3 ms·

I'm sure Fred worked hard enough, but I think you're being lenient and modest to compare his efforts to yours. It's unbelievable the level of technical prowess

by jeromec 16y ago

I'm sure Fred worked hard enough, but I think you're being lenient and modest to compare his efforts to yours. It's unbelievable the level of technical prowess you pulled off 20 years ago, by yourself, on an ill-advised platform, working so many hours that your wife left you, for a minimum base salary and the promise of equity which was later disregarded. You know better than I do, of course, but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was.

jacquesm 16y ago
> but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was. That is probably true, at the same time he knew full well to sell when I announced my departure so he must have had some idea. The interesting thing is though, in retrospect, the 'ill advised platform' brought out the best in me in many ways, and I wonder if I had learned as much as I did had the platform been more powerful. There's nothing more satisfying than taking something that any sane person would say can not be done and then doing it anyway simply because nobody told you it couldn't be done. I think of the whole thing as a character building exercise ;) And I have learned to have great respect for the people that make industry work, the guys behind the lathes and the mills, the 'operators' that have more knowledge in their pinky about metal and metal working than most people will acquire in a life time of book knowledge. They taught me more about feeds and speeds and materials than I ever wanted to know. And they also taught me that I'll never be a good machinist, even though I'm safe and can make what I want I just can't spend the lifetime on gaining all that knowledge. One nice anecdote about that. One guy was complaining about the precision, this was in a factory of gears called 'Mak aandrijvingen', the guy told me while listening to the machine (in a factory full of noise at that) that it was running about 1/100th wide close to the chuck. I thought he was pulling my leg, brought out the micrometer, sure enough 1/100th wide. We adjusted the table a tiny bit with to reduce the offset but overcompensated, during the next trial run he told me it had gotten worse, probably around 0.05 mm. Sure enough, the exact amount was very close to that. After that I started to slowly believe that this guy was so attuned to his machine that he could hear how much material it was taking off and as a consequence knew how much was left. When he finally said it was good it really was. By then I was a firm believer :) Incredible.
- adharmad 16y ago
  Truly amazing. Reminds me of the anecdote about Jim Gray wherein he was able to figure out that the database was not tuned based on the the hard disk noise.
- mattm 16y ago
  I've heard stories about Ted Williams - the last baseball player to hit .400. A shipment of new bats would arrive for the team. He would look them over and pick some out saying "These ones are 1/8th of an inch too short."
- lutorm 16y ago
  Thanks for sharing the story. I was thinking that maybe a good course of action would have been to find some guy like the one you mention here and see if they were interested in being beta testers/consultants in exchange for getting the machine for free. My dad and I are kind of like you and that guy, by the way. He's the shop guy with no schooling but almost half a century of experience building stuff, and I'm the one who knows all the math and computer stuff... ;-)

by jeromec 16y ago

jacquesm 16y ago

> but I can't imagine Fred truly appreciated or understood just how advanced the engineering work, and sheer hacking, you were doing was. That is probably true, at the same time he knew full well to sell when I announced my departure so he must have had some idea. The interesting thing is though, in retrospect, the 'ill advised platform' brought out the best in me in many ways, and I wonder if I had learned as much as I did had the platform been more powerful. There's nothing more satisfying than taking something that any sane person would say can not be done and then doing it anyway simply because nobody told you it couldn't be done. I think of the whole thing as a character building exercise ;) And I have learned to have great respect for the people that make industry work, the guys behind the lathes and the mills, the 'operators' that have more knowledge in their pinky about metal and metal working than most people will acquire in a life time of book knowledge. They taught me more about feeds and speeds and materials than I ever wanted to know. And they also taught me that I'll never be a good machinist, even though I'm safe and can make what I want I just can't spend the lifetime on gaining all that knowledge. One nice anecdote about that. One guy was complaining about the precision, this was in a factory of gears called 'Mak aandrijvingen', the guy told me while listening to the machine (in a factory full of noise at that) that it was running about 1/100th wide close to the chuck. I thought he was pulling my leg, brought out the micrometer, sure enough 1/100th wide. We adjusted the table a tiny bit with to reduce the offset but overcompensated, during the next trial run he told me it had gotten worse, probably around 0.05 mm. Sure enough, the exact amount was very close to that. After that I started to slowly believe that this guy was so attuned to his machine that he could hear how much material it was taking off and as a consequence knew how much was left. When he finally said it was good it really was. By then I was a firm believer :) Incredible.

adharmad 16y ago
Truly amazing. Reminds me of the anecdote about Jim Gray wherein he was able to figure out that the database was not tuned based on the the hard disk noise.
mattm 16y ago
I've heard stories about Ted Williams - the last baseball player to hit .400. A shipment of new bats would arrive for the team. He would look them over and pick some out saying "These ones are 1/8th of an inch too short."
lutorm 16y ago
Thanks for sharing the story. I was thinking that maybe a good course of action would have been to find some guy like the one you mention here and see if they were interested in being beta testers/consultants in exchange for getting the machine for free. My dad and I are kind of like you and that guy, by the way. He's the shop guy with no schooling but almost half a century of experience building stuff, and I'm the one who knows all the math and computer stuff... ;-)