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Any Professional Youtube Metalworking Channels?

ewlsey

Diamond
Joined
Jul 14, 2009
Location
Peoria, IL
I like browsing youtube for interesting videos related to metalworking, machining, and machine repair/rebuilding. However, at least 99.9% of the videos I find are home shop hobby guys dicking around on toy machines (Tormach included) and moaning about the high cost of everything or bored retired guys who endlessly wax poetic about the old days of manual machining.

Where can I find some decent videos of guys doing cool shit at a pro level? There was a guy who posted here a few years ago, Abomb79. He has a youtube channel with some good content. He's definitely a pro. Tom Lipton has a channel with some good stuff but it's buried under piles of useless crap about hammers and esoteric minutia related to every detail of machining. There is Keith Fenner, but something just rubs me the wrong way about that guy. Some of the repairs he does are good but others seem like he spends 2 weeks scratching away at something to avoid spending a little money to have someone with the right tools do the job for him in a fraction of the time. Plus he's always trying to sell a bunch of junk.

There are corporate videos which are just adds for new machines or tools. Some are interesting. Most are not. I can only watch so many impellers be machined on 5 axis mills.

I know that it's only logical that the hobbyists would dominate. The pro guys are busy making money and it takes a lot of time to make a decent video. Plus they probably never assumed anyone would want to see something they do every day.

Any suggestions? I intend to make a few myself but time is an issue for me as well.
 
not sure what the motivation would be for a real pro to put out some real good videos.
Putting out intellectual property for the whole world to see and use against you doesn't sound like good business.
Too bad individual countries don't have their own internet.
 
not sure what the motivation would be for a real pro to put out some real good videos.
Putting out intellectual property for the whole world to see and use against you doesn't sound like good business.
Too bad individual countries don't have their own internet.

Eh. Are you really doing some super secret stuff that no one else ever thought of? Most guys like talking about their work and are happy to show it off.
 
Most of the places with really neat stuff or processes have very strict rules against posting any of it online or any pictures.
Even when commonly known what is being done.
I once tried to get some Ford engineers in to tour a GM plant.
Over half of them had come from said plant anyways and certainly nothing secret or new. These places trade engineers monthly, what the heck......we all go fishing and bambi killing together.
You would have thought I wanted to bring in Satan himself from the uproar out of corporate.
Yet at the same time the chosen ones are touring Toyota and vice a versa.

I know some here can't talk freely, many can not post pictures......... I have gotten legal papers in the mail for saying too much on this board which just floored me.
Everyone likes to think they have a "trade secret" even when the rest of the world is doing the same thing all day long.
Even the machine builders are very restricted on what they can show on the net. You sign 40-100 pages worth of legal stuff no human can read if you want to play.
40 years, now I have one 4 drawer filling cabinet just dedicated to these things and they get longer every year.
Special R&D is different, this gives your customer a leg up for maybe two-four years and you should keep quite but do not think for a minute that your customer will be loyal to you in return.

So... No ......you do not and will not see the the big time on the net.
 
ROBRENZ is the best machinist I've seen on Youtube. He's old schoolish, but really good and tries to haul ass. His manual lathe technique is pretty bad ass. Very smart guy. I don't agree with all his methods.


Joe Pieczynski is okay if you're into lower precision type machining. He's old school. He's better than any of the home shop idiots that show people how to make stuff.

Keith Fenner is good if you're into more repair/fab/marine type shit. He's old school. His older videos are better when he just showed himself making stuff. His newer stuff is him talking a lot about shit I don't care about.

Abom79 is quite good at the type of work he does. He's legit. Old school. I skip over most of his talking.

oxtoolco Talks way way too much. He thinks he's pretty awesome. He's decent. old school. Mostly makes retarded projects.

Keith Rucker is actually kind of fun to watch if you're into old machines. He does some decent work.

Clickspring is really good for a hobby guy.

Tublicane is mostly annoying. His manual machining technique is high school shop teacher level. He likes collecting tools and talking about them.

I'm probably forgetting some others.





I haven't seen a professional new school machinist on youtube. No one good. It's 98% hobby idiots and a few old school pros.
 
Yeah Clicksprings video quality makes the hobby machines seem so insignificant.

I think I like him the best out of them all.

Eventually id like to make some videos about my iron. All my stuff is old wore out scrap, but it seems people on YT are impressed with a 20" lathe doing a roughing pass. Nothing wrong with that, and there is other stuff out there that no one seems to show.

Id like to see some HBM work, one off precision stuff with a jig bore (like the hydrualic pump I've been trying to finish for over a year), or line boring in situ, etc.

I've only seen two guys do HBM stuff with any set up/job explanation. And neither has many videos or of mind blowing quality.

