It's called gun drilling and about all I know about it is what the rep at IMTS told me when I looked up and saw a 3/8ths drill bit whose business end was eight feet above me. The "gun drilling pavilion" was not huge? But it was not small either. I'll bet you can do a 1mm hole 40mm deep (I've been doing enough metric that I'm starting to think in it!) but not without planning and tooling up. Now I'm really curious as to what that hole was for... I learned engineering fundamentals by taking apart cars from the age of 6 so underneath all the theory is a Cargo Cult understanding of mechanical objects. "I have never seen that hole, therefore it is impossible" without ever learning any 10x rules.

I've harped on this before - we see 3d through the way things move as we move our head, not through stereoscopic vision. Stereoscopic vision really only carries out to things about 6 feet away. When we're looking at a monitor, the image doesn't move - but with my magic puck I can move things around exactly as I want them whenever I want them and my brain builds 3d. Usually you hold down the center button but I found that limiting, so I bought a puck. Jeron Lanier made the point that humans adapt to any control schema really quickly; for my brain, "twitch my fingers" easily substitutes for "move my head."

This is all for jewelry making, but those jewels will run towards watches, pens and accessories. At a certain point, any precision assembly or surface needs to be machined rather than filed or cast or sawed or whatever. I got to the point with the casting where I went "and nothing will go together without things being precision drilled" at which point the question became "so how are you going to do that."

This machine cost me about $9k for the husk. It's been about another $15k for parts (fully $7k of that was rebuilding the spindle - yeowtch!). It will, if things go to plan, perform about as well as this thing, which I was quoted $180k for. It will also have a working envelope easily 3x as big in every direction. And, because I am controlling it with a highly-configurable Windows-based CNC interpreter, I will be able to do obnoxious things like configure it as a 5-axis drag knife, which is a device that no one in the world has ever made.

Honestly?

I did the July one because nobody would listen to the fact that I'm actually doing stuff, and it was cathartic to catalog all the shit that I had gotten done. I did the August one because I recognize the value of that catharsis.

I am on that voyage where your home shores are long gone, your destination remains over the horizon, and you find yourself surrounded by people with no understanding how sailing works but a bottomless curiosity for "are we there yet."

Honestly? It fucking sucks. It sucks on every possible level.

When I built the car I found myself going "huh. I wonder how to make a distributor because this engine is actually a Mercruiser and they don't make a marine HEI." I had to cobble something together from junk yard parts. I went to Checker and said "I need a GM alternator" and they would say "for what car" and I would say "doesn't matter, give me a hundred amp" and they would say "it doesn't work that way son" and I would say "that one on the shelf there will do" and they would smile and go "no, fucker, tell me what car it is" and I would have to go "A four wheel drive Triumph TR-7 on a scout chassis with a full roller 400 SELL ME A FUCKING ALTERNATOR ASS" but of course I didn't do that because I was a seventeen year old kid with exercise bulimia and a disabling crush on a girl who didn't know I existed. So getting a damn alternator was obviously something that scarred me for life.

I'm now at "yeah nobody remembers the specs for that spindle" and "nobody really remembers how resolvers work" and "yeah you may have paid us $6k but we just hooked up the existing wires it's not like we tested anything" and "we'd love to answer your question but we'd much prefer to do the integration for you it will probably be only $30k now that you've done all the work."

Here's what the hobby machinist crew thinks is a "tool change."

Here's what Kern thinks is a "tool change."

Now - who's got two thumbs and absolutely no support from anyone on closing the gap?

this guy