Has a friend or relative been responsible for your beginnings in this hobby?

Terrywerm

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People sometimes ask me how I got started in such an obscure and unusual hobby. I blame my grandfather!

I suspect that many of us had a relative or friend that created the spark which led to this internal desire to use machines to make things from metal. For some of us it has also led to a love of old, oily machinery that carries with it an odor that is objectionable to many (just ask my wife), but loved by us. For me it was my maternal grandfather, who worked as a machinist for much of his life, though I do not know exactly what year he began in that trade. Prior to that he was a chauffeur, gas station attendant, and truck driver (now I know where I got that, too) before being drafted into the military during WW2. For a short time after his return from the army he tried farming with his brother, but eventually went on to become a machinist for the Char-Lynn Corporation. Layoffs occurred from time to time in that trade, and due to those layoffs, he eventually worked for Telelect, Thermo King, and Continental Machines, makers of DoAll saws. I remember as a youngster, going with my grandmother for tours of Telelect and Continental Machines when they had various open house events for family members. It was during one of those visits that I was overcome with the burning desire to learn more about these fantastic machines that magically made usable parts out of odd chunks of iron and steel. I was hooked!

In high school I had the opportunity to take a number of machine shop and drafting classes and loved every minute of them. After graduation I gained employment in a local job shop and quickly became bored with drilling the same hole in the same part, several hundred times per day for weeks on end. They were some sort of valve body for army tanks, that's all I remember about them. My desire to make a living this way soon disappeared and I opted to sate my wanderlust by becoming a truck driver. Doing so never caused me to lose my interest in working metal, however.

My first machine was a drill press, but beyond that I purchased a 10" Logan lathe. I eventually found out that it was originally purchased new by none other than the Char-Lynn Corporation in 1941. This made it entirely possible that my grandfather had operated my lathe long before I was born. I can imagine him performing operations with it, never in his wildest dreams thinking that his grandson would come to own that lathe some day. Thinking about that for me is AWESOME, and completes another connection in my mind between the two of us.

I eventually purchased two midsized milling machines, one vertical and one horizontal. Naturally I've also purchased quite a bit of tooling since getting into this hobby, a seemingly never ending habit that causes my wife to roll her eyes and smile at the same time. Yes, she's an enabler!

In line with my love for old machinery, I have started down what I suspect may become a slippery slope by purchasing a 1937 Ninth edition of Machinery's Handbook in very good condition. That year is special to me, as it is the year that both of my parents were born. I do not plan to start a collection of all of them, but I do already have a 29th edition that I use as my 'working' copy. It spends its time sitting by the computer, a handy reference when needed. I also have the revised first edition of the Machinery's Handbook Pocket Companion which I keep in my shop and use it extensively. I hope to eventually expand my collection by a few select editions from special-to-me years, but if I ever purchase another brand new one it will be the large print version. I don't need it yet, but it's need is coming and there is no escaping it as time marches on.

So there you have it, my beginnings in this wonderful hobby. How about you? What's your story?
 
Very interesting Terry. My grandfather was also my inspiration, but really not about machining.

When I was very young I was fortunate to be able to spend the summer months at their cottage on Georgian Bay. Originally it was rather secluded and not many folks around but the locals. We didn't have any electricity, running water etc. He had two rental cabins, and each one had a wooden row boat and so did my grandmother have a lovely row boat.

My grandfather was very clever. He cut wood for the fireplace / cookstoves, repaired the boats, maintained the cabins, had to do road work since the his road would get washed out at times by high water. He was a wiry man without an ounce of fat on his body and not all that tall, yet he managed to lift boats into his boat house, move huge stones and fell large trees. There were no power tools, but he had a large selection of hand tools. He had all manner of hand cutting tools and he knew how to keep them all sharp.

Nothing got thrown out, he attempted to repair anything that broke and he would cleverly make functional things that they needed around the cottage. There was always something to work on and we were busy all day, and every day seemed to bring a new challenge. He taught me about levers for mechanical advantage and the use of block and tackle. After a big storm all sorts of stuff would wash up on our shore, usually broken docks. He would take the boat and haul the old dock parts back and we would take them all apart saving everything we could. I spent hours straightening nails.

I spent many a summer with him learning all sorts of fixing skills. My Dad was in the Navy and he would be away for extended periods, so Mom was the official keeper of the household. We didn't have a lot of money, and we moved about every two years so it was up to me to apply my learned skills to fix stuff and make things that Mom needed for our rental housing.

As I continued to grow up I became quite good a doing mechanical stuff and also electronics. I had taught my self to design with vacuum tubes, and then the early semiconductors. Soon it became time to choose University. It was a coin toss between mechanical engineering and electrical. Electrical won.

