Authors and Contributors¶
About This Wiki¶
The Lathe Mastery Wiki Book was born from observing a fundamental gap in how technical knowledge flows between communities. Hackers and machinists—two groups with complementary skills—rarely cross paths. While hackers document everything online, machinists traditionally pass their craft through apprenticeships and shop floor conversations.
This creates a problem: machining wisdom lives in the minds and hands of practitioners, transmitted through personal demonstration and verbal instruction. When a master machinist retires, decades of accumulated tricks, techniques, and hard-won insights risk being lost forever.
Modern wiki methodology offers a solution. By creating a collaborative, versioned, and searchable repository, we can capture this oral tradition in a format that both preserves and democratizes access to machining knowledge. This book serves as a bridge—translating shop floor wisdom into documented best practices that anyone can access, contribute to, and learn from.
At the time of this version's publication, this wiki is neither complete nor perfect. It undoubtedly contains errors, omissions, and gaps where crucial wisdom should be. But that's the beauty of the wiki format—it's a living document. Every reader can become a contributor, correcting mistakes, adding missing techniques, and expanding sections based on their own experience. Through collective effort, this resource will grow more comprehensive and accurate over time.
The goal is simple: ensure that the art and science of lathe work remains accessible to future generations, whether they come from machine shops or makerspaces, trade schools or hackerspaces.
Author / Maintainer¶
- Johanness A. Nilsson
Contributors¶
Contributors are listed in alphabetical order. To add yourself, please follow the format:
- Your Name - Your contribution (e.g., "Threading chapter improvements")
This list will include those who have contributed content, corrections, or improvements. For a full list of everyone who has contributed to this project, see the contributor graph.
Acknowledgments¶
Special thanks to the hackers and machinists whose shared wisdom and hands-on experience form the backbone of this work. The techniques and best practices documented here represent decades of collective knowledge, refined through countless hours in workshops and on terminals.
Contributing¶
Want to see your name here? Check out our Contributing Guidelines and help improve this resource for everyone!