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...

you should have been more specific.

If the three humans of the household had grown up now, we would all be labeled what is now called "twice exceptional" ("EE" or "2E" for short). I know that I've always been super smart, and also I get over-stimulated or overwhelmed and I shut down and retreat inward. And I have ADHD, and it turns out the old joke isn't actually a joke.

"Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"ADHD kid."

"ADHD kid wh—"

"LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!!!"

Anyway. I have to keep learning things, not from any kind of principle, but because it's who and what I am, and I could no more stop learning than you could stop breathing. I once sought out boring podcasts I could fall asleep to: histories of Byzantium and philosophy, two topics I find hyper-detailed and dull. They stopped putting me to sleep after one or two dozen episodes, because my brain adapted and started the process of enthusiastic learning. It's who I am. I have to roll with it, or suffer needlessly.

Luckily, the world has more stuff than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes! I've long thought it would be fun to know (at least a little bit) how to fly a plane, but I do not want to actually fly a plane. It's grotesquely expensive, the radio protocols are not friendly to my brain which often blips on audio, and the noise, vibration, and sickening motion of small planes hit me pretty hard. The most intensive flight simulation rigs can have VR, an eye tracker, and several monitors, enough to qualify for real-world training, and still be a fraction of an actual plane. So I bought the best-cheapest flying hardware (a Logitech joystick) and X-Plane, the biggest simulator for Macs, famous both for being cross-platform, and for having a physics engine enabling users to create the Space Shuttle, or the enormous wings of an airplane on Mars. Maybe someday I'll upgrade to more complex hardware, but for now I'm enjoying a light involvement, at the Indiana Jones level.

everyone has their story.

I've spent an abnormal amount of time at the Apple Store this past six weeks or so, dealing with both my personal and work laptops. The personal machine needed a new battery, which in modern MacBooks is a single piece with the keyboard and trackpad; this was actually pretty awesome because four years of constant use left both the keyboard and trackpad pretty beat up. The work laptop is limping along, and I can use it, but I've warned IT I will probably end up begging them for a less haunted machine.

The guy who helped me with the haunted work laptop, though. Nice guy, in his 20s, who besides working at the Apple Store, is not just in a band, he's a drummer, and has done some sound engineering.

(I'm sometimes not good at not having conversations, and I opened this up by being startled when the idiots running the sound system dropped the microphone a few times with the volume about double what it should have been, in a space that is fundamentally a 2-story tall empty concrete box. I mentioned compressors and limiters and we were off to the races.)

He loves model trains, and he's far and away the youngest officer of his model train club (association? I don't remember) in many, many decades.

He makes and sells various train parts, using a 3-D printer. He'd like to build a business around it, but needs to buy injection molds, which are expensive.

His uncle knows a Japanese angel investor who loves model trains, and might be excited to provide the capital. If I were that investor, I would be very, very happy for the all-too-rare opportunities to kickstart model-train-related startups.

I live in a very strange place.

an apt description

Steve has commented on how much he enjoys the seemingly endless discoveries of things I'm interested in or have tried out. It's a long list, because I'm just that way; I tell people that my primary hobby is dilettantism. The cycle: I try something out with a bit of intensity, achieve some basic level of competence--perhaps just to assure myself that I'm generally competent and that I can if I really want to--and then I drift off and try something else.

To me, it feels like a small list, but considering I did most of them for at least six months, some for quite a bit longer (usually because they were family activities, like skiing and sailing), I guess I've been accumulating them steadily through my entire life, but especially as an adult, being out of school and having some money and leisure time to indulge myself. Some, like motorcycling and ceramics, are not uncommon; others, like bookbinding and blacksmithing, are a bit more esoteric.

Steve, as he can, summed this up:

You have the interests and attention span of a kid with a checking account.

Not bad.