Most of the power tools in my shop have belt drive, allowing control over
the operating speed by choosing the size of the pulleys. The radial arm
saw is an exception: the blade is mounted on the motor shaft.
It runs at the AC line frequency, minus a little bit ('slip').
I got curious and measured the slip on my radial arm saw this morning: it's running at 59.15 Hz (3549 RPM) in this pic. It runs very close to 60 Hz unloaded. I sometimes wonder what
it would be like to move to another country.
A friend who got fed up with politics in the USA
moved to France last year.
I'd miss
using old tools if I moved overseas and furnished a workshop
from scratch. Yeah you can find used tools if you look hard enough
but that's not the same as acquiring them without deliberate effort.
Part of what I like about working with wood is the feeling of participation
in a craft with millenia of history. The basic operations
(sawing, turning, ...) have been practiced for much longer than electric
tools have been around. The mechanical properties of wood have been
with us all along.
I also like that humans are not the only species to build things out of wood. A bird's nest doesn't use fasteners or glue but building one nonetheless requires skill to get a satisfactory result. I like leaving pieces of bark on finished wood products, partly because it reminds me of structures built by the creatures we share the Earth with. All this is a roundabout way to segue into telling you that the Bald Eagle nest cam I mentioned last year captured a fun encounter last week of a squirrel jumping onto a sleeping eagle's back before dawn; see the first 16 seconds of this video.
About 20 years ago, I strained the tendons in one of my fingers while
climbing, badly enough that I had to avoid using that finger for a few months.
I learned a bit about technique during that time as I had to think
more carefully while not having full use of one hand.
Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham after his publisher bet him that he couldn't write a book with a vocabulary of only 50 words. I have great respect for harpsichordists. Their instrument doesn't have the dynamic range that a piano does and subtlety of phrasing is everything. Béla Bartók didn't write specifically for harpsichord but he did encourage people to play some of his piano pieces on one. Huguette Dreyfus, one of my favorite harpsichordists, recorded an album of Bartók on the harpsichord back in 1969. Here's the first 15 bars from her performance of Mikrokosmos #145 (the second dance in Bulgarian rhythm): |