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There is an easy rationale for sailors on the high sea to learn celestial navigation: if for any reason your electrical systems fail - batteries, engine, a short - you can still rely on your sails to get any place, as long as you know where you are and where to go.

Anything that needs annealing - cast iron, steel, weldments - i throw into my woodstove end of day. The temperature will then be around 700 degrees Celsius. In the morning I take them out. Works for me.

Hi Mat, another of our members has done the replacements; what I know is that the Emco's run very well again! In my own workshop I have different machines to take care about: GOTHA Tool and Cutter grinder from about 1937 under restauration, TAIG lathe, SOLID Pillar Drill, Myford Super Seven...

Our workshop is every weekday in use by about 10 members of our 100 member group. A rough guess is that the Emco's are used each about 10 hours per week during 40 active weeks per annum. That would make in ten years time 10x40x10 = 4.000 hours.

In the workshop of our horological society we have besides four Schaublin 102 lathes also two EMCO Compact 8 lathes. In our experience the headstock bearings need replacement about every ten years.

A method I heard about but never used myself is to get yourself a holed metal strip as used in packaging. The distance between the holes is remarkably precise. Get yourself a lenght that includes the number you want, say in your case 39 holes or 78 holes. Now calculate the outer diameter of a...

Meat-eaters don't taste as good as herbivores like deer and cattle, but you often can mask their heavy taste by marinating strong and long.

As I have not really much professional experience in working to close tolerances my strategy is to cut the last about five steps to final dimension in equal fine cuts that give good surface finish. On my Schaublin 102VM lathe that is 0,02 mm or slightly less then 0,001 ". Creeping in these small...

About knowing it all.... at age 30 I really knew and understood everything. Since then it only got worse till nowadays I doubt the most basic former truths.

My two cents are if it is fit for purpose don't worry and don't waste time on repairing a non-functional glitch.

And when you are doing your utmost to wring impossible results out of a machine that needs a lot of compensation focus and concentration is important. My grandmother told me once that when her father, my great-grandfather, did an especially precise job on his threadle-lathe she had to operate...

Something to consider with the less stable hobby-type machines is yes, it is useful to start setting x to y to z right and then tramming the head, but this is something you do under no-load conditions. You may want to simulate the load once in a while by putting serious weight on the machine and...

What you can get in practice depends very much on what is available around you. But please remember the dual lineage of mills. Probably the oldest machinetool mankind knows is the bowdriven drill. At some point in time somebody flipped this vertical contraption to the horizontal and got himself...

Well the Chinese are able to send a machine to the moon, shovel some dirt there and get it back, so as long as you know where to look they are clearly capable to make anything at a quality level that at least matches ours. Still I'm happy with my old world machine tools that are only a few years...

At age 10 (I'm a first ripple baby boomer) I did my first lathework on the Myford Super Seven at the home workshop of one of my fathers friends from the machine factory. About two years ago I got a similar one from the estate of a deceased friend. This 60 something year old machine is an...

My guess is that most home workshop practitioners stick to the manufacturing technology of the 1950's and the 1960's. Basically before advanced cutting tool materials and before Numerical Control. At least I do. My most important workshop manual is the one I got in trade school 65 years ago. It...

Best way forward is start doing things. After a whole career talking about machining it was really an eye opener to actually do machining myself. It took me some time to reduce my ratio 'work done - to work done successfully' from about 3 to about 1,2 right now. Don't be afraid of falling down a...

On one of our big rivers close to Rotterdam sits an outfit that puts engines in ships. They have a jetty going into the river. On my question how they keep the jetty stable in the stream they told me they use a large lathe from eons earlier as anchor.

In Zürich I seem to remember public transport buses ran with FES, and given the hilly town this was very effective.

The TAIG, similar to Sherline, would fit the bill. Nice and precise. If you order with the ER16 spindlenose and a set of high precision ER 16 collets you can do small precision parts. I would recommend a DC motor with speedcontrol up to 6.000 rpm. with the standard beltdrive this will give you...