Nowadays if somebody wants to build a machine without a lot of tools available, and doesn't have the goal of recreating industrial revolution processes, I'd recommend looking into epoxy granite casting. Epoxy granite will result in a way better machine since it has vibration damping qualities similar to cast iron. It also avoids melting metal, which everyone can do but some might want to avoid.
I was about to recommend the exact same thing. Epoxy granite is used by some world class machine tool builders.
I think an interesting modern take on the Gingery machine, would be a homebuilt machine tool; built from epoxy-concrete. Linear rails, servos, fly-by-wire controls with force feedback.
Machine form factor would be a la Mazak Integrex but much smaller and fits in a two car garage. Total envelope would be 8"x8"x8"; high spindle speeds w/ low depth of cuts. That should compensate for the total lack of stiffness :)
I'd really like epoxy granite linear rails for the noise dampening attributes. If they're flexy they could just be bolted to a metal or wooden support.
Exactly like jogging with CNC controls; but with force feedback. I have done some cuts with the Haas in handjog mode. I always feel iffy doing it, since I can't feel the feedback from the cutting forces.
Actually, you are almost always better off buying the Chinese-import machine tools. With a bit of scraping and adjustment, the Chinese imports can perform extremely well.
The main thing about the small epoxy granite milling machines is that they have stupidly (30K RPM+) fast spindles--and generally have through coolant/air. That way, the cutting edge removes material before significant lateral forces develop and compromise accuracy due to lack of rigidity.
Gingery's books, as I understand, have you start from no machine tools and go to a metal shop the way computer hobbyists might start with discrete electronics and breadboards and go to a fully functional 8-bit computer with BIOS, ROM, etc.
A gem for the post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Assuming anyone can still read.
Correct. I’ve done some of this. You start with a metal foundry for melting aluminum. From there, you can build tools tools that help build other tools, up to the ultimate: metal lathe.
It’s a pot of work but very rewarding.
Here are some pictures of ‘the 5 bucks furnace’ i built:
I did. Nothing really notable, so I'll have to look through my pics at some point to see what else I could post. The furnace is extremely heavy and life happened it on it's terms, so that project got iceboxed for a while.
The primitive technology guy would make a shelf out of earth.
Edit: Or he would just hack some bamboo or some thick branches with a stone axe and tie them together using some dried vines to create a pretty good shelf.
I've thought of this when thinking about bringing recently extinct creatures back from extinction via cloning.
Take New Zealand or Hawai'i and try to bring back an animal that humans caused to go extinct. Like the Haast's eagle.
The eagle only went extinct around 1400, but did so because the Maori hunted the moa to extinction. So bring the eagle back you need to bring the moa back. To bring the moa back you'll need moa habitat, which have been radically changed and are in short supply.
More broadly, it shows a central problem with humans who want X but don't want to dedicate the work or resources for X. Take the current issues in restaurants in America. American consumers want cheap and well prepared food, but aren't willing to pay very much for it. So, and entire industry matured using exploitive employment practices and keeping wages below the cost of living let alone a living wage. The business can't pay enough and make a profit with the price consumers are willing to pay.
So yeah, we want pandas and gorillas and the buffalo to roam, but often aren't willing to pay the bill needed to do so.
The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. - Joe Armstrong ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
I always think of these sorts of things in terms of “what would I do if I was stuck in 500 years in the past?”, how far I could get in terms of making myself comfortable and being able to recreate some modern conveniences.
500 years in the past, metal would still be relatively scarce and precious, where in the notional postapocalyptic future that people enjoy fantasizing about, the ruins of today's world would offer a veritable cornucopia.
Bret Devreux had a very fascinating history of how iron was made posted, long read but it explains a lot of the complications and work that went into historically making iron, and many of the reasons metal was so rare & expensive. Well worth a read.
A perpetual favorite read of makers everywhere. If there were a variant that didn't require sand casting of metal, it might be a lot more approachable.