However after graduation, I still had the mechanical desire, and started my own "hobby side business", restoring old small gasoline engines. I also got interested in making R/C boats and wanted to make all the controls and servos myself. I soon decided that I needed a lathe. Back then there was no internet, my "world" was the local hobby shop and the classified. I knew the owner of the hobby shop and he told me about the Unimat DB200 with mill setup and could get it for me at his cost. I was hooked. The Unimat taught me about patience as well since machining was very slow at times.

But I needed something larger for doing repairs on the small engines, and with a stroke of luck found an Atlas 618 in the newspaper.

The small engine worked ended when I had to move across the country, but I still maintained the equipment to make stuff and do repairs. As I got close to retirement I decided that a nice clean hobby would be repairing old mechanical clocks, and have been doing that for the past 10 years. My go to lathe is still my beloved Atlas 618. I have made all sorts of accessories for it. For a mill I tricked out an awesome JET bench top drill press with an X-Y table, Z feed and Z dro.

So after a very rewarding career as an electrical design engineer for myriad consumer products and DIY tools, my mechanical hobby has been a pleasant change from the electronic side of things...besides the components are getting too small for me to have fun working with. Clock parts are just the right size for me.

David
 
My experience is a bit different from Terry's. I never took any machining classes in high school, and never saw a machine tool until my freshman year of college. I was attending a state college (later to become part of the University of Wisconsin system) pursuing an Electrical Engineering degree. It just so happened there was a machine shop for training future industrial arts teachers in one of the buildings I had classes in. One day when I was early for class I stopped in to see what was happening. The first machine I saw working was a 20" shaper. I didn't know it at the time but I was hooked.

After school I went into business for myself for several years. Not a machine shop as you might expect, but rather more in line with my first passion automobiles. I purchased a Standard gas station/repair shop, and later against all logic purchased a second one. That went fine for several years, but like most things in time I grew tired of the long days. I sold the places and took a more regular job as a service manage of a local car dealership. That grew tiring even more quickly than the long cold winter days in my own repair shop.

Although I wouldn't admit it I really thought I would like working in a machine shop. Again as luck would have it I was alerted to an opening in the engineering department of a large manufacturer in the area. I wasn't sure I wanted to work there, but on the advice of family I decided to give it a try. I was assigned to an experimental machine design shop. This wasn't the typical design shop in that just on the other side of the glass was a well equipped machine shop. I don't know if anyone saw me when I first entered the shop, but I'm sure my mouth was wide open, I was drooling all over myself, and it was all I could do to keep from wetting my pants. I must have made quite an impression because a couple of the machinist took me under their wing and attempted to teach me the craft. It was a great learning experience and lasted over 10 years. Unfortunately time moves on. In my case that meant transferring to another part of the engineering organization, and away from the shop. I did stop into the shop as often as I could, but much of my time was spent on the road.

I spent another 11 years with the company with one of my responsibilities being to supervise a machine shop in a different location. This shop was set up for 5 years as a temporary location to rebuild production machinery. When the project was finished some machinists retired, while others returned to their original jobs. The equipment was declared surplus and was to be sold to the production facilities in the system, or scrapped. Much of it sold, but several pieces had no takers. Rather than see it go to scrap, myself and another employee offered to buy it. The offer was accepted and the rest is history. I took an early retirement offer in 2006 and never looked back.
 
When I was 11 years old my dad took me to his friends shop. He was going to machine a small block chevy water pump for the NASCAR modified my dad ran. Every other impeller vane had to be shaved off to slow down the coolant flow. Gives better cooling and increases horsepower available to the flywheel. The friend was building an Indy car and also had a large lathe he was running. He showed me some brass cannons he was making on the lathe and mill. I was really interested. After that we went to a shop in New Jersey with a crankshaft, pistons, pins, con rods, damper and flywheel to get them balanced. Running 8500 rpm makes balancing super critical. I watched them do the balancing and they used a mill and drills to remove weight. I knew after that day that I wanted to learn machine work and at least get a hobby lathe and mill. It took many years, but I have both now and wish I'd gotten them sooner.

