Metro Detroit Metalworking Club


 

Home
Links
 

 

Privacy Policy

 

-


January, 2007

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Please pay careful attention to the yellow boxes (grey shaded boxes for the paper edition of the newsletter). These have important announcements you should consider. There are three yellow boxes this time. One is a reminder that the metal class is starting up again. Another deals with dues, which are now due. The last talks about elections. Run for office and influence the direction of the club.

MINUTES John Osborne reporting. There were 19 members present. We again voiced our appreciation for last month’s presentation from LocTite. I passed out LocTite brochures and application calculators left over from the last meeting. Rick Chownyk had a stack of tap and drill charts he passed out. I use mine all the time (it has all the metric info I need). Possession of the club book again changed and the last reader added to the chorus of those who say it is a fine and valuable book. We talked again about the club getting additional books and videos; everyone liked the idea. We talked about paying dues for the New Year. The treasury is in good shape due to careful handling of funds. John Lee mentioned that more members are getting the newsletter (our only club expense so far) by email and fewer by regular mail. We talked about reducing dues, but a vote was almost unanimous for keeping it at $10 (and use the funds to get club books and videos). We talked about elections and decided to put that off to the next meeting. I urged the members to consider running for office. I do not intend to be Pres for a lifetime. I also complained about my difficulties in running the meeting, taking pictures, recording the minutes and writing it all up and laying out the newsletter. I offered to give all possible help to anyone interested in doing the newsletter (even as a backup to me). I asked if anyone wanted to know how I get the newsletter pieces to fit perfectly every time. James Howard took the bait and said he wanted to know. I said its done in Word with a few important tricks. Here is how: all the text is in boxes so the box can be stretched or squashed to make the text fill it. Changing the size of headlines can also find space or use it up. Pictures are cropped to throw out unneeded stuff, then sized and stretched or squashed till it fits. This distorts the pictures, but if done judiciously, the reader never knows. Every other publication is doing the same thing to you.  I did for this edition, too. But you won’t be able to prove it…

Rick Chownyk got up to tell us about his new job as a manual machinist in a small family-owned job shop. Rick gained some respect for one of his fellow workers when he used a MIG welder to back out a 6-32 tap that broke in the part. He welded to the broken tap, then added blob after blob of weld until it was above the surface, then welded a “T” on that. Pliers backed out the tap. There is no picture, but it was very small anyway.

Joe Pietsch recommended yet another book. I think the club needs a librarian and I nominate Joe. At least we could be sure he would read them all and review them for us. The 3 panels to the right show the front and back covers and a picture from inside. I lost the pictures I took at the meeting, but I had the ISBN number, so I found it on the Internet. The pictures are better than I took anyhow. Here are the details: Randolph ’s Shop, by J. Randolph Bulgin, ISBN# 9785475-0-0. It can be bought online at:

randolphsmachineshop.com for $39.