Third Anniversary Q&A!

[Music] oh hello internet i didn't see you there yes this is the third year in a row that i'm doing that joke and i'm not going to stop doing it so welcome to blondie hacks this is my third year anniversary special and as is tradition every year i like to do a little q a i get my patrons to ask some questions and i answer them here on the show and you know if one person has a question a bunch of others probably do too so hopefully this will cover all of your questions so let's go first question is what are your 10 commandments in the hobby machine shop i'll answer that as we go along if you had an unlimited budget what machine tool would you buy that's different from what you currently have that's an easy one the elephant that is not in this room is a surface grinder surface grinder really unlocks a lot of power in a machine shop for making tools and doing really precision work in a way that you really can't do any other way so if i had infinite space and money a surface grinder would be sitting right here or over there you know wherever there was space what does sprocket get for special treats and has she ever destroyed any furniture or projects well sprocket gets only veterinarian-approved dental treats seeing as how i have two veterinarians in my immediate family i was not getting away with anything less and luckily she's not a very destructive cat she's really never damaged much around the house except the carpet in the living room she's very determined to ruin that not to be a sycophant but there are times when i would do an operation differently but by and large it's only a matter of kit or perspective now there's no actual question in that but i wanted to talk about it anyway because it's actually i think interesting a lot of what you see me do on this channel is i'm sure different than a lot of what you would do and i think oftentimes it is because i have probably smaller machines than you do or maybe larger than some of you and you know you have to make a decision on how to do something based on the equipment you have and the time you have and the type of material you're using and your skill set you know a lot of times i do something less than perfectly because i don't know a better way you know this is all a learning process for me as much as it is for any of us in this hobby so i think it's okay to have different opinions from how i would do something just don't be a jerk about it when you share those opinions with other people [Music] how much time do you spend on video production versus actual shop time for a video i would say the ratio is about three to one video production to actual shop time that includes time spent on the video set up while working on the project you know every operation i do you got to set up the camera and make sure the lighting and the focus are right and all those sorts of things and if it's a new operation that i haven't done before i might do a test shot to make sure it's going to come out nice certain corners of my shop the lighting isn't good so if i do a shot over there i have to go and set up extra lights so it depends on on the project a lot some projects that ratio is flipped like on the boiler project it's probably three times as much time spent on the boiler as i have actually filming it because i'm not going to refilm all the stuff i've already shown you and make you watch the same setups over and over that sort of thing [Music] what's your software gear and process for video production well most people don't know this but the first two and a half years of this channel were shot entirely on a galaxy note 8 cell phone i have since upgraded to a nikon full-frame dslr which is nice for shooting the machine tools because you don't get rolling shutter artifacts there and i've got a couple of different lenses that i use mostly for up close work but i've also got a nice long lens when i want some depth of field effects and also for some operations like silver soldering where i need to keep the camera away from the heat i've had this camera go into thermal shutdown a couple of times already but much like machine tools it's much more about the operator than the gear and you really don't need a lot of fancy stuff to make youtube channel videos i learned photography from my mom and she taught me all of the basics which apply to any kind of camera that you're using for software again i started out with the free stuff i used hitfilm express which is actually very good free software i've since upgraded to final cut pro which has made me a lot more efficient but the free software out there is pretty good so if you're interested in doing this kind of thing take a look at it really most of the budget on this channel has been spent on audio audio is much harder than video getting good quality audio in every situation so i've spent way more on microphones than i ever did on camera gear if you were to buy a new lathe today what features would you look for that are different from what this one has that's an easy question i really like this lathe a lot but there are two things that it really needs the first is threading gears in the quick change gearbox that's pretty difficult to find in small lathes like this there are some older lathes that did have it the south some of the old south bend lathes had a quick change gearbox option it's a little hard to find the ones that have it and i believe the myford lathes that you can get over in england have a quick change gearbox option with threading gears that's a big win if you can get that the other big thing that this lathe needs that is really missing from a lot of