/>Last week I finally got around to ordering the first four of a set of seven books I'd long been interested in, written by a machinist and inventor named David J. Gingery. He published these books back in 1980, showing you how to build a complete metal-working shop entirely from scratch. He starts with a simple charcoal foundry, made for $25 using a 5-gallon pail, a vacuum cleaner, silica sand, and clay. He describes the usefulness of this simple foundry:

You can melt aluminum, pot metal, and even brass with a very simple home built furnace fueled with grocery store charcoal. In a very few minutes you can melt beer cans, your wife's pots and pans, the siding off your neighbor's house, the pistons out of your car, and anything else you can beg, borrow, or steal. It costs very little to build, and it works incredibly well.

You then use your new foundry to melt aluminum scrap and cast the parts needed to build a metal lathe. The interesting part is that you actually use the partially-completed metal lathe as you're building it, to machine its own parts. Again I'll quote Gingery:

Having been described as "the only machine that can duplicate itself or any other machine in the shop," the metal lathe is the most versatile and desirable of all metal working machine tools. It is certainly among the most expensive pieces of equipment, but there is no need to do without one in your shop because here is a lathe that can not only duplicate itself, but it can produce its own original parts from home made castings and stock materials. All of the castings are made with the simple charcoal foundry, and the remainder of the parts are standard hardware items. The only power tool used was a 3/8" electric drill, and there was no custom machine work of any kind. [...] All of the machine work was done on the machine itself as it progressed step by step.

Once the lathe is built, you proceed to build a metal shaper, milling machine, drill press, etc, all of the previous tools being used to build the parts for the next. I'm not sure how far in the process I'll get, but I think I'll definitely be building the foundry. It'd be fun to be able to cast my own metal parts, using the same primitive methods used hundreds of years ago.

Originally posted at BinaryRock [Original Entry]