Dear Rhodes;

I am no longer able to build another set of shoe lump barrels as I sold my shop equipment which consisted of a vertical mill, a horizontal mill, a 10" swing long bed lathe and all of the tooling including my rotary indexer(which is a must to mount on the milling machine table to build shoe lump barrels). I retained a smaller lathe and my engraving equipment and microscope.

When I bought all the mills and lathe above, I had to disassemble them and bring them into my basement workshop piece by piece. You can imagine, I am sure how much difficulty it is for one person considerably past retirement age to remove the table, knee, the top spindle and motor from a vertical mill (the knee alone weighs several hundred pounds) move them all though a tiny basement door into the shop and then reassemble everything. Even more difficult was moving the milling main base through that tiny door. My vertical mill weighted less than a ton assembled, but still very heavy. I am fortunate to own a small 40 year old farm tractor which helped greatly to move the parts of the mills and lathe across the property and down and around the trees to the lower basement level of our house. As I am at advanced age I decided that my daughter(my only heir) would not be able to move or have moved all my shop equipment from the basement after I die, and therefore I decided to sell the equipment and move it out of the basement and reassemble it all--which took me more than a month or so.

The main reason that I posted how to build shoe lump barrels on this site was to help others who might decided to build a set. I hope that some of you will carry on the work. Make certain that you practice on a mock-up barrel and shoe lump set to learn how to braze the barrels to the lump securely.

I traveled down to Australia a number of times in the 1990's and 2000's on business. I was impressed how you lads there have such wonderful workshops out in your "sheds" behind your homes and even more impressed in how that you can take on any sort or task and complete straight away. I remember going into a home work shop shed in 1991 over in the Latrobe valley of a man who was changing the drivers controls side of a 1960's Chevrolet Corvette from Left side to Right side and fabricating most of what he needed for this task--I was amazed at his work.

Kindest Regards;
Stephen Howell