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My friend and I call this the "my uncle's machine shop" phenomenon after the seemingly endless forum posts about cars, desert racing, mountain bikes, woodworkin
by abakker 10y ago
My friend and I call this the "my uncle's machine shop" phenomenon after the seemingly endless forum posts about cars, desert racing, mountain bikes, woodworking etc where someone says something like, "I didn't have the part handy, so I drove over to my Uncle's machine shop and we milled it out of a 6x6x6 inch cube of billet aluminum he had lying around. Then we anodized it, and used it to fix our broken plastic xyz part."
I have consciously spent tens of thousands of dollars on tools to be more capable of building things for myself (bad Return on cash). But some of the stuff these people make and have access to astounds me.
- hydrogen18 10y agoThat's genius. I feel like I need to create a blog documenting stuff like this. We could compare the cost of the tooling used vs. the cost of the replacement part. Except nowadays it is more like "I just went over to my uncle's job that night where we used a $1.5 million CNC machine his employer owns to make a replacement from solid stainless"
- abakker 10y agoOn the plus side, the replacement part will probably be better. If the tools don't cost any money, and the material doesn't cost much, and you can do the labor for free, you can make some incredibly cool stuff!
- tjic 10y agolife goal: becoming That Uncle™