[ExI] Kevin Kelly and Dave Gingery (was: Relays (was: Oil))

[Bryan Bishop]

On Wednesday 02 July 2008, Kevin Freels wrote:
>  Gathering the raw materials and refining the metal alone would be a
> significant accomplishment for one person.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_J._Gingery

> Gingery is most famous for his Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From
> Scrap series, which details how to build a reasonably complete
> machine shop at low cost, often from scrap metal and other items. The
> hobbyist starts by constructing a small foundry capable of melting
> silicon-aluminum and zinc alloys from recycled automotive parts. Then
> green sand castings are used to make a metal lathe. The lathe is the
> first machine built since it can be used to help build itself. The
> lathe and foundry are then used to make more complicated machine
> tools.
>
> There is another book by Gingery, not usually counted as part of the
> series, entitled "Building a Gas Fired Crucible Furnace", which can
> be substituted for that describing the charcoal foundry.
>
> The dominant themes of the series are recycling, using inexpensive
> and free materials, and bootstrapping the shop's capabilities.
> Gingery is noted for using basic methods, seldom used today, in order
> to make it possible for a skilled hobbyist to build the machines in
> the book series, usually without the aid of power tools or other
> expensive instruments.
>
> In addition to the Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap
> series, Dave Gingery and his son Vincent have published a large
> number of booklets on shop practices, engine construction and
> mechanical miscellanea.

And from our favorite editor, Kevin Kelly:
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/03/bootstrapping_t.php

