you can start the party now

[normalbill]

Good morning.

I really don't enjoy doing this, but feel obligated to at least make my presence known.

I am still normalbill and i am still normal. That could well be why they call me normalbill. 'Ya think?

In lurking around here a little, i see lots of familiar names. There is a lot of knowledge piled up in one little spot here, and i am glad to be a part of it in some way.

It isn't real often that i have much to say. I have found that i learn a lot more that way along with a corresponding reduction in noise pollution.

May i offer my sincere thanks to whomever started this forum? While there are other metalworking fora, it is good to have one specifically devoted to home made tools. thank you.

peace.
normalbill

[kbalch]

Hi normalbill,

Welcome to HomemadeTools.net!

As you continue to browse the site, I'm sure you'll encounter many interesting tools and potential projects.

I believe you'll find that the overall signal to noise ratio around here is quite favorable. So, with minimal noise pollution, the quality posts stand out that much better.

If you've built any interesting homemade tools, yourself, we'd all love to see them! Post 'em if you got 'em... :-)

Again, welcome!

Ken

[normalbill]

good afternoon.

wow. this is highly social for me, but i was notified that there was an answer to my first post. it seems to me that if someone [in this case, Ken] takes the time and makes the effort to respond, then i should as well. thank you for the reply, Ken.

in answer to what you wrote: i have already encountered some interesting tools and hope to encounter more with the passage of time. to those whose ideas i intend to use/rip off/blatantly plagiarize/etc.: thank you ever so much. it is so nice to hang around people smarter than one's self. kind of like playing chess. if you want to get *really* good, then play with someone that you cannot beat. promise: do that long enough and you will get good.

as to the signal to noise ratio: that is good. i have been around since the internet was 4 computers that all belonged to the government. [long time] i remember all too well sending some email and immediately calling the person long distance to see if they got it. consequently, i have seen lots of signal and **LOTS** of noise. in my paltry opinion, the internet is the finest tool ever made for communication. i literally have the world at my fingertips. sadly, i also have some other crap at them as well. like it or not, this is the way of the human. it ain't gonna change. one eventually learns to develop a filter of sorts to screen the trash out. or one flips clean out.

as to tools: yes. i have built some. however, the pictures, or most of them, are on 3.5" floppy discs. i am presently at a laptop computer that accepts compact discs. i suppose you can see how this might be a problem. however, i do need to take some pictures and i do own a desktop computer that accepts floppy discs, though it is not presently hooked up. given a little time i should be able to do some pictures.

so far i have yet to read the directions for posting pictures here. does one attach them directly or does one have to deal with someone like photo bucket? i am sure i will encounter such directions, but i have not as of yet. the reason i ask as opposed to searching is that i might be able to do a few from the hard drive of this computer if i knew how.

so. what began to be a simple 'thank you' has turned into some further demonstration of the verbosity of elderly people who need to do more work and less verbosity.

i wish you all a pleasant and productive afternoon.

peace.
normalbill

p. s. duh. i see up there there is a button to insert an image. stand back. i am gonna try this:

the pictures are probably way too big. i will work on that. this is a tapping arm i built 2 or 3 months ago, a la John Stevenson in old blighty and some other folks. thank you for your interest.

[kbalch]

wow. this is highly social for me, but i was notified that there was an answer to my first post. it seems to me that if someone [in this case, Ken] takes the time and makes the effort to respond, then i should as well. thank you for the reply, Ken.

You're very welcome. Glad to have you here.

in answer to what you wrote: i have already encountered some interesting tools and hope to encounter more with the passage of time. to those whose ideas i intend to use/rip off/blatantly plagiarize/etc.: thank you ever so much. it is so nice to hang around people smarter than one's self. kind of like playing chess. if you want to get *really* good, then play with someone that you cannot beat. promise: do that long enough and you will get good.

Couldn't agree more. I strongly believe that we all have something to learn from each other and that each individual, from the newest builder to the most experienced, has seen and learned something of value for himself and the rest of us, if only he can identify and communicate it. Blatantly plagiarize to your heart's content!

as to the signal to noise ratio: that is good. i have been around since the internet was 4 computers that all belonged to the government. [long time] i remember all too well sending some email and immediately calling the person long distance to see if they got it. consequently, i have seen lots of signal and **LOTS** of noise. in my paltry opinion, the internet is the finest tool ever made for communication. i literally have the world at my fingertips. sadly, i also have some other crap at them as well. like it or not, this is the way of the human. it ain't gonna change. one eventually learns to develop a filter of sorts to screen the trash out. or one flips clean out.

