Monday, February 11, 2019

Gears, Small Machine Tools and Tooling

I have some notes on big machine tools. But probably more of America was built with many small machine tools than with a few big ones. I'm starting some notes concerning small machine tools.

ITemp Plays posted

Karl Daigle commented on ITemp's post
How a gear shouldn’t look.

Antoni Gual Via posted
Lady at the controls of a milling machine during WWI.
Pete Bronlund: As a hobby machinist I needed a piece of brass bar 1.75” dia around 12” long. I could have called up the big metal suppliers seriously paid dearly for the privilege of them cutting it from stock & the shipping but I popped into a truly old machine shop near my work in my lunch hour. I met an elderly lady in her late 70s I thought looking after the phones & the minute I asked her she smiled & took me out on the shop floor, found an off cut & in about 30 seconds she’d chucked it parted it off & trued the ends in a lathe. She did it in virtually a perfect dance of familiarity with the old lathe I was just stunned! She told me it was her grandfathers shop, her fathers & she had run the show for her life so three generations… & she’d been there for the War Effort. Sadly being in the city the Developers came in with a huge check & within a year her famous machine shop disappeared for an office block!
[Some comments argue about whether it is a jig borer or a milling machine. I think jig borer won.]
Kent English: That would be a jig borer...... designed for more accurate hole making than a milling machine.
Full coverage to keep the caustic soda cutting fluid off skin.
E Henry Horn: At least she controlling her hair with that hat. I was an Apprentice assigned to a radial drill line. Long hair freak at the next drill bent down to pick up a drill chip, fan blew his hair into the chuck while it was indexing the drill bit down. I remember it but don't talk about much. It was bad.
Richard Koch: Tools that did not require brute force were developed for a mostly female workforce. After the war the men had to begrudgingly admit those tools were just better, period. Took them another 20 plus years to start to admit the women were, too.
My JHS shop teacher, Mr. Welch, spent part of one day showing us old and new tools to drive home that point. Exemplified the old axiom that if all you have is hammer, everything becomes a nail.

Steve Johnson shared a link to a photo album with the comment: ""Our pneumatic tools in use on one hundred and thirty-five railroads" 1897 Chicago Pneumatic Tool Co pneumatic hammers brochure, including their Boyer Railway Speed Recorder. Very cool illustrations, rare early brochure, company incorporated in 1895."
Steve Johnson Did a very extensive search and only found one other copy, in the Canadian National Archives of all places.
Dennis DeBruler Between steam locomotives, ships, bridges, and skyscrapers, there were a lot of rivets that had to be pounded back then.

Below are some of the photos from that album.
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Pneumatic tools are also used to to drill holes. In fact, compressed-air driven tools were invented to create holes in rock for explosives when building tunnels and mining minerals because they can hammer and twist the tool.

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Hammers have many uses. In the case of this photo, cleaning flange off of forgings. I used a smaller pneumatic cold chisel with my 2-horse air compressor to bust the stucco off my house when we were installing a new door. The carpenter I hired to do the job had bought a concrete cutting blade for his saw. But the pneumatic chisel did a much quicker job. He was embarrassed because he had consulted with a friend as to how to remove the stucco. He was also relieved because the saw didn't make much progress, but the chisel cut through the stucco like butter.

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I've also come across videos of a couple of generations of making chain.

Screenshot @ -0:44    (source)
Screenshot @ -0:07   (source)




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