Stop in for a cup of coffee
Thats a cool story. There are so many things that we use every day that you I never even think about who invented it and how it's made. I love the How It's Made shows on cable I just watched one the other day on how they Forge a crankshaft pretty cool stuff.
Very cool projects you get knocked out in a few hours, Ben.
Funny I was thinking about all the things my Dad made and built over the years, I can't remember them all, sometimes one will pop into my head like the time he got interested in making pottery, so he ordered a bearing and built himself a potter's wheel, he made me a cookie jar as a graduation present and he made a bunch of other ceramics he sold at craft fairs, until he got interested in something else.
This might be interesting...the aerospace company in Sarasota where he worked as an engineer wasn't getting many contracts in the '70's, and they had a very expensive machine shop, so they had my Dad cultivate other types of work for the company. South of town was a company that made fingernail clippers, and my Dad designed and built them a machine to assemble them faster than could be done by hand. I remember being impressed by the pneumatic operation and the hoppers of parts that were fed into chutes by vibration, and how Dad worked thru getting it to run flawlessly. Not long after it was delivered, a wave of Vietnamese immigrants came over. These ladies could assemble the clippers faster then my Dad's machine! So there it went presumably into a corner of the plant. Fast forward 20+ years, my Dad had been in Georgia for years, and was interviewing a "gal Friday" as he called her, come to find out, she once worked at a company in Tennessee that made fingernail clippers, and my Dad's machine had ended up there. Small world.
