Iron Tour 2015 - Lots of pics

Is this iron tour going to be annual? or on a 5 year rotation or something? and will the next iron tour be advertised?

This was a one time event
I am a machinery dealer and have done bussiness with most of the shops we visited
Every year or so I am gonna visit some colleges abroad
I owned Tien a favor and asked if he would find it intresting to join me
He was enthousiastic from the start
So we picked the most intresting places and some
I visited PM members Kees and Martin and had the chance to visit some old and new customers
And I had the opportunity to see TIENS CAVE with his collection
It was a intresting week
And looking back all the pictures from Tien made it look much longer
I am still enjoying it

Peter from holland

peterve said:

I visited PM members Kees and Martin

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Maybe I missed the photos but were there some of Kees and Martin's shops and/or their actual human forms ?

Martin is on the picture in front of that big trainwheel in the snow
I have not seen Kees on a picture(yet)

Peter from Holland

I found this one on Youtube:


Overhaulin the Russian way, but it looks he does a decent job here. He has more of this on Youtube.

He put some music under the movie which I silenced, I rather would hear the actual grinding noise...

Nice vid. by the look of the DRO that ELB is quite old I would say late 70's ,looks in very good shape though obviously well looked after.

Just to keep this thread alive...

It was listed for sale today.Lets see how long it stays online.

Deckel Fräsmaschine FP4 MK Bj.90 Heidenhain TNC 113 in in Geretsried | eBay

Btw, has anybody noticed the old style head on Singer's LV aktiv machine?
I believe there were no aktiv models at all with this type of head.
Maybe this change, shows a preference?

zephyrous said:

Btw, has anybody noticed the old style head on Singer's LV aktiv machine?
I believe there were no aktiv models at all with this type of head.

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I'm not absolutely sure.
I positively recall seeing an older style FP3 (i.e. with rounded head) featuring a DC feed motor on the back at FPS.
I can't recall if it was aktiv or not, but there was clearly a machines generation with mixed attributes.

Speaking of wich, I just recalled this exemple currently on german eBay :

Deckel FP 3 Fräsmaschine mit Heidenhain Digitalanzeige Universalfräsmaschine in in Herdwangen-Schönach | eBay

Tien and Peter
I would like to thank you so much for the posting of this fantastic story and all the great photos. To be able to take part in your journey has been a great pleasure. We have all heard about the dealers you have visited and we have seen the photos on their homepages, but to see it in this way was really something special. Your post has made an entry into the Norwegian machine clubs and we all have had a good time admiring your story. In particular I liked the report on Mr Krämer’s workshop. What happens in his workshop is real magic.
Edvind

Edvind, I'm glad -and even proud- that this thread was inspiring enough for you to sign in and write your first post on PM
I can only hope there will be many more, since the stories you have to tell are certainly much more interesting than our modest journey (we were lurkers only).

For those who don't know, Edvind is the guy behind the website missiseipi.com a "must see" if you like beautiful machines and skilled restorations !

He and his northern gang are deep enough into machining and machine tools to have had Richard King himself make it to Norway and show them one trick or two about scraping... No less !

SCRAPING COURSE - www.missiseipi.com

Well, after visiting the Netherlands, Germany and Swiss, I thought it would make a nice addition to that little Iron Tour 2015, to see how they do on the other side of the planet...
So I took a flight to Vietnam. No less

Man ! Talk about a contrast !!!

I've found two shops during our stay, musing around in old pedestrian streets of Saigon.
The streets were so narrow that in both case, I even wonder how they got the machines in in the first place...




Want to see a shop ? Follow the three phased wires !





Those were minuscules shops with open doors on the street, in such a way that I could get in and take a look at what the guys were doing without having the feeling of disturbing or bothering anyone... Of course, not beeing to speak a single word of vietnamese didn't help, but it seems like machinists always find a way to understand with each other in the end.



I've seen people working on crude, old, probably totally worn out machines, using a minimalistic equipment, without any safety gear of any kind, in such a heat that they probably have to oversize the parts they make by 1.2 (at least !) if they want them to be within tolerances at 20°Celcius...










I tell you it is imperial / metric !!! if you have the gear set, that is...













The ancestors altar is a nice addition to any machine shop over there...





Of course, one could laugh at those guys working shirtless swith flip-flops, but they obviously make do with what they have and that is obviously not much.