> A favorite fantasy game for engineers is to imagine how they might
> re-invent essential technology from scratch. If you were stranded on
> an island, or left behind after Armageddon, and you needed to make
> your own blade, say, or a book, maybe a pair of working radios, what
> would it take to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?
>
> Occasionally tinkerers get to engage their fantasy. In February 1942,
> R. Bradley,  a British Officer in the Royal artillery in World War II
> was captured and then held prisoner by Japanese in Singapore. Their
> camp was remote, supplies were almost non-existent, and they were
> treated roughly as POWs; when they rebelled they were locked in a
> confinement shed without food. But they were tinkerers, too. Together
> with some other POWs in his camp, Bradley stole hand tools from the
> Japanese soldiers and from these bits and pieces he transformed scrap
> metal into a miniature lathe. The small lathe was ingenious. It was
> tiny enough to be kept a secret, big enough to be useful. It could be
> disassembled into pieces that could be tucked in a backpack and 
> moved in the camp’s many relocations. Since large pieces of metal
> were hard to acquire without notice, the tailstock of the lathe was
> two steel pieces dovetailed together. The original bed plate was cut
> with a cold chisel.
>
> The lathe was a tool-making egg; it was used to manufacture more
> sophisticated items.  With it the prisoners machined a duplicate key
> for the solitary confinement shed (!), and manufactured a hidden
> battery source for a secret radio. During the two years of their
> interment the lathe remade the tools -- like taps and dies -- which
> were first used to create it. A lather has those self-reproductive
> qualities.
>
> Recently a guy re-invented the fabric of industrial society in his
> garage. The late Dave Gingery was a midnight machinist in
> Springfield, Missouri who enjoyed the challenge of making something
> from nothing, or perhaps it is more accurate to say, making very much
> by leveraging the power of very little. Over years of tinkering,
> Gingery was able to bootstrap a full-bore machine shop from alley
> scraps. He made rough tools that made better tools, which then made
> tools good enough to make real stuff.
>
>
>
> Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. This was a small
> 5-gallon bucket packed with sand. In its center was a coffee can of
> smoldering BBQ charcoal. Inside the can of charcoal was a small
> ceramic crucible into which he threw scrap aluminum – cans, etc.
> Gingery forced air into this crude furnace via a fan, burning the
> charcoal with enough heat to melt the aluminum. He poured the molten
> metal into a mold of wet sand carved out in the shape he wanted. When
> the cast was cool he had a workable metal holding plate, which became
> the heart of a homemade lathe. Other lathe parts were cast. He
> finished these rough parts with hand tools. His one “cheat” was
> adding a used electric motor – although it is not impossible to
> imagine a wind or water powered version.
>
> When the rough lathe was up and running he used it to turn out the
> parts for a drill press. With the drill press and lathe operating he
> constantly reworked pieces of the lathe itself, replacing parts with
> improved versions. In this way, his tiny machine shop was an
> upcreation device, capable of generating higher a machine of
> precision than itself. He used this upcreation tool to manufacture
> the pieces needed for a fully functioning milling machine. When the
> milling machine was completed he could make almost anything.
>
>
>
> Gingery recapitulated the evolution of technology, the great pattern
> by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on infinitum.
> This expansion of upcreation power is the means by which an entire
> culture lifts itself out of mud by pulling up on its bootstraps. Yet
> is it obvious this little demonstration is not pure. As a way to make
> your own machine tools, Gingerys’ plans are fine and dandy. He uses
> cast off washing machine motors and other junkyard scrap parts to
> grow a fairly robust machine shop. But as an example of relaunching a
> technological society in a kind of Robinson Crusoe maneuver – landing
> somewhere and starting civilization up -- it’s a cheat because in
> this latter game you don’t get to start with discarded aluminum cans,
> scavenged nuts and bolts, old electric motors and waste sheet metal.
> To really navigate the minimum bootstrap path through the industrial
> web, you’d have to start with finding your own ore, mining and
> refining it with primitive tools, firing up bricks, rolling out sheet
> metal, developing screws and bolts by hand – all just to get you to
> the point where you’d have enough tools and materials to make the
> simple 5-gallon bucket foundry that Dave Gingery started with.
>
> About two dozen survival schools in the US will host, on any given
> weekend, a class on how to make your own clothes from hides, chip a
> knife from stone or bone, cut and assemble a shelter from trees, and
> generally live off the land with self-made tools. They start where
> Gingery does not – with the elements as we find them in nature. It’s
> a lot of work. Starting a fire without matches is possible, but only
> after about as much practice as it takes to become an expert at a
> video game. Even with all the tools the world’s best expert can make
> from scratch this way (about 100 in total), it’s a hard life that
> appeals to few.
>
>
>
> Beyond these primeval tools, the interdependency of created objects
> is astounding. Select at random any one of the many thousands items
> within the reach of where you now sit. None of them could exist
> without many of the others around it. No technology is an island.
>
> Let’s take a very sophisticated item: one web page. A web page relies
> on perhaps a hundred thousand other inventions, all needed for its
> birth and continued existence. There is no web page anywhere without
> the inventions of HTML code, without computer programming, without
> LEDs or cathode ray tubes, without solid state computer chips,
> without telephone lines, without long-distance signal repeaters,
> without electrical generators, without high-speed turbines, without
> stainless steel, iron smelters, and control of fire. None of these
> concrete inventions would exist without the elemental inventions of
> writing, of an alphabet, of hypertext links, of indexes, catalogs,
> archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recapitulate
> a web page you have to re-create all these other functions. You might
> as well remake modern society.
>
> The more we try to untangle this web of interdependency, to tease a
> single discovery away from the tangle of related and supporting
> inventions, the more futile it becomes. We get the same web of
> sustenance for any modern substance or device. Antibiotics? A field
> of inventions starting with sterile techniques, to chemical pathways,
> to pumping technology, packaging innovations, animal studies, testing
> procedures, statistical analysis,  and  many more are needed
>
> This is why restarting a sophisticated society after a devastating
> setback is so hard. Without all the adjacent items in a given
> ecological bundle, a single technology can have no effect; therefore
> you need them all working to get one working; therefore you have to
> repair them all at once. When war, earthquake, tsunami, flood or fire
> destroys a society’s infrastructure indiscriminately, the job of
> restarting/rediscovering them all  at once is impossible. The
> conundrum of disaster relief is a testimony to this deep
> interdependency: one needs roads to bring petrol but petrol to clear
> roads, medicines to heal people, but healthy people to dispense
> medicines, communications to enable organization but organization to
> restore communications. We see the interdependent platform of
> technology primarily when it breaks down.
>
>
>
> This is also the explanation of why we should not confuse a good
> clear view of the future with a short distance. We can see the
> perfect outlines of where technology is going, but we tend to
> overestimate how soon it will come. Usually the delay (in our eager
> eyes) is due to the invisible ecology of other needed technologies
> that aren’t ready yet.  The invention will hang suspended in the
> future for many years, not coming any closer the now. Then when the
> ignored co-technologies are in place it will appear in our lives in a
> sudden, with much surprise and applause for its unexpected
> appearance.

- Bryan
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http://heybryan.org/