What did you do today?

[Cenedd]

1902 - 1918? Doesn't that predate the change in definition of the inch?! You want to be careful, you could be out by 18 millionths of an inch over the whole scale!

[lugnut]

Just got off the phone with Starrett Tech Support: the No. 323, No. 13 Graduation, 9" Flexible Rule was manufactured between 1902 — 1918! It seems that a customer had gone to the trouble of creating a short list & long list of item numbers, descriptions and what catalogs they were in (the long list is all items!). Here are the photos after de-rusting:







Stained where the rust was worse, but it cleaned up reasonably well; I didn't want to get too aggressive and need to re-ink the graduations. I may put this one in the walnut Gerstner chest with my Father's tools.

ChazC. your post sparked a memory with me, and looking in my selection of small rules, there is a Starrett 9 inch rule 320 NO. 10 Grad with 32 on one end and 64th. on the other end. if you collect this sort of things, PM me your mailing address and I will send it to you.

[mattthemuppet]

mattthemuppet What's the lathe? Looks sort of pared back, almost skeletal. I'm guessing that's more the angle and there's a load of back gearing hiding behind.

definitely the angle

[RB211]

Cleared out my office so they can install the "life proof" hard vinyl fake wood flooring. Sooooo much nicer than carpet!

[Cenedd]

definitely the angle

Looks good. I'm just used to a lathe headstock being a larger, ugly box I guess.

Been turning down some 300mm lengths of 10mm EN24 (equiv 4340) to 8.4mm -ish to make tommy bars for my neighbour. He needed two of them 300mm long....or so I thought! Actually he needed four of them, 150mm long....which might have involved less swearing! Still, I've been getting more familiar with a follow rest and luckily the dimensions aren't that critical as I've got about 0.2mm (diameter) of taper over 300mm.

[Bented]

Copper electrical fittings for liquid cooled conductor terminations.

I truly dislike working with 110 alloy copper.

[ChazzC]

Looks good. I'm just used to a lathe headstock being a larger, ugly box I guess.

Been turning down some 300mm lengths of 10mm EN24 (equiv 4340) to 8.4mm -ish to make tommy bars for my neighbour. He needed two of them 300mm long....or so I thought! Actually he needed four of them, 150mm long....which might have involved less swearing! Still, I've been getting more familiar with a follow rest and luckily the dimensions aren't that critical as I've got about 0.2mm (diameter) of taper over 300mm.

Don’t be silly, you made them that way on purpose: the taper will make them easier to insert in the holes.

[wierdscience]

[ATTACH=JSON]
I truly dislike working with 110 alloy copper.

+1 nasty, gooey, demonic sh*t.

[ChazzC]

1902 - 1918? Doesn't that predate the change in definition of the inch?! You want to be careful, you could be out by 18 millionths of an inch over the whole scale!

That puts me in mind of an incident from long (long) ago. For background, I attended a public high school that focused on science & technology (Baltimore Polytechnic Institute), who's motto was Theory & Practice: we studied Chemistry, Physics (including Electricity/Electronics, Mathematics (including Calculus), Thermodynamics (i.e., "Steam") and Statics alongside English, History Social Studies and Foreign Language (French in my case) in one portion of the facility and put these studies to use in Mech Lab, Pattern Making (and other wood working), Machine Shop, Sheet Metal Shop, Forge, Foundry, Drafting (including descriptive geometry) and Surveying. The idea was that one would be better prepared for both a technical degree and career by knowing the nuts & bolts of how things are done in addition to the theories behind them.

For some unknown reason, I was only given the opportunity of working with wood (joinery & pattern making, all manual operations), which may explain my interest in machine shop practice in college and later in life. Thus I was not given the opportunity to transform my anvil pattern into an Aluminum anvil (earlier foundry work used brass, but they changed over to Aluminum before I enrolled due to cost): I have seen beautiful presentation pieces with the pattern and resulting brass anvil mounted on a walnut base, but this was not to be for me.

However, (as usual) I digress. To keep things "real," we used shrink rules for all of the layout work on the patterns that we made so that when (if?) the patterns were placed into use the finished object would be true to the design dimensions. Now Aluminum and Brass both have the same shrinkage allowance (3/16 in./ft.), so there was no issue that some of the older Brass rules were still in the shop. Unfortunately, some cast iron rules (1/8 in./ft.) and plain everyday rules had also found their way into the shop, and since the instructor checked the finished project using templates, if you didn't use either a Brass or Aluminum shrink rule, you lost points (yes, we were graded on what we did – I can still read the "100" on the bottom of my anvil 😊). And there were a few unfortunates every year that not only didn't check that they were using a shrink rule when laying out their work, they used different rules on different days and had to start over.

Being a contentious worker, I will keep my antique rules (thanks to lugnut, I will soon have two) and similar pre-1912 (when Johansson decided upon 25.4mm for his 1 inch block thickness, 0.0000508mm smaller that the then U.S. standard & 0.000023mm larger than the U.K. standard) length/thickness gauging devices separate from my other instruments, although in reality since one can only discern a distance of approximately 1/2 of the smallest division on a rule it probably won't matter in my work.

[eKretz]

Ground up a couple radius-ended parting tools for a friend's shop on the Monoset.

[The Metal Butcher]

Lots. Worked, put a bearing in my forklift that would normally require disassembly, heard the Daewoo motor run for the first time (bearings sound terrible), did some more hacksaw maintenance to be ready to cut again, and met up with some friends for some beer and engineering. Busy day.

[PStechPaul]

I had to look up the meaning of a "shrink rule". I grew up in Baltimore City and could have gone to Poly in 1963, but we moved to Towson in Baltimore County.

https://www.mechical.com/2022/01/shrink-rule.html

Actually that looks like some sort of slide rule. Here is a perhaps better article and image:

https://www.mecholic.com/2017/01/what-is-shrink-rule-pattern-makers-scale.html

[Cenedd]

ChazC You might not be able to pound metal on it but it's beautiful as an ornament. Very nice piece.

eKretz Good job you're not local or I'd be after some if you're making them that nicely!

PStechPaul Small world and all that. My wife went to Towson university for four months on an exchange arrangement. Weirdly the thing that sticks in my mind was that Baltimore is closed on a Monday! (When we tried to go out for a meal)

[eKretz]

eKretz Good job you're not local or I'd be after some if you're making them that nicely!

The Monoset makes it look easy, and actually does make it easy, heh. Great machines.

[ChazzC]

@PStechPaul
Nice to meet you, Paul!

A few years before me – I started my freshman year in 1966, last year the "old" school was in use (now belongs to the Board of Ed, who was always feuding with Poly since Poly had entry requirements). We had quite a few county residents as students, but they had to pay tuition (I think around $600 a year, but then there was the travel to consider and $600 in the '60's was a lot of money).

I found the second link also when I was searching to make sure I had the terminology correct.


Stay safe, Charlie