[TheForge] Re: Old tools/Replacement parts

[Mike Spencer]

Ries> But frankly, nobody in industry cares- not the manufacturers,
Ries> and not the consumers of all this high tech stuff.

Indeed.

Ries> Modern tools are not made for old putterers like most of us...

I *do* understand that you didn't mean that as a condescending slur --
you did, after all, use the first person *plural*.  But I've had my
perspective at least since I was 27, arguably earlier.

       We don't stop with asking what a tool does. We ask about what
       kind of people we become when we use it.
                    -- Amish machinist (Quoted by Howard Rheingold, 1998)

Even before I saw my first piece of hot Iron, I think, that notion was
worming its way into my head.

Getting off into a slightly off topic yarn here....

I was a "research assistant" -- a slightly glorified lab tech -- for
an ENT doc [1] at one point.  My task was to figure out how to
separate the proteins in single drops of fluid and measure them --
potentially a lifesaving piece of information. So I did the reading,
the phone calls etc. and told my boss that we needed an autoanalyzer
like they had upstairs in the main biochem lab.  He agreed that we
should have one, called around for prices and came to my lab looking
shell shocked. About $10,000 (in 1965 $$ or, say, $100,000 in today's
money), way more than my meager salary and maybe five times what he
had left in his research kitty after paying me.

So he said, "Figure out some other way."  In a few months I built a
couple of widgets from common glassware, scavenged equipment and stuff
from the dumpster.  Both worked.  One produced results good enough for
a journal paper and an international conference presentation. (And,
eventually, a single line in Harold Schuknecht's encyclopaedic atlas
of ear surgery. :-)

Edging gradually back toward the blacksmithing-tools topic, that
year in the lab helped make me what I am.  In comparison, the poor lab
tech upstairs spent that year running sample after dreary sample
through the autoanalyzer, same drill day after day.

The late Francisco Varela once said, "The flow of energy through a
system works to organize the system."  That's sufficiently vague to be
a bit challenging to prove or demonstrate in hard-core technical terms
but as a loose approximation, it's about the same piece of insight
that Amish machinist proffered.  Your choice of tools is, in a sense,
your choice of a view of the world and of what you want to be and
become.

I have neither the skill (aka ignorance) nor the temperament (aka
stupidity) to run a business such a Ries does.  But I'm (possibly
overly) touchy about such locutions as "old putterer".  There is a big
and variegated middle ground between bottom-line oriented biz and
feeble old farts puttering around, between biz and "hobby".  It's
getting gradually more difficult to occupy that ground with dignity
and style but it is, IMHO, worth the effort.


- Mike


[1] ENT -- Ear, nose & throat. Sort of the egglaying wool-milk-pig of
    surgery.  Even sounds that way in German:
    Ohren-Nasen-Kehl-Heilkunde or Hals-Nasen-Ohren-Heilkunde.

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^