Rare Myford Lathe rebuilds.

[Yorkie]

I have a chum who runs a light engineering firm - bascially, a 'one-man band' - and one of his lathes is from a WW2 munitions factory where women were employed extensively. As anyone who has used a lathe will know, if you take 0.001 off a workpiece, you reduce the diameter by twice that amout (0.002) and have to mentally allow for that. The difference between no fit, an interference fit, and a slack fit is the tiniest smidgen (a smidgen being the smallest unit of measurement in these parts!). The marking on that WW2 lathe are calibrated to show double the actual movement of the tool, thus, if the tool is advanced by 0.001, the dial reads 0.002. Nothing to do with the fact that the lathes were being used by women, but that the women had to be trained very quickly, and as with other skills they undertook from rivetting to welding, proved themselves very capable. It seems such a sensible way to calibrate the lathe that I can't think why - other than tradition or howls of de-skilling - it hasn't been adopted as standard on all lathes.

As to what kids are taught at school these days, I think what was metalwork and woodwork hase metamorphosed into 'Design and Technology' ('DT'). My only knowledge of this is of my eldest granddaughter, now aged 13, but her experience is probably not typical of the average school, in that she attends a selective fee-paying independent school in Richmond on Thames. (Boys & girls school). However, the stuff that they do seems quite advanced, and the workshops extremely well equipped with laser and hot wire cutters, vaccuum forming of plastics, small bandsaws, electronics equipment and so on. I've attached a pic of a 'desk tidy' that she gave me as a Christmas present when she was 12, which has a wooden core that she made, vaccuum formed heated plastic sheet applied over the core, and a Perspex tube cut at an angle. A lot of what she does is what I would have thought was physics - making PCBs, using soldering irons, op-amps, transistors etc. She took me round the school on an open day and I was eying up all the equipment and materials, when she said to me sternly, 'I know what you're thinking granddad, but keep your hands in your pockets'.

As I say, perhaps not typical, but I found it refreshing that they allow kids to use potentially dangerous equipment under supervision. No lathes though, but then I dare say even back in the era when I grew up in the 50s, it would have been the Secondary Modern schools rather than grammar schools that had fully equipped woodwork and metalwork workshops. My only experience is of a Secondary Modern school where we were contantly reminded by teachers that we were being trained to work with our hands - not our brain, which was the answer I was given when I asked why we didn't get any homework. I guess it was all done to lower our expectations and aspirations so that we wouldn't get ideas above our station. Good job we took no notice and pressed on with our lives regardless!