Scraping, books, and obsessions

There are several books I tend to plug as shop resources and references.

One is Edward Connelly's "Reconditioning Machine Tools". IMHO it's the most complete compilation of skills, methonds, and resource description of hand scraping used to rebuild machine tools so far published. While it was written in the 1950's its material is applicable in the home shop in 2006 wherever frustrated hime shop machinists gather worn out and nearly free machine tools with the intent of rebuilding them into new performance, accuracy, and operability.

Some of you have copies. They are expensive. I see on center bottom page 80 of the Sep/Oct issue of Home Shop Machinist an ad by Machine Tool Publications offering "Machine Tool Reconditioning" at a 25% discount for orders of 20 copies or more. About $70 beats $93.

If some good Samaritan wants to take on a thankless task he could gather 20 or more committments, take orders, gather the money, buy the books, and mail them off.

Just a suggestion. It worked once a few years ago but it was a real struggle for the Samaritan.

It's a bit late in the day for me Forrest but I'd still be interested if the same Samaritan was also prepared to mail my copy to the U.K.

It was done on the HSM forum several years ago, and it turned into quite a fiasco for the samaritan.

There were two reasons for the fiasco, one was people who expressed interest, but delayed sending payment, the other was the inability of the publisher to handle the large quantity if orders in a short time. As I recall, they had to send it out in several lots, and it took quite a while to fulfill all of the orders.

The samaritan ended up with extra copies, and out of pocket expenses to cover them as well as the thankless task of packaging and mailing the books. The samaritan dropped from sight and has not been heard from for several years.

Perhaps the publisher could be approached to perform some of the tasks of the samaritan as the increased sales would be to his direct benefit.

If anyone is interested in the undertaking, they would be advised to look through the HSM site archives and read up on the transaction. I seem to recall it took well over a year for it to fully play out, and most of the problems were caused by the publisher's inability to deliver.