The Day a New Guy Forgot the Guide Bushing
The new guy’s name was Marcus. He’d been with us for about two weeks. He came from a general machining background — vertical mills, manual lathes, that kind of work — but this was his first exposure to deep hole drilling. He was sharp, asked good questions, and seemed to have a solid grasp of the fundamentals of machining. I was optimistic about him. What I didn’t know at the time was that Marcus had never even seen a guide bushing before. In the general machining world, you don’t use them. A drill chuck holds the drill, the drill goes into the material, and that’s the whole story. The concept of a separate precision guide that supports the drill at the entry point — that’s unique to deep hole drilling and a few other specialized processes. It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t know about bushings because they were so fundamental to everything I did. ...