A Brief Shop/Machinery Tour

[Jared McMahon]

I've been away from the boards for a while for various reasons. I won't bother you with my job changes or my wife's ER trips, I'll stick to the happy reasons, like the volunteering I've been doing. I'm doing basic woodworking and general shop tasks for the Northwest Railway Museum, helping restore train cars and maintain the ones currently in use. I've always been something of a closet train buff so this lets me do woodworking, play with actual trains, and help a local museum. I've been doing very basic things thus far, mostly knocking apart old wooden seats and stripping thick battleship-grey paint off the gorgeous mahogany underneath, but that's what needs doing and I'm happy to do it. Posting a few pics of the workshop and especially the machinery. There are some conservatively sized Craftsman and Grizzly tools around but mammoths dominate the view, with names like Yates, Oliver and Northfield. And what appears to me (a non-machinist) to be an implausibly large lathe; but I guess when the pieces are for use on something the scale of a locomotive, "implausibly large" quickly becomes "bare minimum".

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[Jared McMahon]

More pics.

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[Jared McMahon]

One more.

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[Andrew Fleck]

Thanks for sharing Jared. That is a nice looking shop. I wouldn't mind having a few of those pieces myself.

[David Kumm]

Great stuff. Old iron is tough to beat when dialed in. Keeps settings forever. Dave

[Mark Bolton]

The lathe alone makes me angry with you... hrmph

[Jared McMahon]

The yellowish thing at the far end is my empty soda can for scale. I guesstimate the bed length at 10', possibly a bit more.

[Jim Andrew]

Must be cool to live in an area where old iron is readily available. The only old Iron I have scored is an old Oliver wood lathe, that was in a local school district probably 40 years ago. The guy who had it said it is old enough to draw social security.

[Mike Heidrick]

Grab a brush and clean those ways off on the lathe and get some oil on them.

[Stephen Pereira]

A friend of mine, master machinist, also does volunteer work for RR club. One of his projects was making castings for old steam whistles.

[Charles Coolidge]

Step away from the machinery and grab a broom! ;-)

[Mike Cozad]

That lathe is tiny! Lol. Google some video of turning rail car wheels. Its makes the scale of that lathe come right into focus. I have family that has been machinists or in the tight tolerance machining business all their life. I once toured a facility that had a machine so large the operator rode along with the tooling in a cab. It was massive.
When I worked in the steel food can industry the plants I worked in had lathes the size you have pictured. We used them to make our own tooling. The dies to make cups for a 3" diameter can in a 150 ton press can get to a pretty large diameter so you need a good sized machine to sling the metal around....

[Will Boulware]

That's awesome! Thanks for sharing. Love seeing old stuff, especially when it's being used to work on more old stuff! :D

[Jared McMahon]

I happen to volunteer on days when the shop is basically empty, so I only indirectly see what others are working on. The metalworking area doesn't seem to change much, at least in the handful of months I've been around. The woodworking area always has plenty of signs of life (chips, moved gear, chips, work pieces, chips, etc) so I make a point of leaving enough time at the end of a shift to clean up after whatever I've been doing, and then at least one other work area or machine. Hopefully it makes life better for the weekday guys.

And a while back, when I was grousing about my drill press and looking into old iron, I stumbled onto some companies that make gun drills as well as lathes targeted at the oil industry. And yeah, that changed my size perspective in a hurry. :O