I had the fortune to meet Pat at the Open Hardware Summit in 2012. Pat's hardware was the hardest there, it was concrete. Pat had rediscovered a method of making machine tools cheaply and was at the summit to share it with us. On Make he's sharing the concrete lathe, his engine mill and his philosophy. It's well worth a read. Make Article on Pat Delaney there's also a great deal of info at OpenSourceMachineTools.org
"This is the story of Pat Delany, one of the leading creative voices in Appropriate Technology — technology that is small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, and locally controlled. This 78-year-old grandfather came to the field as an outsider, inspired by a second-hand description of a news photo. But his visionary home-built machine-tool designs now have the potential to help millions bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Delany never had much money himself, or any formal engineering education, but his personal quest to develop open-source DIY machine tools has been embraced and spread by Appropriate Technology’s conference-hopping, grant-getting establishment."