The Information Preppers Need to Build Machines
The importance of knowing how to build simple machines in the event of a collapse cannot be overlooked. This applies to far more than just machine tools. How do you build a horse-drawn wagon, agricultural machinery, a steam engine, and tens of thousands of other machines?
History of Technology – Making Simple Machines from Scratch
“Even today, blueprints are considered inadequate to transmit full information, and when a firm buys new and elaborate machinery [or software] it sends some of its workers to acquire, directly from the manufacturers, the knowledge of how to operate it. Through the ages, the main channel for the diffusion of innovations has been the migration of people. The diffusion of technology has been mostly the product of migrations of human capital.” ~ Before the Industrial Revolution, European Society and Economy 1000-1700 by Carlo M. Cipolla
I believe that construction plans and drawings on machine tools and many other machines were never published because that was considered proprietary material at the time and were discarded when the machines became obsolete. However, there may be some plans for constructing old machine tools, and some old machines themselves, available in museums, library, university and private collections. Finding this would be difficult, time-consuming and expensive.
An alternative to finding plans would be finding the old machines themselves and reverse engineeringthem for the purpose of developing plans, specifications, and drawings to reproduce each machine. Just compiling a list of machines that need to be created would be a complicated task. What needs to be done is to identify today’s machines that would be crucial to restoring our present civilization and researching the history, i.e. predecessor machines back to the original version of each machine. Then developing a critical path for the development of each machine. Eventually, this will provide a list of the earliest, blacksmith made, machine tools.
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