The Modern Machinist

by John T Usher
reprinted by Lindsay Publications Inc

Most machine shop books are textbooks and are used to teach raw beginners. Once in a while you'll stumble across an old book that offers tricks and expertise gathered by the author through years of hard work and offered not only to beginners but to journeymen as well. This from 1895 is one of them.

Here you get some basics but far more important you get the practical skills needed to repair machines, the kind of practical knowledge that Osborne (Echoes of the Oil Country) obviously possessed. This about the skills of installing, building and repairing machinery. You'll learn various ways of using drifts, bending and straightening bent machine parts, details of assembling a steam tractor (traction engine) from parts, machining a raw casting for a steam engine base, truing up a crank pin, doing double face milling, creating new custom keys for flywheels and pulleys, making boring tools, boring and turning engine cylinders, making circular cutting tools, and on and on and on.

You get unusual stuff. Not the material covered so often in beginning texts. The author in the preface states flat out that he intentionally left out the obvious material, and that his goal was to show machinists (machine-men) how get the most out of the garden-variety machine tools that most any shop should have.

You get great illustrations... beautifully drawn and very revealing. And lots of them.

We reprinted this originally in 1990 and after several years discontinued it. We've brought it back. At least for a while.

Great reading for machine nuts. Educational. But forget that. This is just plain fun to read. I like it. I think you will, too. Order one! 5-1/2 x 8-1/2 softcover 322 pages

No. 20501 ... $13.95

Chapters have general titles:

Measuring Instruments, Vise Work, Inserting Pieces in Seams, Chasing, Erecting, Setting or Lining Shafting, Planing & Shaping, Chucking Engine Beds & Cylinders etc, modern milling practice, lathe work, and more.

Within the chapters are scores of individual topics suchs as:

Lapping "snap gauges" to size * Drift and drift plug for cutting key ways * Methods of holding the work while it is being "chased" * Box-tools-fitted on the slide-rest * Box-tools -with circular cutters * Babbitting the crank-shaft bearings and the various methods and appliances employed for securing the correct alignment of the crank-shaft * Laying off the bed of a stationary engine, in the rough. * Method of chucking thin work * Improved form of "monitor-chuck" for general chucking purposes * Improvements made in "milling practice" by individual operators and superintendents * Cutter-heads for boring-bars, and the objections existing in the ordinary forms * Simple method of chucking the work so that the different surfaces can be operated on at one setting on the supplementary chucking-plate * sliding lathe chuck employed as an adjustable chucking arbor, for turning pulleys, eccentrics and work of a similar nature * Advanced practice of turning and boring as exemplified in the turning and construction of cranks * Re-turning crank-pins that are worn or bent out of truth without removal from the crank * Methods of chucking the cylinders for "steam engines, "pumps", "ammonia" and "air-compressors," and other machinery, for boring and turning * Measuring the bore of a semicircular bearing by means of the "odd-legged calipers" and on and on and on.