At Play In The Machine Shop Of The Lord

One consistent theme running through what I guess you might call "metalworkers YouTube" is the amount of time metalworkers spend on maintenance: restoring beat-up machines they bought because they have more elbow grease than cash, or fixing something that broke, or just the periodic (often frequent) cleanings and lubricatings these things require. I don't recall anyone doing that with woodworking machinery, but then woodworking machinery doesn't usually have the scale or complexity of, say, a power hammer, or the high-precision shenanigans of a lathe or milling machine.

I did finally get my lathe partly bolted to the bench: there are two feet, with two screws each, and they form a rectangle, and one diagonal pair of holes has bolts in them. I want to say that the other two holes are somehow not where they're supposed to be, but since I have flubbed both the "measurements" method and the "put sharp objects directly into the holes and mark up a target surface" method, I think it's just beyond what I can accomplish in the situation I've created for myself. I have many many ideas about how to move this heavy object around in an enclosed space. You know what would be useful for implementing said ideas? A lathe.

Following tradition, I learned a whole bunch about how the lathe is made by removing a part (to see if I could lubricate something to make it move easier), having an unexpected piece of metal fall out, and having to figure out how to put it back and have it work again. It's not magic, but it is extremely clever: basically there's a slide that moves on a dovetail channel, and the piece of metal has depressions for three set screws, and it's basically a 6-inch long wedge to make the dovetail fit tightly. How irritatingly difficult that slide's crank handle is depends on those set screws, but also on how tightly the handle is screwed on, and also if the slide fits too loosely in the dovetail, the whole system loses so much precision as to be useless.

I find this whole thing particularly engaging because historically, while I'm very good at taking physical objects apart, I have not been very good at fixing them, or indeed of just putting them back together so they still work.

I'm very good at fixing software sorts of problems, but there's no physical distinction between the act of fixing software, and the act of breaking it in the first place. Arguably software is broken by default, but that's a different discussion.