That more or less defeats the purpose of the idea. Almost the entire machine is cast from melted-down scrap metal and then (variously) machined, bootstrapping from the first tool, the lathe, which is hand-finished.
Does it presume you have like, scrapers and a surface plate and so on?
I can't see someone making an accurate lathe or mill without an expensive suite of metrology tooling (or going full whitworth three plates method and lapping like forever).
It's hand scraping all the way. For initial standards, the author recommends just going with the straightest thing you have in your shop, then just scrape away until things mate well.
The books are light on the theory of precision and accuracy, but I would be surprised if most readers of Gingery books didn't also have a PDF of 'Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy' somewhere :). These days nothing about this process is practical, it's all basically an exercise in bootstrapping.
Duckduckgo for 'gingery lathe' if you're interested in seeing results, people have been building these for decades.
Float glass is pretty flat, but I'm not sure regular glass is temperature-stable enough for the task (and of course, it's fragile). Temperature-stable glass (e.g., Pyrex) usually requires a lengthy annealing stage.
Granite surface plates are pretty popular, though. Maybe glass would be okay for light duty.
Speaking of glass, amateur telescope makers can grind mirrors accurate to within 1/4 wavelength of light, using nothing but abrasive powders and patience, but they start out with a pre-cast and annealed Pyrex blank.
I do use a piece of float glass on my 3D printer bed, and it works well enough. Maybe I'll see if I can figure out how much it distorts when heated (not enough to cause a noticeable problem with the relatively low-precision stuff I've been making thus far).
Some people do use borosilicate glass (like Pyrex) for this, but I've been satisfied so far with a piece of regular float glass window stock I had cut to size at Lowes.
There are glass compositions that are very thermally stable, this is a very well researched area because so many pieces of the science puzzle depend on it.
No, but it can get you a pretty good starting point to make something that is really flat. For instance, three pieces of float glass alternated using successively finer grains will get you insane levels accuracy in a relatively short time. To the point where you'd need a laser interferometer to detect where you still have high spots.
You know, I've never really thought about it, but I would think that grinding two same-material surfaces together with an abrasive compound would result in flatness if the pressure is even.
With two surfaces you can still have some bias (convexity/concavity) even though they appear to be relatively flat, you need three surfaces for absolute flatness. See the Whithworth Method described earlier in this topic.
He uses a piece of glass on plywood, with a ground file for a scraper. He's only scraping aluminum.
I don't think Gingery wrote these books as a way to demonstrate bootstrapping. When Gingery wrote these books there were no Chinese machines available, and hobby lathes (say the Southbend 9" or the myford 7") were way out of reach for a lot of people. He wrote the books to let people get to a machine with what they had. Everyone would be able to find a piece of glass and a file.
I built this lathe, but with much heavier sections and out of ZA12 rather than aluminum. I did a pretty good job, I think, but it is still inferior in every way to a Chinese 7x12. Zero regrets that I did it though, even with those better machines available.
I don't think too many Chinese factories are scraping in their ways on their mini mills or lathes.
And also lots of old machines that likely have lost their flaking and true trueness a while ago. Still being run by old operators that understand their limitations.
You can make accurate parts on an 'inaccurate' conventional machine.
The slightly nicer ones have scraped mating surfaces. The very cheap ones will at a minimum be surface ground very well, and have some oil scrapes.
> You can make accurate parts on an 'inaccurate' conventional machine.
To a point, sure. At some stage, it doesn't matter how much of an old timer you are and how much knowledge of your machines' limitations you have - you just need to make a part the machine cannot.
You can basically always rescrape a machine, give it new gibs, and be back to 100%.
IIRC, wood chisel and 3 plates. Prussian blue to evaluate the thickness. Portland cement, a hairdryer and crucible. I made tongs with strap iron and a drill. hairdryer on the charcoal to melt the aluminum.
I started with sand casting aluminum cans. I realized I was woefully unprepared to deal with molten metal, if something went wrong. I wasn't willing to iterate at the bottom, and buying the next level of tech seemed like cheating. Still have the books though.
