cape and gouge chisels to help decapitate some of the less-accessible rivets. Ford truck frame rivets definitely aren't soft wrought iron and I got lots of practice resharpening the chisels, as well as shortened reduced-shank drill bits that no longer fit a Darex. The factory manual calls for bolts one size larger than the rivets.

Cutting metal with a sharp chisel is slower but otherwise not much different from making a square-cornered door hinge or latch mortice. It helps if you can grind good straight flats on the chisel to guide the cutting edge.

Jim Wilkins