Hand File Reference

[EricB]

So I'm taking my Red Seal Exam on Friday to become a Journeyman Machinist which has me reviewing information from all years of my apprenticeship and I have to say, it is shocking how little most of my co-workers and classmates know about simple bench-work like filing. I can appreciate that modern machinery, tooling, and software has rendered most filing, hand-tapping, scraping, etc. unnecessary, but they are still important skills to have, you would be amazed what you can do with a simple file. Anyways, while doing some review this morning I stumbled across this blog entry from KMS tools, and I was really impressed. This is a very thorough overview of file types, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else who likes to keep old practices alive, or is just a huge nerd like me wants to read it.

https://www.kmstools.com/blog/hand-file-identification/

And in case you think filing is silly, here are a couple of videos that show a bit of what you can do with a file:

Filing starts at 8:38

Cheers!
-Eric

 

[CalgaryPT]

Just watched this. Very humbling when someone can do a better job by hand than I can do with a power tool. Hope your exam went well.

 

[Dabbler]

The guy who got me into machining was given an odd shaped piece of steel and a file on his first day of apprenticeship. He was told to make a smooth, square, flat 1" X 1" X 1" cube out of it. The shop foreman told him that only one in 4 men passed this test.

I hope your tests go/went well! Let us know how you did!