Metalworking - Doing It Better: Machining, Welding, Fabricating

This book, which draws heavily from Tom Lipton's bestselling Metalworking Sink or Swim, will help you develop new metalworking skills and improve those you already have.The most substantive changes between Doing it Better (DIB)and Sink or Swim (SOS) are found in the page layout and design. A short table of contents has been added to each chapter, and sections now are numbered in the Table of Contents and throughout the text, making it easier to find topics. Subsections are now listed in color and many headings for subsections have been added. Most pages are now self-contained and whenever possible, topics begin on new pages or columns. Photos are now almost always on the same page as their text reference. Another user-friendly feature is the expansion of the index, which is 60% longer than the original one.

Both Tom and the book's publisher want anyone who already has SOS to realize that there is not a compelling reason to also get DIB. From the get-go, that was never their goal. Instead, their goal has been to broaden the appeal of the acclaimed text and photos in SOS by making these materials more user-friendly for the home hobbyist and fans of DIY.

This collection of priceless tips, tricks, skills, and experiences from a veteran of the trade is presented in a way that captures the readers' attention and engages them in the process of furthering their skills. It includes shop-tested descriptions and illustrations of creative and unique techniques and observations from four decades in the metalworking trades. Perfect for hobbyists and veterans alike, and everyone in between, and for those who work out of either small shops or garages, backyard facilities and basements. It will help any metalworker do better work and do it faster!

The shop environment. Basic generic skills such as drawing and sketching, accuracy, speed, shop math and trigonometry, and angles. Setting up your shop, including floors, light, heating and cooling, workbenches and tables, air supply, raw material storage and handling, safety equipment, filing, sawing, rigging and lifting. Manual and CNC lathes. Manual and CNC mills. Welding. Flame straightening. Sheet metal, patterns, cones, and tanks and baffles. Sanding, grinding, and abrading. Covers hundreds of shop-tested techniques. These creative and unique techniques have been shop-tested by the author the old-fashioned way, by repetition and hard work. Features hundreds of 4-color photographs. Metalworking: Doing It Betterincludes over 900 4-color images personally photographed by the author to illustrate the methods he describes in the book. Fully integrates text and photographs. The guide has been designed so that in virtually every case, the tips and the supporting photographs appear together on the same page. Provides wide range of topics. Many of the topics address specific trade skills, working with manual and CNC lathes and mills, as well as welding flame straightening, sheet metal, sanding, grinding.