Surface plates are actually one of the easiest tools to bootstrap, using the three-surfaces method and lapping with fine grit. The only three surfaces that can all slide laterally against one another are three perfectly flat surfaces.
Here's a video (four parts) of a guy doing it. He uses modern tools in the video, but really that's just about saving time (and showing off). You can simply subsitute (a whole lot) more time spent lapping for the lathe part in his video.
I think by ordering your parts made you'd end up with a lathe much less capable than one commercially available, at a much higher (3x? 4x?) price, without having gained any machining or scraping skills.
Nowadays if somebody wants to build a machine without a lot of tools available, and doesn't have the goal of recreating industrial revolution processes, I'd recommend looking into epoxy granite casting. Epoxy granite will result in a way better machine since it has vibration damping qualities similar to cast iron. It also avoids melting metal, which everyone can do but some might want to avoid.
For anyone interested there's a wealth of epoxy granite info on the CNC Zone forum.
https://www.cnczone.com/forums/epoxy-granite/
I was about to recommend the exact same thing. Epoxy granite is used by some world class machine tool builders.
I think an interesting modern take on the Gingery machine, would be a homebuilt machine tool; built from epoxy-concrete. Linear rails, servos, fly-by-wire controls with force feedback.
Machine form factor would be a la Mazak Integrex but much smaller and fits in a two car garage. Total envelope would be 8"x8"x8"; high spindle speeds w/ low depth of cuts. That should compensate for the total lack of stiffness :)
There are several people who have documented builds of epoxy granite mills. Much bigger than what you described generally, but still garage machines. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIuvJtM342E7p2nEpwTGbDw and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCssIc2lLpX1nIHkymAzEptw are two of my favourites.
I'd really like epoxy granite linear rails for the noise dampening attributes. If they're flexy they could just be bolted to a metal or wooden support.
What do you mean by fly-by-wire controls? Just manual jogging with CNC controls or do you mean something more specific?
Exactly like jogging with CNC controls; but with force feedback. I have done some cuts with the Haas in handjog mode. I always feel iffy doing it, since I can't feel the feedback from the cutting forces.
That sounds awesome. Do you know of any builds that have done that?
Pointers would be much appreciated.
Actually, you are almost always better off buying the Chinese-import machine tools. With a bit of scraping and adjustment, the Chinese imports can perform extremely well.
The main thing about the small epoxy granite milling machines is that they have stupidly (30K RPM+) fast spindles--and generally have through coolant/air. That way, the cutting edge removes material before significant lateral forces develop and compromise accuracy due to lack of rigidity.
Gingery's books, as I understand, have you start from no machine tools and go to a metal shop the way computer hobbyists might start with discrete electronics and breadboards and go to a fully functional 8-bit computer with BIOS, ROM, etc.
A gem for the post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Assuming anyone can still read.
Correct. I’ve done some of this. You start with a metal foundry for melting aluminum. From there, you can build tools tools that help build other tools, up to the ultimate: metal lathe.
It’s a pot of work but very rewarding.
Here are some pictures of ‘the 5 bucks furnace’ i built:
https://chrisbergeron.com/2008/01/21/metalcasting_furnace/
Phil’s books are great and it would be handy to have them in a post-apocalyptic scenario to bootstrap society.
Very nice project. Did you eventually cast more stuff with it than your motor mounts? You should take a look at this Youtube channel by a Russian guy, Advoko Makes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc1ufNROdAxto9Fr0jnEE2Q
I did. Nothing really notable, so I'll have to look through my pics at some point to see what else I could post. The furnace is extremely heavy and life happened it on it's terms, so that project got iceboxed for a while.
> A gem for the post-apocalyptic bookshelf. Assuming anyone can still read.
I assume that to get a bookshelf, you have to build the wood workshop first?
The primitive technology guy would make a shelf out of earth.
Edit: Or he would just hack some bamboo or some thick branches with a stone axe and tie them together using some dried vines to create a pretty good shelf.