Roy
 
Dad was a mechanic and my uncle who I followed like a puppy dog was a sort of carpenter. I grew up in the country building tree forts and summers spent on the river in an aluminum boat with a 3 hp Firestone (yes Firestone) outboard. When I was 14 dad taught me to use the arc welder which led to turning Volkswagens into bush buggies. High school opened the world of machine shop, drafting and electronics. Went into university to get an engineering degree not having a clue what an engineer actually did, never knew one.
Through an uncle I landed a summer job in the steel mills, spent 5 hot dirty summers there while I went through school. Spent most of my time there as a millwright helper. One summer in the coke ovens an old English machinist took me under his wing and had me pouring babbit bearings and rebuilding duplex steam pumps. Learned a LOT from him.
Came time to graduate and knew I'd never survive in an office. My then wife and I decided we had gypsy blood so got an oilfield job and headed west. I did field work, incredible money at the time but was away all the time so we decided to tough it out for 3 years to get my profit sharing bonus, that job ended up lasting 22 years. Pretty much all in the field where most engineers lasted 3. Saw a lot of incredible country and a lot of airports.
Set up a bit of a cabinet shop in a shed that morphed into a friends bigger space. Ended up building a house with my own shop.
We hated the prairies and ended up spending any free time at the coast on various boats. We decided we needed a big one so I started building a 45 foot steel trawler. During that endeavour I was getting parts made a machine shop we used at work. Got to know Terry the owner well, he was also a neighbour. He wanted to do the jobs for free as a friend which was nice but slow as paying work had to take precedence. So in a weak moment I bought a new 14x40 Taiwanese lathe. The bug bit me hard, remembered some from my misspent high school classes and Asked Terry a lot of questions, that was pre internet.
Lost Ann at that point to cancer and lost interest in finishing the boat. The kids were young then, tried having a nanny for a couple of years but the kids hated me being away. One night while I was 200 miles off the coast of Newfoundland I made my daily call to the kids and found out the house keeper was quoting. Decided I'd had enough of that so I took an office position, which meant another move, the 5th in 20 years. The next place had a bigger shop though. With evenings and weekends to play I bought a Bridgeport clone and retired the milling attachment on the lathe. Office politics and I didn't agree, and whining crews didn't like my solution to their problems, find another job.
Decided it was time for a change, took me a year to p!ss my boss's boss off enough to fire me. My boss couldn't fire me I had to go one up to get a severance package at the ripe age of 45.
Moved back home at that point and finally got off the prairies.
Built a two story shop here, finally separated the machine shop and the cabinet shop. Once the floor was poured I got my bigger lathe I thought I needed. A 17x 80 Summit, imported from Poland. Started getting some work, and more tools. Soon a Logan shaper, then the Taiwanese lathe was replaced with a Colchester that was eventually replaced with a Hardinge. Then the little shaper was replaced with an 18 inch Peerless and the space where the small shaper was got used by a Boyar Schultz surface grinder, then a radial arm drill.
Seem to spend an equal amount to time in the cabinet shop and the machine shop now. Guess I could make a living at this but its much more fun only taking work if it interests me or gets someone I know out of a bind.

Greg
 
My inspiration came from the price of a seal driver. That was before HF times. I worked on anything that moved as a hobby. Self taught. I grew up back when you either fixed something or through it out and did without.
 
I was born with a mic in one hand and a pair of calipers in the other.:big grin:

I pretty much learned the trade from my dad. Started running dad's 9" South Bend Lathe when I was 10 years old. Still have that lathe, too.
Decided after high school to try college to be an engineer. Still playing an engineer/designer in the profession I'm in today. Still running machines every chance I get.

Ken
 
my grandfather (my dad's dad) started the quest for me.
he was not a machinist.
he was a tinkerer in many the of wood arts(repair, restoration and furniture construction) and electrical repairs of various machines.
he had modest tools and was able to do many things by resorting to out of the box thinking.
a lot of those skills were undoubtedly due to necessity.
a harsh experience in the great depression honed sharp intellect and imagination in regards to practicality and resourcefulness.
it seemed that he could make repairs or make really useful things, from mere junk.
that fact has permeated my view of resources available to me.
i still think of him when i'm in the shop, hoping that i have made him proud
i lost him when i was 7 years old and i have missed him everyday since
 
Not specifically. My grandfather owned a small machine shop but it must have just been work as he rarely talked about what he was working on, and seemed to have no interest in machining as a hobby.

My dad is a tinkerer and likes building stuff. He got me into models as a child and involved me in projects around the house since I was a small child. He also did odd jobs for people from time to time and started to take me along to help when I was a teenager. I assume I get my curiosity about learning how things work and learning how to do things myself from him even if our specific interests are different.

From building models I became interested in doing more than just assembling parts from a kit. I began to make my own decals and scratch build parts. Later I learned to resin cast parts and have tried dabbling with photo etch although that last is still very much in the learning stages.
The lathe and mill are just the next step in modelling, opening up new capabilities. It was kind of a fun twist a few years ago when I taught my dad how to resin cast some parts he made for his models.

I learned a lot about woodworking and home repairs from my dad, but my knowledge of metal working and automotive repair came from shop classes in highschool (when they still offered such things) and beyond that have largely been self taught.
 
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