With the advent of CAD systems, fewer and fewer people are solving shop math problems the old fashion way. Nevertheless, hardly a day goes by that a machinist doesn't make a few calculations of some sort.

With the vast majority of shop math being simple addition and subtraction, many machinists can get by with few math skills. Sooner or later, as a machinist you'll be faced with a problem that elementary math won't solve. If you are able to do trigonometry; find the circumference of a circle and use Pythagorean's theorem then you'll be able to solve most shop math problems.

Like many skills with learning curves, practice makes perfect. Math is no exception. In this chapter, I'd like to present what I think are some interesting and relevant math problems for readers to practice on. …