these chinese lathes is a back gear you know it has a 10 inch swing this lathe but above about 5 6 inches you've got so little power left that you can't cut anything that big anyway and a back year is really what solves that problem so that's something that again the older south bends and stuff had that for some reason they've stopped doing in these newer lathes i guess to cut costs so that's definitely something i would want what is something that you wish was more available to hobby machinists for me i think that's information there's tons of great youtube machining channels not a lot of them focused on the hobbyist with small equipment and not a lot of them focused on education and also not a lot of great books out there for the modern hobby machinist there's lots of great books from the 30s and the 40s and the 50s which i've shown many of those on my channel the problem with them is that they're all reprints from the 80s and the photography in them is really bad because it's been reprinted 16 times and so on so the quality of books that you can get is pretty spotty and uneven and so i'd really like to see more information the whole reason i started this channel was because i was looking for a resource like this when i started and i really couldn't find something that was really targeted at the kind of information that i think a beginning hobbyist really needs so information has your intro gotten slightly faster over the years in fact there's a distinct moment where it doubled in speed because i went into final cut pro and hit 2x on it at some point i decided it was just too slow and you know kids today everything's got to be snappy so i sped it up what got you interested in metalwork and machining that might be adam booth's fault i think he was probably the first channel that i really got into but i've always liked making things and i had a brief foray into woodworking like many of us and i didn't really like it i didn't like the tools they're loud and they're messy and i just didn't have a feel for wood it just didn't click for me but metal working just really appealed to me for me machining is kind of like the closest you can get to perfection when making things like you can very nearly make things perfect in a way that you can't i think with other mediums and that really appeals to me as a computer and graphics nerd where everything is always perfect so there's something about that to me it's as a civilization kind of the highest form of making things everything that we have around us is because we've achieved precision in just about everything that we do now and there's something very addictive about precision i guess why is cheese and what does it mean i do not wear the cheese the cheese wears me have you ever considered making an internal combustion engine from scratch not full size although i've certainly rebuilt my share of engines but i will make a model internal combustion engine at some point on the channel internal combustion engines are much much fussier than steam engines everything on them really has to be perfect for them to run and so i think making a model gas engine is a little outside of my skill level right now but it's definitely something that i would like to work towards the path of the hobby machinist very much follows the path of the industrialization of civilization you start out making the easier stuff like steam engines which are very forgiving you can build them pretty poorly and they still run and then you move on to the primitive forms of gas engines like hit and miss engines again they're pretty forgiving and then you move on to full-blown four-stroke internal combustion engines where if everything isn't absolutely perfect they self-destruct so those are much more challenging for hobbyists to build and the smaller the scale is the more perfect everything has to be if the weight balance isn't just right in all the tolerances and all the clearances aren't just perfect it doesn't run because at the smaller scale everything's much more sensitive to things being perfect because you don't have as much inertia and you don't have you know as much wiggle room on the forces involved so it's it's a very challenging type of project so have a lot of respect for those youtube machinists that you may have seen who've built working v10 internal combustion engines those are really really something special [Music] what's your history of activities with motor vehicles i guess that's my mom's fault she was really into cars and she got me into them from a young age and then my dad taught me how to work on cars and much of my childhood was spent on the family farm where of course we were all working on machinery and as soon as your legs are long enough to reach a clutch in my family you are put on a machine and put to work so machinery is just in our family it's in our blood and i started racing cars about 15 years ago i gave it up a couple of years ago because racing cars and especially working on cars is very much a young person's game and my back just can't take it anymore the the reaching up and the bending down and crawling around on the ground that you need to do to work on cars is not for those of us of a certain age so that's uh but it's always going to be in my blood i've always got a broken down something in my driveway there's a really nice classic 5 series bmw to my left here that is just gorgeous to look at and currently doesn't run so there's i am what i am and what can i say how long does it take you to go from sitting on the couch to in the shop making chips i want to answer this question in a slightly different way because i think