Well one of my interests, shooting, has led me to look at some of the high end shotguns out there. Most of the older British, Belgian, Italian and Spanish guns, were made with little more than hand files, hammers and chisels, and very limited machinery such as maybe a pillar drill.

All changed now of course, machinery takes away a lot of the drudgery , but old fashioned hand tools still have their place.

There was also Sally, another Stuart model that did use a Myford but not a lot else, just change the last number of the URL to get the next installment. Hand Maiden was the one done with even less.

You may be interested in an account by R Bradley of secretly constructing a small screwcutting lathe together with many accessories in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during WW2. The article was originally published in Engineering magazine in Jan 1949, and was reprinted in Guy Lautard’s “Bedside Reader”. It’s amazing what was done with extremely limited materials and resources.

Ship models, largely in bone, by French prisoners of war in the Napoleonic wars, trench art, a full-size glider and various models by WW2 POWs, medal-winning models made with machine tools most would think incapable of any kind of precision, and then, of course, all the works of craftsmanship and art in history and pre-history, made using hand methods, with tools often made from materials that we would consider hopeless, clocks and watches and so on and so on. Once I start thinking about what has been done by people who know how to achieve the impossible with nothing, I start to think that I should just pack up and slink quietly away. I need all the help I can get from precision machinery to de-skill tasks, as much as possible.