And I'd like to see some CNC stuff too. Someone to open the eyes of manual troglodytes like me. And not the NYCNC level, real iron, not on a Tormach.
 
Yes, big companies have lots of really bored lawyer who sit around and dream this crap up. I was in a plant that makes big yellow tractors working on a machine tool. Wanted to take a few photos of the electrical cabinet to cover my ass (looked like a squirrel had been locked in there and tried desperately to get out). My god the rules and regulations to get that done... I should have just taken the picture and not said a word...

I'd love to see some videos from the guys who contribute here. Guys like Ox, Edster, Oldwrench, SND, ^CarbideBob^, etc. Maybe it will naturally happen as cell phone cameras become more powerful and completely ubiquitous.
 
Keith Fenner is good if you're into more repair/fab/marine type shit. He's old school. His older videos are better when he just showed himself making stuff. His newer stuff is him talking a lot about shit I don't care about.

Abom79 is quite good at the type of work he does. He's legit. Old school. I skip over most of his talking.

oxtoolco Talks way way too much. He thinks he's pretty awesome. He's decent. old school. Mostly makes retarded projects.

Keith Rucker is actually kind of fun to watch if you're into old machines. He does some decent work.

Clickspring is really good for a hobby guy.

Tublicane is mostly annoying. His manual machining technique is high school shop teacher level. He likes collecting tools and talking about them.

I'm probably forgetting some others.

That Tubalcaine codger is possibly the most annoying person on Youtube. I've suffered through a few of his videos and there's just nothing redeeming about them. He'll spend 200 hours building some little widget you could buy for $100 except he does it with a clapped out Bridgeport, a toy lathe, and scrap materials so it looks like a piece of crap. He wants everyone to worship him too. If there are negative comments on his videos he just disables them.

I love the one where he claims he invented the drill adapter to raise and lower the knee on a Bridgeport.

There is a guy called Trainman or something. He's up for second most annoying. He wears a hard hat in his hobby shop for no explicable reason.

I do like Keith Rucker though he has a tendency to take things apart, clean and paint them, then put them back together and call them "rebuilt".

I think my favorite is a guy called AvE. Not much machining content, but he's smart, funny, and I love his power tool tear downs.
 
RP Mechanics is a guy I like to watch. Although be only has a small Atlas 618, he knows how to use it properly and makes little projects.

Dave Richards is a hoot to watch with his lineshaft powered steam powered machine shop.

Chris DiPrisco is making a DIY VMC out of steel and aluminum plate using his 2 axis CNC BP to cut out all the plates. It's done and in the debugging phase.

This Old Tony.....how can we forget him. His humor is second to none and the video work is great.

As far as woodworking goes, I like watching Frank Howarth, Matthias Wandel.
 
Yeah, This Old Tony has some interesting stuff. He made a hydraulic press that was very nice. He has some scraping videos too. I think he posts here.
 
I basically learned how to do all this off of YouTube + PM + Google + Instagram (you can learn a lot just by looking at people's setups).

Honestly - for autodidactic types, it has been a pretty decent way to climb the curve quickly, but once you get beyond the basics? This method totally falls apart. With no guidance or mentorship or exposure to how pros do things, the experience velocity decreases pretty goddamn fast. For example; I mostly work in aluminum, but I wanted to start learning how to cut stainless, so I bought a chunk and just started throwing operations on it to get some experience. With zero feedback; I couldn't tell you if my feeds and speeds are on point, if my surface finish is even remotely acceptable, or if the cut was even set up properly. It's sorta feeling in the dark.

Other forums are way too home-gamer to answer questions. This place has no interest in answering the basics. The folks who are real stone cold professionals who I've had the great fortune to make contact with are way too busy to answer stupid noob 202 level questions.

I don't think I'm the only guy in this position - this industry use to be about starting out sweeping the shop floor and working your way up. Now, it's starting in your garage/basement and building up your career independently. DIY CNC gear and Tormachs and old Robodrills are accessible and sucking people in pretty deep.

Long and short way of saying that I think there is a huge market for 2-3 modern, kick ass, real CNC guys to have a huge impact on the pool of knowledge out there. Lots of people are yearning for something beyond the experienced home gamer and old codger stuff.

I wold kill for 3-4 more ROBRENZ level guys on YouTube.
 
I can't really handle the hobby guys. I just don't understand why they make videos?

I don't know. A hobby serve no practical purpose. It's purely for entertainment. I guess making the videos is entertaining. For machinist and a lot of hobby guys, machining is a means to an end. They want the widget they are making, the machining is just a tool to get there. Then there are other guys who really just like machining. They dream up little things to make that they really don't care about. They just want to play with the machine and show everyone how cool it is.

It's not much different than taking a car to a car show or going to a meetup like NAMES.
 








 
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