I also learned my trade from my Dad who was a Journeyman Machinist for Cat in Peoria IL before WW2 and was recruited to come to MN during the war to run a lathe at Northern Pump a huge plant up here the Navy took control of and they made 12" guns and bomb sites. When he arrived they didn't need lathe operators, but they needed Maintenance Men, so he Apprenticed under a German Immigrent who taught him to hand scrape.
He also thought of a device to help in testing parallelism of ways and after the war he patented it. It was and is called the King-Way Alignment Gauge. When I was a 10 or 12 he would bring home Myford OD Grinder tables or Boyer Shultz table to scrape at night in our basement and my brother Tom and I would watch and "help". Any of you Dad's know what I mean, but he was patient and we began to learn, during my summer vacations we would work with him rebuilding machines. I remember working at medical device plants scraping Myfords in my teens and Onans when I was in my late teens. This was before the Biax Power Scraper was invented and we would scrape by hand or use a Anderson Power Scraper (shown in the Connelly book) (My Dad knew Connely as he was a Vo-Tech teacher in St. Paul).
Over the years we would share shops with Millwrights so I worked with them and continued to rebuild and Apprentice under my Dad. In the spring of 1971 I was 20 and we had a huge fight and I drove up to Alaska with 2 friends (another story and adventure) while I was up there I got a letter from my Mom and she said that my Dad had got a big contract and if I could get home I could go with to Iran. I borrowed plane fare from a friend and flew home. Had to apply for a passport and make up with my Dad. So in July of 1971 my Dad and Millright named Don and I flew to Iran where we worked for 3 months installing a machines in a machining plant for BMY of York PA who had built Sherman tanks during WW2 and after the war had sold /given several hundred to Iran. The plant was to rebuild and modernize these tanks. It was an amazing experience and I had my 21st birthday in Masjid-i-Solimon Iran (MIS for short). When I returned home I went alone around the world and my Dad came back through Europe. Don Stayed and his family eventually moved there.
After that I was working full time as a Machine Rebuilder at the used machinery company who had sold all the machine tools to BMY and had also liquidated a Boeing plant where most of these machine originated from. I spent several years working as a contractor at Midwestern Machinery in Mpls with my Dad and after he passed. The owner became like an uncle. Working there I got a heck of an education as one week I was scraping a Moore Jig Bore and the next a 600 ton punch press, or a G&L or Lucas Boring bar. I scraped and repaired just about any or all types of machines over the next 20 + years. We bought our first BIAX Scraper in 1972 and continued to make King-Ways. (You will occasionally see one with Sherr-Timico on the box, My Dad sold them a license to make them too as well as Do-All, both MN companies).
We got an order from GM in Indianapolis in 1982 I think and they wanted someone to come and demo it, I flew down and did it. While in the plant I saw about 50 guys scraping by hand and off the cuff said "how come your not using Biax Power Scrapers?" They had no clue what they were....so I went back and for the next 2 years taught their men in that plant as well as in 2 other plant in Indy how to scrape with Biax. I came back and got my guys jobs working for Kurt Mfg (the vise company as I was a friend of Bill Kuban the son of the owner who my Dad knew), liquidated the shop machinery and started out on my own with my Dad's straight-edges and my Biax's teaching rebuilding and scraping. Since the 1980's I have taught well over 20,000 men and women all over the world how to rebuild / build / scrape ways. I have taught several hundred students and for dozens of new machine builders here in the states, Europe and mostly in Taiwan.
I now work from my home in Cottage Grove MN and rebuild machines for old friends here in MN and continue to teach. Plus I have become addicted to the shop forums and was aching for a board like this one as the others were so unfriendly. I still write on the other boards because some of the people on there need to know the correct way, many of those guys on the other ones, figure they are experts after scraping 1 machine or some are all talk.
I have never Met Nelson or Tony and some of the other Moderators, but they feel like family to me. Uncle Nelson, Little Brother Tony and cousin Ray.....lol...and all my "kids" who I teach. I had a man in Turkey tell me once after I taught him to scrape at "Spinner" a German new machine builder who opened a plant in Istanbul...This student, with tears in his eyes told me through an interpreter "I taught him like his Father did" Made me cry too...so I now call my students "my kids".
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