One of my first manufacturing jobs was in a small shop making precision rifles. We did the whole nine yards. Drilled, reamed and rifled the barrels. Machined the bolt actions and made the gunstocks out of beautiful California Claro walnut.
One of the jobs was grinding angles on the bolt handle before it was welded onto the bolt. These angles were important in that they had to nestle nicely into the action body when the bolt was closed and locked.
The Daily Grind
The grinding was done freehand on a belt sander. A template was provided to check the angles against, but otherwise the only control was the skill of the guy doing the grinding. Now that I have spent a lifetime in manufacturing I can see that it was a poor way to control a process. I did however, start me down the path of understanding the connection between mind and body.
I ruined probably 30 of the first ones I tried to grind. Grind a little bit, test, grind a little bit more, test,grind some more-Crap-throw it away-do it again.
I don’t know at what point when I actually entered the zone. 200 pieces, 500 pieces, a thousand-I don’t know. All I know is that there were 3 angles on the part and I was doing it in 3 moves. Grind, rotate, grind, rotate, grind, drop in bucket. I took you longer to read this than it took me to do it. I didn’t even check them and they always fit beautifully. I did not check them because I could feel that they are right. If one happened to not feel right I would set it aside and more than likely it would need some adjustment.
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There can be no discussion of foundations without talking about the ultimate foundation-The Earth we live on.