Agree 100%. I, too, have been around online for a long, long time - though not as long as some! I've been playing with computers since the '70s and have had an email address since the mid-'80s (on BitNet). I can also remember calling someone to see if they received my email. Though my internal filters are intact and probably still growing, I doubt you'll need yours around here.

as to tools: yes. i have built some. however, the pictures, or most of them, are on 3.5" floppy discs. i am presently at a laptop computer that accepts compact discs. i suppose you can see how this might be a problem.

You might want to get those images off the floppies before the magnetic media degrades. Now that I mention it, I need to do the same thing with some papers I wrote about 25 years ago!

p. s. duh. i see up there there is a button to insert an image. stand back. i am gonna try this:
the pictures are probably way too big.

Pictures are fine. Good job!!

this is a tapping arm i built 2 or 3 months ago, a la John Stevenson in old blighty and some other folks.

We'll get that added to our database (and your builder page) directly - thanks for sharing!

Regards,
Ken

[Jon]

Welcome to HomemadeTools.net normalbill, and thanks for posting the tapping arm! It's been added to our Drilling and Tapping category, and to your homemade tools page here: normalbill's Homemade Tools. Your receipt:

Tapping Arm by normalbill

tags: tapping

[normalbill]

good morning. i think.

mornings here are sort of an exercise in getting moving one little part at a time. i do wish i had listened better to them old guys who told me that i wasn't gonna be bulletproof forever. 'forever' is such a foreign concept when you are 19. it becomes considerably less foreign with the passage of time.

and then you have the morning pills, and the middle of the morning pills, and the noon pills, and the middle of the afternoon pills, and the evening pills, and the just before you go to bed pills. it gets to where it is very complicated. i do believe i need a secretary.

being the fng here and not knowing the protocol, i am responding to your post, Ken, in this manner. should i be doing it otherwise, please let me know and i will forthwith change my ways, assuming i can remember in the face of all them pills. thank you.


you wrote: ' Couldn't agree more. I strongly believe that we all have something to learn from each other and that each individual, from the newest builder to the most experienced, has seen and learned something of value for himself and the rest of us, if only he can identify and communicate it. Blatantly plagiarize to your heart's content!'


i believe without question that places like this forum are the future of both that identification and communication, as long as it can be kept [mostly] on topic and 'personality', for want of a better word, can be sublimated for the common good. when you come down to it, metal is metal and tools are tools, regardless of where they are or come from. this whole thing that we are about comes down to the interface of a tool and a workpiece. it really doesn't matter if the machine the tool is attached to came from China or Cincinnati, Ohio, or Timbuktu.

i have seen a lot of bickering in some places because of the origins of tools. i have also seen what i would call prejudice against 'home shop' guys, and disagreements between them and 'full time' guys. in my mind this is pointless and highly counterproductive. we are all in this together and we are all working [or playing as the case may be] toward the same thing[s]. we all want to make parts that are functional, be they for a little air engine or the space station. [i kind of like to make mine pretty too but first it has to work as intended.]

the paragraph i quoted above gives me hope that i have found a place where those petty differences are transcended. certainly we all come to this with different skill levels and ambitions. a 'new guy' will have many questions that seem elementary to some of us, but sometimes we tend to forget that once we were that new guy too. what we do is a dying art. surely there is CNC and 3d printing and probably a lot more stuff that i don't know about. to those who would point that out i ask, 'what are you gonna do when the power goes out?' can you make your own power?

as an example i will present my youngest son. he has a CNC mill built on what started out as an x2 mill i believe. little toy mill. it don't do no hogging. so this kid figured out the parts and made them on my machines and has a functioning CNC machine. his next step was to make up some 'kits' of the parts to convert one of these mills. he programmed the parts and pushed a button and the mill made them. so i got to looking at this and figured out that i could make 3 parts manually on my toolmaster mill while he set up and ran one part on his. obviously, this was not a complicated part. 2 tool changes. toolmaster has x axis power feed only. i know several people who own machine shops. they all tell me that the so called 'machinists' they see are young guys who know how to push that button. they all say that there are apparently no young manual machinists. this youngest boy of mine took a 2 year vocational machinist's program that he says dealt mostly with CNC stuff. [i suppose i should confess getting him started 15 or so years ago on my machines.] i would have to say that he is a pretty good machinist, though he has a problem with patience. he has told me many times that he learned a lot more from me than from the school he went to. i am no 'super machinist' by any stretch of the imagination.