the core of it is how do you keep your excitement and your passion for something going so that those times when you don't feel like coming out here and doing stuff that you can still do it to me what it's about is finding the right projects because there's going to be tough times on any project and it's the passion for that project that keeps you going if you've read my blog you may have seen my project veronica which was a computer built from scratch which was something i always wanted to do kind of on the scale of building a steam engine from scratch and that was a five-year project because frankly when i started i was in way over my head on electrical engineering and there were times where i had to walk away from that project for months at a time because i had to spend time learning and no figuring out all the things that i didn't know to solve a problem and getting through those down times it was the passion that did that it was i was so excited by this idea of doing what steve wozniak did building a computer from scratch that if i hadn't had that passion for the final goal i wouldn't have made it through the whole project and for me building a steam engine from scratch was similar and in my head i have a bunch of other long-term projects like that that are going to be on this channel someday and those are very much similar in that my excitement for them is so great that it was going to carry me through all the dark times like when you try to silver solder a boiler and it completely fails you have to cut it apart and start again it's my excitement for steam power and really wanting to do this that keeps me going through that kind of stuff do you have any electronics projects lined up i do in fact i have a whole list of things i want to do with veronica the homebrew computer that i mentioned time is tight though with the day job and the youtube channel and everything else and so that stuff tends to get de-prioritized i will get back to it though when i have more time i do tend to do that stuff on the blog rather than here on the channel because i haven't figured out a good way to film electronics projects that's interesting there's lots of great youtube electronics channels so they exist and kudos to those people who do it for me i think that works better in print so i tend to do photographs and and stretch my writing legs there instead and i have a list of things that johnny mnemonic needs as well he's been down for quite a while so keep an eye on my blog for that stuff what is your personal vision and objective for the channel i think for right now it's to keep doing what i'm doing i'm really enjoying making approachable content i really want to bring more people into hobby machining i think machine shop work has a pretty high barrier to entry and i think it's intimidating for a lot of people but i think a lot more people would enjoy it than who are currently doing it and i want to do anything i can to lower the barrier to entry and just bring more people into this because it's really fun what was the outcome of the machinist relay project i've answered this question a lot and i'm going to answer it again because people keep asking it and i understand why it disappeared is the answer uh it had gone to ave he did some stuff and then it went to john saunders and they didn't do anything with it but they sent it to someone else and i don't know who that someone else is and i never heard from it again so the bottom line is it wasn't as interesting a project to the youtube machining community as it was to me i thought it was a neat idea but you know not every idea that we think is neat is neat to everybody so yeah maybe i'll try again someday but for now it's dead i'm sorry let it go and hey if you know where it is let me know have you looked into or heard of touch dro at all i have not i've seen a lot of channels setting those up and using them and they look pretty cool but i've never tried one so can't say anything what do you do for a first aid it's never a bad thing to have a little bit of first aid training which i do for my day job especially and i think everyone should know cpr it's a good thing to take a class on that but just like any other kind of somewhat dangerous hobby i guess it's never a bad idea to have someone know where you are keep your phone within arm's length that's an easy thing we can do nowadays that you can always call for help if something really bad happens but you know here in the hobby machine shop we're mostly talking about metal splinters and you know the occasional oopsy the best first date of course is prevention you know practice safe work habits and just really prevent the bad things from happening the big one for me is in addition to the usual safety stuff that i talk about all the time safety glasses etc the big one is don't be out here when you're tired you know it's very easy to get deep on a project and you're almost done finishing something and you're starting to get a little fuzzy in the head that's the time you got to recognize put the tools down and call it a day because that's the time you're going to get hurt i talked about growing up on the family farm you're always around big machinery that can mangle and murder you on a moment's notice without even slowing down and my dad taught me how to be what the mindset is around machinery it's very much you have to treat it like a trained tiger in that you control it and it will do what you want and it will make your life very interesting but never forget that it's a tiger the moment you turn your back on it it's gonna eat you how many teeth on a sprocket six seven carry the