Some hobbies or skills are so utterly amazing and turn out such fine work as their end product, it almost takes your breath away. It’s no secret The Kneeslider is biased toward the technical side of things and I personally find mechanical components that work together totally fascinating. The other day I posted about metal casting and today, in a related area, I want to touch on home shop machining.

Even if you never had much interest in it, look at the photos here and on the sites I’ve linked to and think about what skill is involved in building a 9 or 18 cylinder radial engine from scratch! One fellow built a turboprop. It’s work like this that makes a person appreciate what amazing tool makers humans are, or at least, can be. I could go on forever but you’ll find much more by just looking through their sites. I highly recommend it.

5 Bears Research

Ageless Engines

I made my way to these sites after seeing a link on the Make blog about a homemade spot welder that one fellow made because he needed to spot weld very thin stainless steel in the construction of a turbine, couldn’t find a good one so he just made his own.