You know what annoys me? Yes, I know, add it to the list.
When woo-heads start babbling about how “precisely” the pyramids were built, usually claiming we can’t hope to come close even with modern technology.
Take a close look at the blocks in the pyramids. You can see gaps and misalignments. We’re talking several inches in places. The surfaces aren’t glass-smooth even on the inside; they show obvious tooling marks in many places.
I’m not much of a machinist, but I can do the basics.
Put me in front of a basic milling machine and give me a metal block, and I’ll have the surface nearly glass-smooth, shaped exactly how you want it, with holes exactly where you want them. It might take all afternoon depending on the level of detail you need, but I can do it down to 1/100″ tolerances. 1/1000″ tolerance if I have a nice machine and a lot of time. By comparison, human hair is anywhere from 6/10,000″ to 7/1000″ thick.
Give me a high-end CNC machine and I can do the code by hand necessary to get 5/10,000″ tolerances out of it. Throw in AutoCAD or Autodesk Inventor for 3D parts, and the process gets several orders of magnitude faster. If it’s a good CNC rig, it’ll do it all day, too; we worked with FANUC robots in skool that were capable of something like 1mm in 10,000 cycles reliability.
Give me a blowtorch, some decent silver-phosphorus solder, some basic pipeworking tools (you know, the contents of my HVAC pipe tooling bag; about $50 in tools from Lowe’s or Home Depot total) and my cordless drill, and I’ll give you repeated 1/16″ tolerance in copper pipe work, working by hand. Throw in a vaccum pump and they’ll be sanitized for AC work too.
By even my standards as an OK machinist, the pyramids are fairly amateurish; if I need something machined, my response is usually “Hey, Mitch, you busy?” They’re big and impressive, and an amazing achievement for people barely out of the Stone Age, but “more precise than modern capabilities” they are NOT.