The Smartest Thing I Ever Saw a Machinist Do
The Routine Job That Wasn’t I was working with an older machinist named Carl who had been running deep hole drills since before I was born. He had started his career in the 1970s working on oilfield gun drilling machines, then moved into aerospace in the 1990s. By the time I met him, he had over thirty years of experience and could tell you the chip load for any material combination from memory. A job came in drilling a 25mm hole through 3 meters of barrel. The print called for 4140 steel heat treated to 28-32 HRC. For Carl, this was a routine job. He had drilled hundreds of similar barrels. ...