Machine shop skills are getting rare

The ability to work a machine shop is a great skill to have even in these days.

Skilled machinists seems to be a rare breed, especially those that take pride in their work and actually can read the material and come up with working reliable solutions.

Keith Fenner is one of the persons with such skills that is present on YouTube, there are a few more as well. But never rule out the skill to operate machines by hand instead of programming them since sometimes you need to get the feeling for the material you work with to provide a good result even with unknown or unusual materials.

The setup in this video is probably one of the more dangerous ones I have seen with a lathe, but sometimes there's only one way to do a thing like this.

Experience comes through trial and error and I hope that some of you that sees this might consider that this is a skill worth to learn and preserve. Just be careful out there - machines like these are very powerful, so don't rush it.