The dying breed

[lingeringstin...]

The old guys in stained white coats who lurk in ancient machine shops knee deep in swarf and train oil, with lathes from the 1930‘s, are dying out. This is a tragedy. Seems like the younger guys in nice clean machine shops with newfangled machines with digital readouts can’t even understand what you’re trying to do.

Luckily there’s one old geezer around here with an old school machine shop. He used to race bikes on the Isle of Man or something back in the black and white days and one of his greatly modified old race engines is sitting like a trophy on his bench now since he’s too old for racing. He’s like the last of his kind. Looks like the mad scientist from Back To The Future, only older, and he's a master of Old School machine shop shit.

It’s always cash in hand, no receipt, no guarantees, but at least he’s willing to entertain my shenanigans when I come in asking if he can make something or modify something for my engine experiments. Most people would probably just refuse such nonsense and bar me from the premises.

A while back I took him a set of barrels that I needed shortened by about 15mm and his concern was that if we lopped that much off the top of the barrels it would lose the lip on the cylinder sleeves so they might shift out or something.

I said we won’t know until we try, so I left him the barrels and a couple of days later I came back to get them and he was still a bit iffy about it. He'd done a wonderful job at what I wanted but we both knew it was probably a daft idea that would lead to some form of horrendous failure.

There was a ten ton press in the shop so I said let’s whack the barrels on the press and give it some heave-ho just to see what happens. He said what if it breaks the barrels or the sleeves pop out or something? I said I’d still pay him, so we stuck the barrels on the press and put many tons onto the sleeves and they just stayed put in the ally fins, so I said I was happy with that and figured they would be fine for what I wanted. He shook his head and mumbled something about me being a bloody annoyance and I went away to build an engine, and it was all good.

I bet if I would have gone to the posh new machine shop down the road they would have probably just said “NO”.

[Pete.]

That sort of work couldn't pay for those nice shiny machines, nor the wages of the operator and you wouldn't want to cover the hourly rate for them to try.

It's nice that you have the old guy nearby because it gives you a way to achieve something you're unable to do yourself but don't think that there's none of the younger generation that are capable. There might be fewer, but they are certainly out there.
____________________
a.k.a 'Geri'

132.9mph off and walked away. Gear is good, gear is good, gear is very very good

[Fat Angry Scotsman]

Comparing apples and oranges a little bit. Why not buy yourself a lathe and learn to use it? Could be rewarding as you'd be modifying and fabricating your own parts yourself.

If you have the space, you can get a very reasonable manual lathe for not a lot. We got this lathe in 2018 for £4,985.00 + VAT and their 830VS turret mill for £4,740.00 + VAT (on top of that we paid another £835.00 for the DRO).

https://www.chestermachinetools.com/product/chieftain-chester-lathe/
____________________
PRESENT: 2018 BMW S1000XR SE Sport.
PAST: 2009 Kawasaki ER-6F. 2021 Zontes ZT-125U.