Machine Shop Books

Jo or gage blocks

Starrett gage blocks on a Starrett pink surface plate.

Jo blocks #gageblocks #joblocks #machinist #machinisttools #gage

From "The perfectionists" by Simon Winchester

“It took Johansson some long while to make the first prototype set—he used his wife’s sewing machine, converting it by adding a grinding wheel, to smooth the blocks to their correct dimensions. It was a task well suited to his personality, a biographer later recalled. For Johansson was, by all accounts, a modest, retiring, unassuming, private, pipe-smoking, mustachioed, patient, formal, stooped, eternally avuncular son of the croft, a man who grew up on a rye farm in central Sweden and, yet, went on to change the world. The 103-piece combination gauge block set he eventually developed, according to his biographer, has since “directly and indirectly taught engineers, foremen and mechanics to treat tools with care, and at the same time giving them familiarity with [dimensions of] thousandths and ten thousandths of a millimeter.”

Excerpt From: Simon Winchester. “The Perfectionists.”

 

The Basics of Knurling - link to "Tips and Tricks" at the Practical Machinist website.

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