four 362. have you ever just thrown in the towel on a project when i was younger i did that a lot i gave up on projects all the time as i've gotten older i've learned two things one how to get more comfortable with failures that i won't give up before things are finished and two how to choose projects that i'm excited enough about to get through the failures and that's really the two keys to not throwing in the towels on things choosing the right projects and building your tolerance for failure if you had to start over from scratch what order would you replace your machines and tooling in i think i would basically start the same way i did which is with the lathe and some high speed steel and a couple of measuring tools and other things basically the stuff that i show in my beginners to machining video series that's really what i would do it's pretty close to what i did i bought a few things that i thought i would need and didn't need you know but mostly i think that was a pretty good way to go as the channel has grown has it changed the way you think about and talk about your mistakes that's a great question my channel is known for showing mistakes and frankly embracing and reveling in mistakes because we all make mistakes and i think if we could all get a little more comfortable with mistakes i think the world would be a better place there's a management concept called the power of vulnerability if you can make yourself comfortable with being vulnerable in front of other people it makes them comfortable being vulnerable with you and we can all share in our mistakes and learn from each other without it becoming a game of saving face and trying to seem perfect with other people all the time i think that's really important especially in this world of social media where we're seeing these constructed perfect versions of each other's lives we all eat this amazing food and we have these amazing vacations and whatever it's the social version of photoshopped pictures of fashion models it's this version of reality that isn't real and that none of us have and it tends to just make us all feel crappy about our own lives so the more we can embrace each other's vulnerability and humanity i think the better off we're all going to be but back to the original question i am committed to showing and sharing my mistakes with all of you obviously as the audience gets bigger i get more negativity and more and more new people coming in who don't understand you know what i'm trying to do here that i'm sharing my learning with you and that i don't know everything and i'm not claiming to know everything and that that's okay that we can still share this content and have fun with each other without all of us knowing everything and learn from each other so you know it comes with the channel growing i guess but i'm going to keep it going as long as i can do you design everything you make in cad or is that just for the channel i actually do design most of my stuff in cad and for me it's actually for me i really struggle to visualize more complex parts in my head and keep things all in my head without making mistakes so for me personally modeling things in cad really helps me prevent mistakes and of course in the machine shop preventing mistakes saves you a lot of time so for me it's very worthwhile to just model it in cad so i can actually see how the parts relate to each other especially if there's angles or you know different features that interlock it can be really difficult for me at least to visualize how those things all go together and doing it in cad i very frequently see oh you know that bolt hole goes through that shaft over there so that's not going to work things like that so i do model everything in cad and i really like having the drawings from that in front of me in the shop here so that when i'm making the parts i don't have to be thinking too much about the whole mechanism and inventing as i go along i'm just focused on making that part in front of me and getting the dimensions right and getting the order of operations right for that part and then at the end it all comes together and it works because i modeled it in cad for the most part i still make mistakes even though i'm doing stuff in cad but for me it really helps well that's my little q a if you made it this far i think that means it was interesting enough but thank you all for watching you know the growth of the channel has been amazing and that's because of all of you who are watching liking subscribing sharing the videos on social media that's really why all of this has happened and i couldn't do it without you and an extra thanks to my patrons not everybody can afford to support on patreon and that's totally okay but those of you who can and do i really extra appreciate that because that's really what keeps all of this going and thank you all for watching and here's to another three years i'm not a great video producer but i try to do as much as i can and try to i'm rambling

Channel: Blondihacks

Views: 53,610

Rating: 4.9668608 out of 5

Keywords: blondihacks, machining, machinist, abom79, this old tony, vintage machinery, steam, electronics, making, maker, hacking, hacker, lathe, mill, woodworking, workshop, shop, model engineering, engineer, engineering, live steam, machine shop, metal lathe, vertical mill, metalworking, metal shop, jewlery making, diy, home improvement, resin casting, how to, do it yourself, do it yourself (hobby), ASMR, mini mill, mini lathe, tutorial, mr pete, adam booth, iltms, diresta, home shop, home shop machining

Id: lzwCV8LVX9s

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021