Deep Magic From Before The Dawn Of Time

Maybe a little bit more than most projects, the metal shop has been a yak shave. I knew roughly fuck-all about machine tools, beyond the many YouTube channels which are amazing, but not really aimed at beginners. The smallest lathes and mills are made by Sherline, and while they have been around forever, and I think they make good stuff, they're limited in the size, shape, and material of the parts you can make with them. People often run them happily enough on a table in their house.

I am confident in saying there is no other machine tool that will run happily on a table in your house. My lathe weighs 120 pounds.  

Anyway, it's been a journey, one which involved getting another 120-pound tool (a mill) to make some stuff so I could satisfactorily use the first 120-pound tool (the lathe). And I have some work for the lathe to do so I can use the mill more easily.

This is the thing about machining as a hobby: I don't need to have something in mind that I want to make. It generates its own problems. Need a hammer to tap parts into place? I can make a hammer, out of metal (probably not steel), with knurling and everything. Yes, ideally everyone gets some kind of machined thing for Christmas this year, but the path from here to there involves a lot of very shiny mistakes.

(You want a tiny brass hammer, right?)

One thing I need for the lathe is a thinger to use a cordless drill or driver to drive the different slides that move the cutting tool. (I also need those slides to move more easily, but one thing at a time.) So I go into the shop, confident I know what I want to do.

Well...that turns out not to be true. Sure, I can write down measurements, but how do I write them so they make sense? How do I plan the order of operations so I don't fritter away my precious aluminum stock on failed parts.

(Large hunks of aluminum are expensive!)

I need...a technical drawing. This sucks, because these days, that implies a program like Fusion 360 or TinkerCAD, which are free, and the actual problem is that I really resist using computers for my hobbies. Because I use computers all day. Hobbies are the things I'm not using computers for. (A notable exception is MuseScore, because otherwise music notation is so difficult for me that I simply won't do it.) So I haven't learned a CAD app, and maybe won't until I need to 3-D print something.

This project—just the first of many!—is stalled without the right picture.

Luckily, I know how to do old-school, pencil-and-paper, T-squares and eraser shields, drafting. Amidst the appalling violence and terror of middle school, we had vocational things that I think were more or less randomly assigned. If I remember right, I pulled 2 semesters of cooking, 1 of sewing, and 1 of drafting. I was very good at the paper sort; there was a computer there, a text screen switchable between green, white, and amber, and it had software on it, but I never particularly tried. But paper! Making pictures without needing to be visually creative! Another form of communication. Not that I'm not grateful to have a throw pillow embroidered with far too many lines from Masefield's "Sea-Fever" to be done well, but drafting has always been the exact sort of arcane but interesting skill that is my cognitive catnip.

In college I was good at it again, in my theater tech work: lines, templates, architects' rulers, protractors, more lines. It was always very satisfying, and I'm looking forward to picking it up again.

...and then I'll have a drawing of the thing to make on the mill which will make the lathe better, so I can make stuff for the mill...

the privilege of enjoying a job.

I am having a ton of fun at the "new" job (if that still applies after ten weeks or so). Having a boss hire me to do what I'm best at is just magical. And unlike the last job, I haven't had to convince anyone that we actually should all be communicating and cooperating; I get to skip the much more fun step of interpersonal work. Busy people, and engineers, are rightfully leery of meetings.

I don't enjoy wasteful meetings any more than the next person. For this project, I make small meetings and mark everyone optional; sometimes there's a planned agenda, sometimes not, but right now there's such a communication debt that it almost doesn't matter who shows up, because there will be something that will benefit. And, of course, if it's not useful, we should all ditch it and go for a walk, or refill our coffee.

Since I joined, the Giant Company-Wide Project has gone from "stalled for several months" to "making headway and shipping in the foreseeable future," which I am more than happy to take credit for. An even broader scope beckons, involving more teams and projects and features, and expanding further into the future. My local scope—my team and surrounding environs—so far looks like nobody is trying to do anything demonstrably insane, so I can look up and find the people who would like to do something demonstrably insane, and probably would, if I didn't work there.

I live with a certain amount of anxiety about having to get a "real" job someday, by which I get I mean physical; I'm not sure how well my current skillset of keeping people organized and talking would transfer outside the realm of modern knowledge work.

I'm still working remote, of course, as I have since 2014, and has turned out to be a gift for all of us here, since it's nice to see each other so much, I'm around to pick up some kid-related stuff, and then it turns out I have always loathed offices, finding them acutely anxiety-provoking, and every inch toward open-plan setups has been one more inch of deadened productivity.