Perhaps construct some sort of rudimentary lathe... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQzg1vpxnnY
In order to make woodworking tools, you will probably want a functioning smithy.
But that contradicts every crafting survival game I've ever played!
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch…
"All you wanted was a Banana. All of sudden you have Gorilla with a complete jungle."
I've thought of this when thinking about bringing recently extinct creatures back from extinction via cloning.
Take New Zealand or Hawai'i and try to bring back an animal that humans caused to go extinct. Like the Haast's eagle.
The eagle only went extinct around 1400, but did so because the Maori hunted the moa to extinction. So bring the eagle back you need to bring the moa back. To bring the moa back you'll need moa habitat, which have been radically changed and are in short supply.
More broadly, it shows a central problem with humans who want X but don't want to dedicate the work or resources for X. Take the current issues in restaurants in America. American consumers want cheap and well prepared food, but aren't willing to pay very much for it. So, and entire industry matured using exploitive employment practices and keeping wages below the cost of living let alone a living wage. The business can't pay enough and make a profit with the price consumers are willing to pay.
So yeah, we want pandas and gorillas and the buffalo to roam, but often aren't willing to pay the bill needed to do so.
The problem with object-oriented languages is they've got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle. - Joe Armstrong ... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
How much would it cost to follow along these books from 1-7? How much time roughly?
I always think of these sorts of things in terms of “what would I do if I was stuck in 500 years in the past?”, how far I could get in terms of making myself comfortable and being able to recreate some modern conveniences.
500 years in the past, metal would still be relatively scarce and precious, where in the notional postapocalyptic future that people enjoy fantasizing about, the ruins of today's world would offer a veritable cornucopia.
That's very interesting. Tbh even though I think bout postapocalyptic situations a lot I never thought of that.
Bret Devreux had a very fascinating history of how iron was made posted, long read but it explains a lot of the complications and work that went into historically making iron, and many of the reasons metal was so rare & expensive. Well worth a read.
https://acoup.blog/2020/09/18/collections-iron-how-did-they-...
You might like this book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Invent-Everything-Survival-Strand...
A perpetual favorite read of makers everywhere. If there were a variant that didn't require sand casting of metal, it might be a lot more approachable.
Probably worth designing and ordering those specific parts online >> https://www.weerg.com/en/global/materials
That more or less defeats the purpose of the idea. Almost the entire machine is cast from melted-down scrap metal and then (variously) machined, bootstrapping from the first tool, the lathe, which is hand-finished.
Does it presume you have like, scrapers and a surface plate and so on?
I can't see someone making an accurate lathe or mill without an expensive suite of metrology tooling (or going full whitworth three plates method and lapping like forever).
Would be interested in seeing people's results.
It's hand scraping all the way. For initial standards, the author recommends just going with the straightest thing you have in your shop, then just scrape away until things mate well.
The books are light on the theory of precision and accuracy, but I would be surprised if most readers of Gingery books didn't also have a PDF of 'Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy' somewhere :). These days nothing about this process is practical, it's all basically an exercise in bootstrapping.
Duckduckgo for 'gingery lathe' if you're interested in seeing results, people have been building these for decades.
The Whitworth Three Plates Method should be on anyone's list of the Greatest Engineering Discoveries of All Time.
The fact that you can make a precision flat surface starting without any precision tools is pretty amazing at first glance.
melt some metal and float some glass on it. That's a very quick way to get a nice reference surface.
Float glass is nowhere near as flat as a hand-scraped cast iron surface plate can get. Smoother, yes, but less flat.
It's a pretty good starting point though, and with a little bit more work and some powder you can get it near perfect.
Float the glass on molten metal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Float_glass
Float glass is pretty flat, but I'm not sure regular glass is temperature-stable enough for the task (and of course, it's fragile). Temperature-stable glass (e.g., Pyrex) usually requires a lengthy annealing stage.
Granite surface plates are pretty popular, though. Maybe glass would be okay for light duty.
