Getting Practical With Guy Lautard Machinist Bedside Reader
The book sits on my bench next to the micrometers and the calipers, dog-eared at the cutting speeds section and stained with half a dozen different coolants over the years. Guy Lautard Machinist Bedside Reader is exactly what it sounds like. It is a pocket reference you grab when you need to calculate RPMs on the fly or remember what SFM should be for 4140 steel at half hardness. The current edition runs about two hundred pages and covers everything from basic trig for setup work through G-code structures, tool geometry, and material hardness conversions. I bought the 9th edition at a machine tool show about eight years ago and have not felt the need to upgrade since. The sections most people actually use are the cutting speed and feed tables, the math reference, and the G-code quick cards. The math section alone saved me during a setup where I needed to find the distance across five balls on a threaded component and could not remember the exact formula. The book has the over-pin calculation laid out with worked examples. I ran through it in about ninety seconds while the machine was still warming up. One thing nobody tells you about this book is how dated some of the cutting data can get. The SFM values for certain exotic alloys in the back sections are based on older tool materials. I learned this the hard way during a run of Inconel 718. The book recommended a feed that worked fine with HSS or carbide from twenty years ago, but modern coated inserts wanted something closer to half of what was printed. I cross-referenced with the tooling sub from Sandvik and adjusted downward. The lesson was straightforward: use the tables as a starting point, not a gospel. Every tooling manufacturer publishes their own recommendations now, and those tend to be more current.
The G-code portion is useful if you are running older controls or teaching someone the fundamentals. It breaks down common cycles like peck drilling and canned cycles in a format that is easy to follow. The limitation is that it does not cover Fanuc Custom Macros or Siemens-specific programming. If your shop runs 810T controllers with macro B, you will need to supplement this. I keep a separate sheet of macro examples taped to the control panel for that. I also use the thread charts more than anything else. The unified and metric thread tables are complete enough for day-to-day work. The one edge case that trips people up is the difference between minor diameter and pitch diameter when you are cutting threads on the lathe. The book lists both, but it does not explicitly call out that pitch diameter is what matters for go/no-go gauge verification. I once machined a batch of 3/4-10 UNF threads and checked them on the pitch diameter only, assuming they would fall within tolerance. They did not, because the minor diameter was running undersize from a worn tool nose radius. Checking both dimensions caught the problem before the parts went into assembly.
What to expect if you are trying to learn from it
The book assumes you already know what a mill and a lathe are. It does not explain how to operate them. It is a reference, not a textbook. If you are completely new to machining, you will get through the first fifty pages but then hit a wall when the formulas start referencing terms like radial engagement and axial immersion without definition. I recommend pairing it with something more introductory like The Machinist's Handbook or at least watching a few videos on basic lathe and mill operation so the context clicks. The practical workflow I use is simple. I flip to the relevant section before I start a job. If I am doing a facing operation on aluminum, I look up the SFM for 6061, calculate the RPM using the formula on page twenty-two, set the speed, then verify the feed per tooth against the tooling insert handbook. The book gets me to the starting number. The insert manufacturer's data gets me to the final number. That division of labor is where the real time savings come in. A full setup calculation that used to take me twenty minutes with a calculator and a loose notebook now takes about four minutes using the book as the primary reference. There are downsides worth being honest about. The binding is not going to survive being tossed into a toolbox every day. The paper quality is thin enough that coolant splashes through to the other side. The index is adequate but not great if you are looking for a very specific topic. And the PDF versions floating around the internet are usually scans of older editions with blurry tables that are hard to read on a phone screen. If you are buying this, get a physical copy. The $25 to $35 range is reasonable and it will last longer than any digital version I have tried.
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The one area where the book is genuinely valuable is in its compactness. You can fit it in a breast pocket or slide it into a tool tray. When you are deep in a machine with both hands covered in oil, pulling out a three-inch reference card is faster than digging through a four-hundred-page handbook. That is the actual design intent. Lautard wrote this for people who are already in the shop and need an answer now, not for students studying in a classroom. I do not recommend it as a primary learning resource. I recommend it as something to have within arm's reach once you are already running machines and finding yourself reaching for a reference more than once a day. That is when the value becomes obvious. Until then, it is just another book on the shelf.
