As an aside--do you enjoy the oiling process? A little bit here or there could be a fun maintenance task. 500+? That just sounds tedious and not really fun for a hobby...
With five machines to maintain, it's become a nuisance, but it's only about two hours if there are no problems. It's restoring old, rusted, or damaged machines that's hard. One machine took weeks of work.
I do it to make this steampunk telegraph office possible.[1]
(Plug: This goes operational tomorrow morning at the Clockwork Alchemy steampunk convention in San Jose. People text in messages and they're delivered by messengers.)
I'd recommend a read of The Practicing Mind to see how it might be different.
A tedious task can easily be therapeutic if you go in with a "beginner's mind". It's kind of meditative, being present in the moment through the whole task.
Thanks for the recommendation--this is actually something I've wanted to learn more about as I struggle to get past the early stages of learning guitar.