Speaking of glass, amateur telescope makers can grind mirrors accurate to within 1/4 wavelength of light, using nothing but abrasive powders and patience, but they start out with a pre-cast and annealed Pyrex blank.
I do use a piece of float glass on my 3D printer bed, and it works well enough. Maybe I'll see if I can figure out how much it distorts when heated (not enough to cause a noticeable problem with the relatively low-precision stuff I've been making thus far).
Some people do use borosilicate glass (like Pyrex) for this, but I've been satisfied so far with a piece of regular float glass window stock I had cut to size at Lowes.
There are glass compositions that are very thermally stable, this is a very well researched area because so many pieces of the science puzzle depend on it.
No, but it can get you a pretty good starting point to make something that is really flat. For instance, three pieces of float glass alternated using successively finer grains will get you insane levels accuracy in a relatively short time. To the point where you'd need a laser interferometer to detect where you still have high spots.
What do you mean by 'hand scraping'?
You know, I've never really thought about it, but I would think that grinding two same-material surfaces together with an abrasive compound would result in flatness if the pressure is even.
(Hand) scraping refers to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeGn4hN1Bg .
With two surfaces you can still have some bias (convexity/concavity) even though they appear to be relatively flat, you need three surfaces for absolute flatness. See the Whithworth Method described earlier in this topic.
If you're interested in this sort of stuff and want a video introduction, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
He uses a piece of glass on plywood, with a ground file for a scraper. He's only scraping aluminum.
I don't think Gingery wrote these books as a way to demonstrate bootstrapping. When Gingery wrote these books there were no Chinese machines available, and hobby lathes (say the Southbend 9" or the myford 7") were way out of reach for a lot of people. He wrote the books to let people get to a machine with what they had. Everyone would be able to find a piece of glass and a file.
I built this lathe, but with much heavier sections and out of ZA12 rather than aluminum. I did a pretty good job, I think, but it is still inferior in every way to a Chinese 7x12. Zero regrets that I did it though, even with those better machines available.
I don't think too many Chinese factories are scraping in their ways on their mini mills or lathes.
And also lots of old machines that likely have lost their flaking and true trueness a while ago. Still being run by old operators that understand their limitations.
You can make accurate parts on an 'inaccurate' conventional machine.
The slightly nicer ones have scraped mating surfaces. The very cheap ones will at a minimum be surface ground very well, and have some oil scrapes.
> You can make accurate parts on an 'inaccurate' conventional machine.
To a point, sure. At some stage, it doesn't matter how much of an old timer you are and how much knowledge of your machines' limitations you have - you just need to make a part the machine cannot.
You can basically always rescrape a machine, give it new gibs, and be back to 100%.
IIRC, wood chisel and 3 plates. Prussian blue to evaluate the thickness. Portland cement, a hairdryer and crucible. I made tongs with strap iron and a drill. hairdryer on the charcoal to melt the aluminum.
I started with sand casting aluminum cans. I realized I was woefully unprepared to deal with molten metal, if something went wrong. I wasn't willing to iterate at the bottom, and buying the next level of tech seemed like cheating. Still have the books though.
Surface plates are actually one of the easiest tools to bootstrap, using the three-surfaces method and lapping with fine grit. The only three surfaces that can all slide laterally against one another are three perfectly flat surfaces.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_plate#History
Here's a video (four parts) of a guy doing it. He uses modern tools in the video, but really that's just about saving time (and showing off). You can simply subsitute (a whole lot) more time spent lapping for the lathe part in his video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHmsQEAx16o
Yes, I mentioned this in my comment.
Also, <3 oxtool
I think by ordering your parts made you'd end up with a lathe much less capable than one commercially available, at a much higher (3x? 4x?) price, without having gained any machining or scraping skills.
True, I was mainly offering it as a suggestion for someone that doesn't want to mess with casting molten metal.
What are good resources to learn how to use these machines as a complete beginner?
That book is a great read AND the market for selling that scrap is excellent today.
Totally cool, just ordered. Thanks, Tomte.
Currently working on my shaper (Book 3)