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.

17

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.

19

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.

13

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

Screenshot @ -0:44    (source)

Screenshot @ -0:07   (source)

AZ AMC Restorations posted

Due to the dwindling supply of quality machine shops and very poor quality aftermarket parts as well as a lack of people interested in learning the engine building and machine shop trades, I regret to inform our many followers and current as well as past customers that we will no longer be taking on any new engine build orders unless it is for a car we are restoring.  Since Covid, we have had to do rework on multiple engine builds due to poorly manufactured parts that failed during break in or machine work that was below our standards due to all the old farts like me dying off with no younger workers interested in taking their place.  For example, rod bearings are now made too thin resulting in 390 and 401 crank grinds needing to be ground .0085, .0185 or .0285 under standard rod journal size yet all but one machine shop in the entire Phoenix area refused to do anything other than the standard .010, .020 or .030 grinds.  Even worse, when the one shop that will grind the cranks the way we tell them we need them loses their crank grinder to retirement in another year or two, they do not plan to replace him.  Machine work that used to have a turnaround of 2-3 weeks now takes a minimum of 2-4 months due to an acute lack of people interested in learning machine work and doing manual physical labor. In fact, one engine block was at a machine shop for a year and when we got it back hey did such a poor sleeve job in one cylinder that it was not even useable so it is now a 250 lb paper weight.  

About 15 years ago I nearly bought out an aging gentlemen's machine shop and continue to regret not doing so due to the lack of availability of places to get the work done.  

As for poor quality parts, Edelbrock aluminum heads are now such poor quality and filled with so much manufacturing machining slag that we have to completely disassemble them, reset the valve stem and spring heights and even sometimes have them resurfaced because the slag scratched the head gasket surface. Similarly, there are only a couple of camshaft manufacturers remaining that harden their cams correctly and nearly all flat tappet lifters are now such terrible quality and inconsistent hardness that we are no longer willing to risk losing a cam due to poorly made cams and lifters.  In fact, we now only use either rollers or custom ground flat tappets with Johnson made lifters from Howard or Herbert.  For example, we have probably used 50 or more Summit cams over the past 15 years but the last 4 we used did not even make it through break in so they too are now off the list of acceptable quality parts as well.  

So what does all of this mean?  We will honor whatever engines builds that are not part of a full restoration that we already have in the queue however we must warn all those who have been patiently waiting for their engines to be built that supply chain constraints in addition to rapidly declining parts quality along with a lack of qualified machine shop workers is resulting in our anticipated wait times to get an engine built often doubling in duration.  And if anyone is tired of waiting and thinks they can do better elsewhere, we will fully refund their deposit and wish them well.  

What used to take a couple of weeks to get back from a machine shop can easily now take 2-4 months or more resulting in our overall engine backlog now being 15-18 months.  The bottom line is that custom engine building is on its way to becoming extinct and it won't be too many more years before all of us old farts that currently do this work either retire and/or die off resulting in engine building within the collector car hobby becoming nearly impossible to find And when you do find someone, don't be surprised if they are backed out 2+ years or more and that they only want to do Chevy builds and know zero about our beloved AMC engines.   "The times they are a changin'."

And any know it all's that are not in this business who try to show everyone how smart they think they are by declaring that these conditions do not exist, despite literally hundreds of others saying they are experiencing the exact same thing, will have their comments deleted because they are clearly talking out of their ass.

Steve OConnor shared