Machine Shop: Vertical Boring Mill #1 (Turret Lathe) 1942 US Office of Education

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Machine Shop Work: An Introduction to Operations on the Vertical Boring Mill: No. 1: Rough Facing, Turning and Drilling (On a Vertical Turret Lathe)

'Identification of the various controls on a standard vertical turret lathe: the use of these controls in making facing, turning, and drilling cuts with the vertical head; demonstrates the independent and universal movements of the chuck jaws on the table; the method of holding a piece by internal chucking and the use of the indexes on the machine to control the movement of the cutting tools. The job selected for this machine demonstration is an aluminum casting for a diffuse section of a modern airplane engine.'

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turret_lathe

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The turret lathe is a form of metalworking lathe that is used for repetitive production of duplicate parts, which by the nature of their cutting process are usually interchangeable. It evolved from earlier lathes with the addition of the turret, which is an indexable toolholder that allows multiple cutting operations to be performed, each with a different cutting tool, in easy, rapid succession, with no need for the operator to perform set-up tasks in between, such as installing or uninstalling tools, nor to control the toolpath. The latter is due to the toolpath's being controlled by the machine, either in jig-like fashion, via the mechanical limits placed on it by the turret's slide and stops, or via electronically-directed servomechanisms for computer numerical control lathes...

Types

There are many variants of the turret lathe. They can be most generally classified by size (small, medium, or large); method of control (manual, automated mechanically, or automated via computer (numerical control (NC) or computer numerical control (CNC)); and bed orientation (horizontal or vertical)...

Vertical

Vertical turret lathes have the workpiece held vertically, which allows the headstock to sit on the floor and the faceplate to become a horizontal rotating table, analogous to a huge potter's wheel. This is useful for the handling of very large, heavy, short workpieces. Vertical lathes in general are also called "vertical boring mills" or often simply "boring mills"; therefore a vertical turret lathe is a vertical boring mill equipped with a turret...

The development of the turret lathe around the middle of the nineteenth century was a key aspect of the advancement of manufacturing technology. Unlike bench lathes, engine lathes, and toolroom lathes, on which each tool change involved some amount of setup, and toolpath had to be carefully controlled by the operator, turret lathes allowed the multiple tool changes and toolpaths of one part-cutting cycle to be repeated with little time or effort. By taking the tool-changing and the toolpath control out of the hands of the operator and building it into the machine tool, it accomplished several feats: it made interchangeable parts easier, faster, and thus cheaper to produce; and it made their production possible by workers with little skill...

Another way to look at this change is that humans gradually figured out that they should not treat duplicate parts like one-off parts. You do not need a master craftsman to cut each duplicate part as if it were unique; if you can set up a repeatable sequence of restricted movements, you can simply repeat the same sequence with each part. And if you can preserve the setting of each tool, so that a tool change does not destroy the setting, but rather lets it be indexed back into position whenever needed, then you have saved vast amounts of time and effort.

The ideas above developed gradually, first in the armory practice of the mid and late nineteenth century (otherwise known as the American system), and then in true mass production during the twentieth century. Those two phenomena have not always been differentiated from each other, but the difference is in the degree to which toolpath control had replaced skilled fitting, or, as it is more often expressed, the degree to which "the skill had been built into the machine tool". The replacement did not happen overnight, but rather was a gradual tapering off of reliance upon fitting, the progress varying by plant and by decade, until it had been completely eliminated from the assembly process, creating true mass production...