Chapter 4
Cutting Up
IN THIS CHAPTER
Losing your head
Assessing shears
Squinting at laser light
Peering at plasma
Flaming out and getting all wet
Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads.
— MOTHER (MARY HARRIS) JONES
If you’re one of those people who jump around from one part of the book to the next and haven’t yet checked out the Reader’s Digest description of metal cutting and a few of the other key fabricating processes in Chapter 1, you should probably go back and do so now. This chapter dives right in with the devilish details of shearing, then moves on to some equally “cleaver” ways to slice big hunks of metal into smaller ones. Quips about my wife’s kitchen scissors notwithstanding, shearing is often an important first step in the manufacturing process; although, as you will see, it’s becoming less so as fabricators (and indeed all manufacturers, machine ...
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