Originally Posted by
Bent Ramrod
You might check with the Olde Tyme Book Store to see if they still have the Dave Gingery books.
His first book was how to build a foundry for melting down beer cans and casting aluminum. The second one was casting the aluminum into components and using them to build a working lathe. Then the series continued with using more castings, and the lathe, to make a milling machine, a shaper, a metal brake and some other things I can’t recall.
Even if you don’t intend to do any of that stuff, anyone even casually interested in self-sufficiency and machine design will find the books interesting. I think there used to be a site somewhere (or maybe it was a column in one of the home shop magazines) where people who had actually done this sent in pictures and descrIptions of their machines.