Re: How do you know you are a good Machinist?

A 20 year old thread... and yet still a good question.

A "good machinist" should be able to take a drawing of something he's never made before and figure out how to make it accurately without making too much scrap - and after figuring it out, repeat it.

On 12/19/2019 12:47 PM, Clare Snyder wrote:> On Thu, 19 Dec 2019

How about those of us who work from pencil scrawlings on a scrap of paper and often have questions for clarification met with "like that other thing I didn't send you an image of" and "you know what I mean" instead of actual answers. Or worse, "I just want it ultra realistic and it has to be 'exactly' perfect." If its in a verbal conversation their pitch almost always changes when they say the word exactly.

LOL.

Often my response to customers is, "I have no way of seeing the pretty picture in your head. Please draw a picture. Even if its not very good." Some are amazingly bad. The ones that kill me are the guys who struggle to draw a marginally circular image who then proceed to tackle a detailed perspective drawing. I have to applaud the effort. I would love to own some of those images. I'd frame them and put on a modern art exhibit. Picasso would be bewildered. Sometimes I really wish I could see it the same way they do. That's the market I picked though.

The mark of a good "machinist" is one who can make the exact gizmo the client wants, given only the rough functional requirements - even when the client hasn't got a CLUE what he wants it to do - - - - -

Exactly the same as the mark of a good "computer programmer"

"It's a (black) art - not a science!!"

Thanks Bob for sharing this insight into your world :-) It's brilliant. the mind's eye sees these scenes vividly, the way you conjure it up. Best wishes.

I tried to learn drafting and machining well enough to not be that guy, with the result that the electrical engineers simply handed me the mechanical problem to solve as I saw fit.

It still helped if an experienced machinist could suggest changes to make the parts easier, faster and cheaper to produce, though that's really a production engineer rather than a machinist task.

Aound here the small job shops are used to working with Lockheed / BAE and are good at (if not always happy about) dealing with engineers.

"Jim Wilkins" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Sat, 21 Dec 2019 07:45:20

-0500 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

I retrained as a CAD guy. I remember a two part assignment: design the casting, then design resulting part. I thought "If I make the casting suchly, then holding it for the machining will be easier." And transferring "the sketch" to the drawing I said "I can make that" meaning all the info I need is there. Except for the note about the material, forgot that. Oops.

Yes, let them choose the alloy that gives them the best results and then send a revised print.

When I talked to circuit board makers before sending out a quote package they often would tell me they'd make the board differently depending on their equipment and supplies on hand, so I had to adjust the quote to fit all of them by removing some specs and relying on past experience with their quality. For these RF circuits the signal trace impedances were determined by my line widths and their inner plane spacings and insulation dielectric constants.

Throughout the 70's and 80's I watched them improve from loose commercial to demanding mil-spec standards and process control for all their products. Everything else benefited from their ability to make circuit boards for defense contractors whose tech was 20 years ahead of civilian applications.

You seem very purrceptive. Can you explain the new British "Cats" movie?

"Oh God, my eyes!" - a typical film critic's review

For starters, if your name *isn't* Mark Wieber, then there is a non-zero probability that you're a good machinist. That probability might be extremely slim, but it's still non-zero.

If your name is Mark Wieber, then there is no f****ng way in hell you're a good machinist. That's just a fact.

"Jim Wilkins" snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com on Sat, 21 Dec 2019 14:29:59

-0500 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

It was on the sketch. My mistake.

OTOH, one assignment did have very specific call outs for two holes and their relationship to each other. Nothing very specific about where exactly on the plate they were to go. As in no dimentions at all. ... As the Proff had said "If the engineer doesn't specify, you can put it anywhere." I also pointed out to the head cheese that the drawing I had, did not specify where the line of holes was to go on the board. The other boards had it at 1" from the top, and the program drilled them at one inch from the top, but hey, anywhere on the board was "in spec". That place had some "interesting" drawings.

Cool.

The funny thing is that my wife teaches Montessori pre-school. Which is everything in its place, and "control of error through the materials". Just like assembly stations. All the parts are on this board here, and the assembly is put together over here. If you have any extra parts, you left something off. If it doesn't match the outline on the assembly;board, you did something wrong. Just like in pre-school. Bewahahahahahahaha!

Sorry Jim - fairly Aspergic technical-brain, plus working long hours on a construction barge - so not seen film. I have heard some fairly intense mutterings from one or two colleagues about it being weird, or something like that.

When I started to need to machine things, during my research into hydrogen in welds, I used to sketch how I thought it could be done, then head down the machine-shop and lay-out my sketches and ask the machine-shop staff how it should be done. Answering their questions and studying their sketches, answers quickly came. Funnily enough, they often had a broader-sweeping imagination than some academics. Being in Sheffield (UK), at that time

• the staff were all time-served machinists
• in the University, they were used to converting ideas driven by science into equipment and tests which would achieve those ideas Hopefully it is true that I got things reasonably right, because I was quickly guided to implementations which worked well. It much contributed to the scientific achievement of my research - however by the time it was over, so was the industry in the UK ... Working as a welder now.

It contains gross and disturbing images you can never unsee, that will stay with you forever like Hepatitis. Rebel Wilson's widespread crotch is one, plus her crunching the bones of dancing baby mice with child's faces. Director Tom Hooper is understandingly being confused with Tobe Hooper who made Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This is how he opened Les Mis, and Cats retains the foreboding lighting and muted colors.

I satisfied my Chemistry degree's Humanities course requirement by taking easy pass/fail classes and building scenery in the University's Theatre department instead of pretending to accept socialist re-education, and hopefully arrested any slide into Asperger's from working alone in the lab all night, the only time the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine was available. It's since been renamed MRI to avoid scaring people.

Ha, good one!

There are other pretenders to the throne of utter weirdness on which Rocky Horror is king/queen/??, notably Baz Luhrman's 'Moulin Rouge' and 'Romeo and Juliet'. By the time the latter reaches the scene where you realize that Claire Danes' sweet, demure Juliet is packing a Walther you are no longer surprised by -anything-.