What do you make?

May 21, 2007 22 Replies

I'd tell you if I could find it

I repair canal boats & old diesels for a living, I've had a lathe of one sort or another for over 30 years but decided some years ago to acquire a wider selection of machines & tools - partly to reduce dependence on outside machine shops, partly just to widen my horizons a bit. If I have a boat on the dry-dock then any work needed is 'now', no good waiting for a shop which has to look after its regular, larger, customers first. Also because the workshop isn't my main place of work, I enjoy it more than what I call the 'day job'. I've now collected a decent selection of equipment, OK some of it's fairly old & 'well used' but it does what I need, trouble is the workshop is at saturation point & I really could do with pushing the walls out a bit! My shop might be in full time use for a couple of weeks, & then maybe abandoned for a month, it just depends what work comes in. My aim is, as my bones start to creak more with the years, to move the emphasis of my work from the dry-dock to the workshop but I can't totally ordain what sort of work comes in! In theory I've got a couple of 'hobby projects' in the pipeline, but in practice I haven't been near them for ages.

Tim

I know the problem :( When I retire I've probably got another 50 years of projects to work on :)

I have found that having a lathe is just the start, then comes meta

storage and some means to cut it, i made a hacksaw machine from a twi tub washing machine gearbox, works a treat, the list goes on. I mainl make skeleton clocks but like to make tools that make the lathe mor versatile, milling/drilling spindle, indexing dividing plates, etc etc Dav

-- DCree

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