the thing i am trying to get at here is that we are keeping what could very well be a dying art alive and that makes that 'identification and communication' all the more important. there will come a time when the manual machinist is essential for survival. look around yourself. now try to imagine that same image with no lights or power. how many people do you know who could raise enough food for just one person to survive on, much less 4? of those people, how many have either the skills or equipment to repair the equipment needed for even that much farming?

it seems to me that i have been thanking you folks a lot in the past couple of days, but thank you again. this has caused me to do a lot of thinking about 'identification and communicating', and for that i am seriously grateful. i have kind of grabbed a subject here that is a lot bigger than it first appeared to be and there is much more to be said about it, though there is probably a better place for it than the introduction thread.

if there is a more appropriate place, please tell me because i would very much like to continue this discussion.

thank you.

peace.
normalbill

[kbalch]

Good morning. Yep, I just checked: it's still morning here...

good morning. i think.

mornings here are sort of an exercise in getting moving one little part at a time. i do wish i had listened better to them old guys who told me that i wasn't gonna be bulletproof forever. 'forever' is such a foreign concept when you are 19. it becomes considerably less foreign with the passage of time.

True words. Though I don't expect that 20 will ever pay much attention to 40; the gulf of an entire lifetime's experience will always separate them. That said, it all does seem to compress as time passes, doesn't it?

i believe without question that places like this forum are the future of both that identification and communication, as long as it can be kept [mostly] on topic and 'personality', for want of a better word, can be sublimated for the common good. when you come down to it, metal is metal and tools are tools, regardless of where they are or come from. this whole thing that we are about comes down to the interface of a tool and a workpiece. it really doesn't matter if the machine the tool is attached to came from China or Cincinnati, Ohio, or Timbuktu.

i have seen a lot of bickering in some places because of the origins of tools. i have also seen what i would call prejudice against 'home shop' guys, and disagreements between them and 'full time' guys. in my mind this is pointless and highly counterproductive. we are all in this together and we are all working [or playing as the case may be] toward the same thing[s]. we all want to make parts that are functional, be they for a little air engine or the space station. [i kind of like to make mine pretty too but first it has to work as intended.

Agree 100%!!

the thing i am trying to get at here is that we are keeping what could very well be a dying art alive and that makes that 'identification and communication' all the more important. there will come a time when the manual machinist is essential for survival. look around yourself. now try to imagine that same image with no lights or power. how many people do you know who could raise enough food for just one person to survive on, much less 4? of those people, how many have either the skills or equipment to repair the equipment needed for even that much farming?

Definitely food for thought. Manual skills are dying everywhere we look these days and I'm not sure it's possible to stem that tide. Speaking only for myself, though, it's heartening to believe that a significant number of true craftsman yet remain. Guys who are not just capable of doing it by hand, whatever 'it' may be, but prefer it that way.

A hand-made product will always be superior to the corresponding machine-produced version. Maybe not from the perspective of parts accuracy to five decimal places, but with respect to an appreciation of the decades of practice and skill that went into a piece, there's no substitute. That's why some of us (guilty as charged) still love handmade, mechanical watches in a day and age where everyone's got the time on their cellphone. It's about far more than simply knowing the time of day.

being the fng here and not knowing the protocol, i am responding to your post, Ken, in this manner. should i be doing it otherwise, please let me know and i will forthwith change my ways, assuming i can remember in the face of all them pills. thank you.

i have kind of grabbed a subject here that is a lot bigger than it first appeared to be and there is much more to be said about it, though there is probably a better place for it than the introduction thread.

if there is a more appropriate place, please tell me because i would very much like to continue this discussion.

Given that we're digressing a bit from the 'Intro' theme, perhaps the Off-Topic forum would be a good place to continue. Just start a thread there and I'll be happy to philosophize at greater length. Maybe we'll even attract a few others to join the conversation.

Ken

[Toolmaker51]

I've just stumbled on the posts twixt our 'normalbill' and lamentedly distant Ken B. Several points are made, that identify HMT's position and cleanliness; the same attractions I found. When I say stumbled that is not entirely accurate; peering around corners is intentional. Over window sills its peeping, and a different story. There is enjoyment in discovery, especially when like-minded characters appear.
I utilize floppy 3.5's still. I try to keep live ones stored, isolated from EMF; not with critical information. USB external drives & discs are cheap and plentiful enough on most auction sites. Normal thumbdrives are fine for regular storage, sometimes too much capacity for logical filing precedence.