making

When I first became interested in machining I remember looking for information on how to run a lathe and mill. At the time I found information in Booth library at Eastern Illinois University. At first, every book I found was on computer numeric controlled machines. This was of little interest to me as I was curious about manually run machines. I stumbled across an old text simply called, How To Run A Lathe written by South Bend Machine Tool Co. This text gave me the language and identified the components of the lathe that I knew nothing about and gave me the start I needed to teach myself about machining. Up until finding this book, it had been difficult to find anyone who knew much about running a manual lathe. It was as if the skills and techniques had become obsolete and meaningless. I was lucky though, as the internet (which at that time was relatively new) introduced me to a myriad of people with similar interests in the topic. I found many retired machinists who had a new found interest in their skills and in sharing them on the world wide web with anyone who was interested. I could never have imagined to this day how books and the internet would progress my knowledge and feed my curiosities.

My father started his career in the printing industry as an apprentice for RR Donnelley & Sons. At the time printing was done via letterpress and the skills that my father learned were engraving of typeface and setting type. He still has the toolbox that he constructed, along with the gravers, stones, and metal bound book with hand engraved cover with the company logo that he created as a part of his apprenticeship. Soon after completing the program, letterpress was phased out in favor of offset printing. His skills had become obsolete. Nonetheless, he learned the new skills associated with offset printing and worked his way up the press and out of the press room and into prepress where he manually stripped film to assemble the page layout. This layout was then transfered to plates that were sent to the press room to be run on large offset printing presses with their webbing running the length of large factories. After the advent of desktop publishing or digital prepress, my father's skills were once again deemed unnecessary and his job was cut as a part of corporate downsizing. So you can imagine my surprise when I was asked by the former professor in printmaking if I could weld a piece onto one of the UWM letterpress presses so that it would be functional again. They had decided to teach a course using letterpress and needed a functional press.

Knowing a skill is important. It gives you purpose. It makes you a contributor. Making and creating something one of a kind cannot be reduced to a formula or program. There are a million decisions made and a trillion problems solved during the process. If we train the young people of our society to only regurgitate answers and to fit the model of what already exists, we are doing them a disservice. Our society needs innovators, problem solvers, free thinkers, skilled individuals, and people who know how to take action and use their minds AND THEIR HANDS to make things happen.

I feel like my father's apprenticeship and specialization has given him a foundation in creating and problem solving and has allowed him to cross into other areas and be successful at anything he tries. Similarly, I have found that knowing as much as possible about what it takes to fabricate in metal has made it much easier to cross into new areas of interest and to apply what I know about metal to other materials and processes. Fabric is metal, welding is sewing, clay is leather, throwing is machining, computers are mechanics, etc., etc.; it's all the same. In the end, everything is related and it all gets reduced back to the simple act of making and creating.

Talk about it all being connected..... from wood, to metal, to leather, to paper......

Michael sent me information on this BBC series on the Gutenberg press. It's marvelous and serves as a precedent for how technology can revolutionize society. Watch it..... you won't be disappointed.