Both Mike and I went to a special kind of senior high school that we’ve got here in Austria (called HTL). You start at around age 15 and it lasts for five years (for most people, at least). We used to have a whole day of workshop class, and we started out with filing a block of metal… I guess we must have spent almost a month filing that stupid block, trying to make certain patterns and to get it perfectly even etc. etc., just to start over again, 1mm smaller. My whole body was hurting at night from that stupid exercise!
Well, but this experience also had it’s upside: I can now totally relate to Daniel-San when he has to do the wax-on, wax-off exercise!
Sounds about right. I was taught machining the old-fashioned way by granddad – like him, I ended up making several of my own shop tools.
I still have a set of perfectly matched 1-2-3 blocks that I made by hand, except for finish work on the surface grinder (he only let me take off .001″ to finish the surface and smooth it out – the rest I had to do with a file. And drilled all the holes on a press – but laid them out by hand. Still use them, too – it’s only been recently you could get more than two 1-2-3 blocks that matched (I have four, all within .0001″ of each other in all dimensions. And getting /all/ corners shaped to 90* with a file was no end of fun, let me tell you!)
OOOhhhh, yeah…. I remember that type of tool class with horror. Like you it was a steel block to be cut then hand filed to within 0.1mm, perfect squared, two grooves cut in, 4 holes drilled and chamfered… all to 0.1 tolerance, no tool markings allowed then number stamped (stampings to be even and spaced to .2mm) and polished to a mirror finish…. muck up a later stage? Start again… all hand tools…. I fluked it in one go… 6 weeks… one of my mates still had not completed the holes stage at 6 months and 9 blocks…… he was ready to kill at the mention of the block….
Funnily enough, the block was one of the readily identifiable things in the ashes of my father’s shed after the fires in ’97 ….