I've found very nice people, surprised to see me interested in what they were doing, but always welcoming and encouraging me to step in and take a look, with the same smile I saw on almost all the faces I saw in that country.

Was a nice experience really, and I wish I could spend more time in that kind of places... I especially regret not beeing able to visit some much bigger shops I saw through the window of the car in the Hai Phong suburbs (probably working for shipyards and the such) but we were on our way to the Halong bay and that time, my travel mate was not Peter...

Very interesting photographs and very nicely done. I wonder if many of those machines are of French origin.
David

More likely chinese or russian I'd say.

Beside old buildings, houses and a few churches from the colonialist era, I didn't see anything french in Vietnam.

Plus those machines don't look like anything I've ever seen here.

Is that a wooden floor in the last shop ???

You did not find any machinery dealers then

Peter from holland

Peter

No wooden, but tiled floor.
I didn't find any machinery dealer but on the other hand, I didn't look for them. It was a holiday trip with the kids and wife and unfortunately, they don't share my taste for the smell of cutting oil...
As I wrote, the most interesting shops I saw were along the Hanoi to Haiphong road.
Haiphong was clearly the most industrial area I went to during this trip.
I really had to refrain from jumping from the van when we passed across a large shop in wich there was a half naked man standing on a vertical lathe, turning a huge part...
What was cool is most of the the shops and warehouse are directly on the street with widely open doors so I was able to see pretty cool things from the van. But to far away and to fast to take pictures anyway.

So perhaps you should go back then once
Perhaps with a more in machining intrested companion

Peter from Holland

Hi All,

Wow! I couldn`t get a word in edgeways so now I`m on page 9. Wonderful thread but although I like to look at an attractive machine I never lose sight of the fact that all that supposed accuracy lounging around in the dealers showrooms is totally irrelevant in my Luddite world. I felt rather irrationally that I needed to get a bucket of water to throw over TNB as he seemed about to burst into flames!
There`s no point in drooling over these overrated machines as you can strip your own machine down and with a modified file and the appropriate measuring tackle scrape your own machine to whatever accuracy you are capable of. During my apprenticeship I scraped a machine or two but have lost the knack of "fish tailing" as the shape of the scraped pattern is called in the UK. The Continentals use the "straight push" method which is supposed to be quicker.
Always remember that like a new paint job on an old machine can sell it, so can beautifully scraped slideways which can be done to disguise the scratches and not make the machine any more accurate as it`s only cosmetic!
Alan

Did you see the size of the stock on the floor in the photo of the guy sharpening his tool? Got to be careful moving those around with sandals on! Thanks for sharing. A few years ago someone posted a short video of an industrial street in Thailand with the kind of one stall shops.

Charles

bentley1930 said:

Hi All,
I felt rather irrationally that I needed to get a bucket of water to throw over TNB as he seemed about to burst into flames!
There`s no point in drooling over these overrated machines as you can strip your own machine down and with a modified file and the appropriate measuring tackle scrape your own machine to whatever accuracy you are capable of.

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As for me, it's your point I have hard time to get

Your statement is a bit like saying La Giaconda is nothing to rave about since it's up to anyone to take an old sheet, some paint and a few brushes, and to make his own to whatever level he's capable of.
There may be a part of truth in that, but I can also see a few shortcuts in the process.

It is sure that there were some porch painted or overrated machines amongst the ones we saw during our trip with Peter, but I certainly wouldn't put them all in the same bag.

I don't expect the level of accuracy I actually need for my machines to set the benchmark for everyone's applications. It is a good thing that there are people who can appreciate super accuracy and make good use of it.
But even if my needs are humble and modest, I can tell serious efforts from cosmetic scraping and I thought tle latests pictures in that thread showed I could also drool over people capable of doing a lot with almost nothing. So no need to throw water at me, I'm fine

Hi All,
Touche TNB, I was just pulling your leg! I`ve mentioned before that I served my time with "Matrix" The defunct Coventry Gauge and Tool Co. I was quite good at scraping and understand that that folk like Hr. Kramer are skilled in scraping that has taken them several years to master. They are not Gods, just blokes like you and me.
Ok, I`m old and miserable and still remember my visit in 1960 to SIG in Geneva, where the people that did the "shove" type of scraping had to have a skin test to determine whether their perspiration was acidic before allowing them to scrape away. Talking about scrapes, I got into a few of those during my apprenticeship!
Alan
Ps. Do you think that Rembrandt would have been good at painting machines?