Shopsmith Forums

We knew Shopsmith used FAFNIR Bearings in the 10E & 10ER but I did not know that FAFNIR Bearings advertising used Shopsmith as an example of their own quality.

The Saw is running at full speed with coins standing on edge on the table. I guess that speaks to being virtually vibration free.

Everett See full advertisement

An indication of great performance back then. Do they still manufacture with quality bearings from Fafnir? I would like to think so!.

Those bearings were changed to less precision when they introduced the aluminum sand cast Mark 5 in the early 1950's

Politics was already in play to help Japan, Germany and Europe rebuild from the wars we did not start. As such, rather than helping out US factories upgrade manufacturing tooling, politicians sent the most efficiently designed New tools to other countries and built competition more efficient than our own to other countries.

We should have upgraded American manufacturing and sold the surplus to rebuild other countries.

If you read the update on FAFNIR production, you can see how strong the US Bearing market was and how many workers must have been employed back then.

We could not compete with the efficiency of the foreign factories and ours withered away to outsourcing.

That's where it began. Today no quality bearings are manufactured here. I am not sure any are at all.

Now couple that with the absolute religious zeal of an activist environmental protection movement and our factories and jobs were suffocated by regulatory burdens that destroyed profits.

Outsourcing was in vogue and the outcome inevitable.

Rather than identifying an environmental problem in industry and turning the educators and scientists to innovate and overcome the problems, political will turned into a manufacturing prohibition movement.

Today there is a move to bring back manufacturing to the US and the environmental concerns remain.

In my mind that just says there is a vast opportunity and new industries possible for those scientists, educators and donors to make real changes and export that technology all over the world.

That's what we should have done in the 50's in my mind and had we done so where would we be today?

Have we learned from our mistakes? Academia does not seem to suggest that yet.

They are in their own cocoon of "Just say No"

No, you can't make that here.
No, you can't do that here.
No, you can't say that here.
No, you can't think that here.
No, you can't believe that here.
No, you can't have ..... and it never ends. That's what we've been teaching, writing, broadcasting, and expressing.

Land of the free and home of the brave, will only be that if the brave, the pioneering spirits of our ancestors rises up within us again and we expose ourselves to what can be, opposed to what cannot.

Everett

Sorry my phone insisted it needed to be posted twice and wouldn't let me delete duplicate only edit it.

Everett