Drilling stainless steel

[maztec]

My university machine shop has all of the tools I mention. I forget that they're not widely available. Although laser cutters should be. Holy crap are they useful.

My undergrad university had an awesome set of shops. Unfortunately, you were required to pay a machine maintenance fee by the hour (about $10/hr for most machines), a $300 fee each quarter you wanted to use the machines, $1000 training course, and of course for the materials you used. Which all meant that the students that really thought it would be cool to do something with it . . . never did, because they were usually the students with almost no money. Meh.

pcad: Eh? Lot of examples of tool use in the animal kingdom, we just haven't recognized them. Crows, ravens, dolphins, whales, octopusses, primates, vultures, sea otters, elephants, and many other animals use tools. The sad thing is we are just starting to figure out the extent to which animals use tools, which every year is being shown as more common than we previously had thought.

And really, have your wife try the tool called a knife - it's a great way to make spätzle.

[pcad]

I was aware of some of those examples of tool use in animals. You're right that we underestimatetheir ability. Still, flaking flint and fitting it to a shaft with twine is still something only our ancestors were able to do. Taming fire, not just taking advantage of a random fire is another skill we were able to develop.

No doubt that we were limited to simple tools at one point also. At some point we got better at innovation and made advances to more complex tools and techniques. Eventually it led to the invention of the Silver Revomaze which is challenging so called humans everyday.