Reddit reviews Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap (Complete 7 Book Series)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1878087355/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491940788&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=David+J+Gingery&dpPl=1&dpID=51lFbYGCpkL&ref=plSrch

Put your face in a book schoolboy.

This isn't exactly what you wanted. But is an amazing set of books on how to build your own fully functional machine shop from scrap. This guy does his own castings from scraps then builds that into a lathe, and other equipment. It's really amazing.

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Metal-Working-Complete-Series/dp/1878087355

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which might be considered the genre defining work, would actually be a decent reference. It's not information packed, but it outlines a process that would be achievable by a 19th-century engineer, in a way that your modern McMaster-Carr dependent engineer couldn't.

But I am a little confused as to what exactly you're asking. Essentially, there are a couple steps of social, technical, and practical problems:

1. Reform society so that scientific thought is culturally normative, entrepreneurial endeavor is encouraged, and education is common.
   
2. Promulgate the principal ideas behind the Agricultural, Industrial, and Technological revolutions:.
   A. Use tools like crop rotation, the iron moldboard plow, and selective breeding etc. so a smaller fraction of the population needs to be farmers.
   B. Use natural energy resources, interchangeable parts, and the assembly line to reform metalurgy, textile, and other industries so that each individual is more productive.
   C. Distribute and collate information using, variously, the printing press, telegraph, and computer (I may have skipped a step in there) to speed the process by which the system improves itself.
   
3. Implement each step in the process, ideally avoiding the various mis-steps and dead ends we actually encountered on the way. An encyclopedia would be really helpful here, but the entire Library of Congress would be insufficient to uplift the society because of all the other requirements. This will take a long time - you might know the required components to build a CPU, but they might depend on a complicated and energy intensive extraction a mineral found primarily in Mongolia. When you start, you'll have a few surface pit mines and low quality tools. A lot of the industrial revolution was just tediously repeating the process of using the tools you have to build slightly better tools, which takes a long time. To go from a feudal, Greco-roman, or agrarian society to a modern one is probably beyond a single lifetime. 1800s might be achievable if you start very young.
   
4. Scale out! It's one thing to have the knowledge, resources, and skill to make (for example) a single printing press, but another to distribute millions of newspapers in every city every morning.
   
   Another resource you might be interested in, with slightly more realistic goals, would be Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap which takes you from raw scrap metal (or, if you felt compelled to do so, from a charcoal furnace, though after proving to yourself that you can make iron from ore, steel from iron, and bars or wire from ingots, it's more effective to just go down to the local scrapyard and buy it by the ton) to a modern machine shop, complete with lathe and mill. I don't have it, but as another reader of this genre, that book is definitely on my wish list!

Woah, far from a snappy title there... But I think I see what you're getting at. How to achieve industrial self-sufficiency?

I think people badly underestimate the current limitations of additive manufacturing (3D printing). It's a neat new invention that's brought down the price of some specific scenarios, but they're a very, very long way off self-replication when you consider motors, electronics, bearings and chains etc. Difficult to get structural strength from a 3D-printed part, they tend to be brittle and crack along the print lines. Not sure I'd want to trust one with a critical load-bearing part replacement, like Mark Watney's Mars airlock. SpaceX have possibly cracked this with their printed rocket components but that's an insanely expensive bit of kit - the raw materials are also way expensive and need a spec that'll have to come from Earth - this isn't going to be able to make parts that everyone in the colony has access to.

Personally, I always liked the adage about "with a milling machine and a lathe, you can build a milling machine and a lathe".
Given the mass of metal and its insane structural capabilities when machined and welded by easily-trained workers, I'd suggest mining, refining, and fabricating parts onsite is going to be essential. Here's a fascinating book about building a metal shop from scrap, starting with a foundry and moving on to more complex machinery. If I had to survive after the collapse of civilisation I'd want that book. I think the same applies on Mars.

So:

1. survey Mars for metallic near-surface ores
   
2. build colony nearby this, and water ice
   
3. mining equipment - eg. automated backhoes - will prove essential
   
4. set up simple workshops, homemade welding gear, etc.

I would first like to say that I agree with everyone else here who recommends buying a used one and restoring it (or just keeping looking for a good deal, they're out there).

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That being said, there is a series of books available by David Gingery that has instructions on how to build basic metalworking machines from scrap. The first book in the series builds a foundry that enables you to cast aluminum, the second book builds a lathe, third a shaper, fourth a milling machine, etc. Seven books in total I think.

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If you do look into going this route, I'd strongly recommend looking into some of the more modern forms of sand casting, specifically the "lost foam" method which seems to be a lot easier to get consistent results from.

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Additionally, there are quite a few youtube series that build lathes either directly from Gingery's designs, or inspired by them. I was introduced to Gingery via the Makercise series and he, if I remember correctly, mostly follows Gingery's designs (he also covers lost foam casting as well)

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Note: if this series seems interesting to you, it would be cheaper to buy the hardcover book containing the whole series (or all 7 individual softcover books as a set) than it would be to buy each individually. However, if all you care about is the lathe, then just the first two should be enough to get you started (and you can always pick up the others later if you find yourself still interested in proceeding)

Here is a thing called an Afghan Lathe.

Then there is "Build Your Own Metal Workshop" Book(s).

I've not done either, but they are intriguing.

Metal Working Series: Gingerly

http://www.amazon.com/Build-Metal-Working-Scrap-Complete/dp/1878087355/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1392611899&sr=1-1&keywords=Build+Your+Own+Metal+Working+Shop+from+Scrap

I'm planning to at some point definitely get around to buying this book series - Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap

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I'd also like to put together a pharmacopoeia based on the WHO list of essential medicines, including the plants you can extract the precursors from.

There's this book series by David J. Gingery called "Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scratch", which describes in seven books how to progressively build an industrial metal sheet brake starting from a charcoal foundry. Building the tools to build the tools to build etc. I haven't read it myself, but I hear many great engineers consider it a formative text.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1878087355

If you're interested and want to start from scratch check out this book series on making your own shop, from foundry up.

From a practical perspective, the Gingerly series of books on how to make your own metal shop from scratch (starting with a charcoal foundry to make your own aluminum castings to build the machines you will need!) is a fascinating series of insights as to how machine tools can be built using bootstrapping.

Gingerly himself was a pretty interesting guy.