Acknowledgements and Recognition
Funding
This Oregon SCC Grant Consortium Product was funded by a $5 million Strengthening Community Colleges Employment and Training Administration Grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The product was created by the grantee and does not necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Labor. The U.S. Department of Labor makes no guarantees, warranties, or assurances of any kind, express or implied, with respect to such information, including any information on linked sites and including, but not limited to, accuracy of the information or its completeness, timeliness, usefulness, adequacy, continued availability, or ownership. This product is copyrighted by the institution that created it.
Source material
The majority of source material is derived from English language wikipedia.
In July 2017 in a public online forum for cnczone.com (The Virtual Machine Shop (cnczone.com), author and publisher, Ron Smith, of the Virtual Machine Shop (VMS), formerly found at jjjtrain.com, posted a request for someone to take over his outstanding website for providing free educational materials specific to the machine tool trades.
In July 2017, on the Practical Machinist forum, Mr. Smith wrote:
I am Ron Smith author and publisher of the Virtual Machine Shop (jjjtrain.com)
75 years old this year and need to start getting myself in order and one of the tasks is to turn the site over to someone who can keep it up.
I noticed a good deal of the traffic I get comes from PM links in this forum.
What you need to do:
1- be vested in machine tool technology
2- be able to use or learn a WYSISWYG HTML editor
3- invest time in finishing it up (example 2-Turning and Facing)
4- make enough $ from it to pay the costs
For many years I have relied on Google ad clicks to pay the costs and that was all. However it is not working anymore and I have had to put in a donation button (still doing this). I have ideas on how to drive more users to the site which is the first thing to be done.
There is a forum there that nobody uses and if you are the moderator of this forum please understand it is no competition for PM. In fact, if we get this all fixed I will connect the forum link directly to PM if given permission.
Open to all questions and suggestions
Ron
http://jjjtrain.com
If someone would like to take over this site let me know.
I own it but it needs a new owner as my time is short
Ron Smith
Also on July 12, 2017, on CNCzone forum, Ron Smith posted:
Hello I am Ron, author and publisher of The Virtual Machine Shop.
http://jjjtrain.com
It is a machine tool technology training site that is fairly extensive.
Circumstance have dictated that I can no longer run the site and I am looking for someone to take it over
Go take a look
ron
I relied on the VMS to provide my students with accessible quality information about the wide world of machining for nine years. I saw the cnczone.com comment about a year after its posting. I tried, in vain, to contact Ron Smith through several avenues to no avail. I accessed jjjtrain.com via the Way Back Machine internet archive and captured text and images from the VMS metallurgy unit. The interested reader will find many references to the VMS, jjjtrain.com, and to Ron Smith in various sections of this book. Because Mr. Smith offered jjjtrain.com and the VMS free to the world and he offered to give away the site to any interested party, I honestly believe that including his materials within the Open Education Resource (OER) book that you are about to read aligns perfectly with his world view to make available accessible, quality information about the machine tool trade. Also, the sections of The Virtual Machine Shop that I pulled information and images from comprise less than 10% of the entire work that is captured on the website. This percentage of use would fall within the fair use for education criteria. Nonetheless, my admiration for the work of Mr. Ron Smith cannot be understated. If Mr. Smith objects to the inclusion of his metallurgy materials here, please contact me. I will revise accordingly. (lwh)
Professional Acknowledgments
Finally, this work would not be possible without the support of my dean, Dr. Kristin Lima, grant coordinator, Stephanie Petersen and my colleagues at Mt. Hood Community College in the Machine Tool Technology Department: M. Keith Knight for his unrelenting confidence in my abilities. Thank you, Keith! Zach Canjar and Mark Thomas are the quintessential subject matter experts. Without their continued patience with me as I ask question after question, their expertise and guidance are invaluable lighthouses on the craggy shores of technical knowledge.
December 2024
