On Wednesday, September 23, 2020 at 11:46:30 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:25:54 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell wrote:
>
> >On Tuesday, September 22, 2020 at 10:46:30 PM UTC-4,John Larkin wrote:
> >> On Tue, 22 Sep 2020 15:25:21 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell wrote:
> >>
> >> >On Tuesday, September 22, 2020 at 3:31:23 PM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> On Tue, 22 Sep 2020 09:59:34 -0700 (PDT), Michael Terrell wrote:
> >> >>
> >> >> >On Tuesday, September 22, 2020 at 11:07:23 AM UTC-4, John Larkin wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> >> I have a career-long record of successfully burgling stockrooms.
> >> >> >
> >> >> >Me, too. The first time was in the Army. They wouldn't give me what I needed to keep a TV station on the air. In a three week period, I used 1400 line items, at a total of a little over 2100 parts. The station was still in good shape almost two years later when it was decommissioned and dismantled. I've talked to people who were there after I left for home.
> >> >> >
> >> >> >I have a room full of discretes. There were a lot of ROHS COG SMD capacitors in the last purchase. Most are under 1000pF. A real boon for people who play with RF. I have a local electroncs store that sells components to the public that I can trade parts with on a reel by reel basis. I also have dozens of 'Taiyo Yuden SMD/SMT Capacitor Kits' in small footprints.
> >> >> I never worked for a company so big that I couldn't walk to the
> >> >> stockroom and production floor and machine shop. I've known engineers
> >> >> who worked in a "office building" where there they didn't even have a
> >> >> lab. And I know outfits that send everything, even prototypes, out to
> >> >> a contract manufacturer.
> >> >>
> >> >> I could tell a funny story.
> >> >
> >> >Tell it.
> >> >
> >> Well, sorta funny. I was chief engineer of a big company. I was 25 and
> >> looked 15. I went into the machine shop and asked a guy to drill a
> >> hole in a piece of aluminum for me. He said "Who do you think you
> >> are?" and I said "I'm Larkin." He was shocked. All the big burly
> >> machinists surrounded me and pointed and said "That's Larkin!"
> >>
> >> He drilled it for me. I wound up dirt bike riding with a bunch of
> >> them. They made their own pistons.
> >> >I don't have a full machine shop, but I do have some nice tools for building prototypes. I have a Cameron precision drill press, a floor model drill press and a small milling machine. My latest addition was a small lathe. They are in my 1200 Sq foot detached
> >> >garage.
> >> We have a nice little shop downstairs. My manufacturing manager is a
> >> superb machinist and mechanical designer too. That's really handy to
> >> have around.
> >
> >I had only worked at Microdyne for a couple weeks when some guy walked up and starts asking me a bunch of questions. He didn't introduce himself, and some of the questions were things that no one outside of the company should be asking. I looked up from the bench and said, "Excuse me, but I have work to do." He came back five minutes later with my boss who was furious!. The man was the head of production, but he had not been introduced to me. He told my boss that I had done the right thing by not just sit there talking to a stranger.
> >
> >I learned to run a lathe in high school, and a friend owned a nice machine shop in Ohio. He manufactured replacement parts for Model T and Model A Fords. Most were made on original Ford dies. He was one of the first companies allowed to use the Ford logo on his boxes. He made replica ignition coils with he Ford logo embossed on the steel can. He bought the raw coils from Echlin, and put them in the cans that he stamped. He made the Model T fenders with a heavy steel wire rolled into the edge, on original tooling and machines from Ford. I could use any machine that wasn't in use. He started this part time, while working as a tool and die maker in the Aerospace industry. That company developed the honeycomb steel heat shields for the early space program. He went full time during a layoff, and never went back.
> I like worker-guys - plumbers, farmers, electricians, machinists,
> construction guys with giant pickup trucks.
>
> At the place I mentioned, we had a huge Whitney n/c punch press. It
> would punch 4" holes in 1/8" steel plate about 1 per second, and the
> building shook at every hit. It was programmed from paper tape in an
> atrocious format, so I wrote a language compiler for our PDP11
> timeshare system, loosely based on Quickpoint syntax. It was fairly
> basic, but it did have a PATn command to punch a pattern and remember
> it for reuse, and OFS Xddddd Yddddd and OFS DXcccccc DYnnnnn to offset
> the origin absolutely and incrementally. We turned that loose on the
> machinists and discovered that they were soon writing elegant and
> efficient programs with just a few control tools.
>
> I also implemented a BHC (bolt hole circle) command which they adapted
> to scallop really big holes using a smaller punch. It was awesome to
> watch it punch out their programs on a big steel console panel.
>
> The Westinghouse n/c controller was all discrete-transistor logic
> cards. It read a paper tape and could do smooth vector moves into big
> servo motors with encoders, using what we'd think of as a DDS
> algorithm, all in BCD.
>
> One thing I've noticed about those worker-guys is that they tend to be
> mystified by and afraid of electricity. They think I wear robes and
> pointy hats because I can wire a ceiling fan.
>
> All kids should learn some basic machining and welding and
> electrical/electronics skills. Some really high-end private high
> schools do that.
They need to put shop classes back into public schools. It was a huge mistake to remove them. I took every shop class that I could, along with the College prep track that I was on. I got sick of being told that I should go into medicine or law, because of my IQ. I also got sick of being told that I needed to see the numbers. I never did look at whatever was in the envelop that they slid across the table to me. I just pushed it back. I was but on thee College Prep track in thee seventh grade. I often got the highest scores on the aptitude tests of anyone in my school system, but it didn't matter to me. I wanted to learn, for the sake of learning, not to impress people. I had a good laugh after one test on mechanics. There were two perfect scores in the entire school system. Me and a girl. The boys who claimed to be mechanical geniuses scored very low. They couldn't figure out what direction the output shaft would turn in a gearbox, yet it was obvious at a glance.
I learned to weld. I learned to wire a house when I was 10. I have a portable Oxyacetylene torch that can be carried to places that you can't take the big bottles. Those were handy as a Broadcast Engineer. You could cut up old crap too remove it, or make temporary repairs until a tower crew could replace a tower. They were also handy to solder 2" and larger copper pipe i the transmitter cooling systems. People thought that I was nuts, because I pre-tinned the pipe and the cast brass fittings, but my work never leaked. Old systems that I had to take apart often had only a thin ring of flowed solder that would crack from vibration. One idiot had brazed the copper pie to the brass fittings. Those took a lot of work to reuse. They were custom designed by RCA, and there hadn't been spares for at least a decade. I had to use Oxyacetylene on an area that wasn't brazed, and drive a thin punch into the seam to dimlpe the copper pipe. Then I had to file the brazing off from the sloppy repairs. After that, a large pair of needle nose pliers were used to twist it loose while the solder was molten. I salvaged and reused every one of them. It was the worst use of 50/50 solder that I had ever seen. I replaced it with a very high tin content solder that flowed properly. It had 0.5% Antimony and may have been 99.5% tin. I still have the rest of the five pound spool somewhere.
I had a bunch of those large, bright orange Burroughs plasma displays for early CNC machines. They were from industrial terminals wit cast aluminum cabinets. The displays ran so hot that they needed it to cool the displays. I think they were in a warehouse that I lost in 2001 when I ended up bedridden for two years.