Machining For Dummies

About the Author

In 1979, Kip Hanson walked away from his minimum-wage job at a fast food restaurant and found employment as a shop helper at a Minneapolis sheet-metal house. He was 16 years old. Three Mile Island was on fire, disco was all the rage, and the USSR was preparing to invade Afghanistan. Newsweek once called it the year that changed the world. Kip didn’t care. All he worried about back then was making enough cash to keep his car gassed up, buy beer, and take his soon-to-be fiancée to see Star Wars.

Despite his newfound pay increase, it didn’t take long to realize that most of the fab guys around him had surrendered a finger or two to the shears and presses, so with some encouragement from his girlfriend, Kip pursued a seemingly safer career in machining. Since then, he’s worked his way up from handscrew operator to CNC programmer to manufacturing engineer to machine tool applications and finally into management.

Fast forward to 1998. Tired of chips in his boots and dirt beneath his nails, Kip studied nights and gathered up enough Microsoft certifications to snag a cushy ERP manufacturing consultant job just as Y2K promised to destroy civilization. Much to the chagrin of his wife and teenaged children, this involved packing up two 24-foot U-Hauls and moving to the desert Southwest, where they’ve lived ever since while he traveled “all the time,” according to his wife.

He still spent a lot of time in the shop, however, and since you can take the boy out of the machine ...