ITALY 04The Lineage of Italian Lathes

Imported lathes and early domestic lathes (1880–1939)

British machines in the arsenals, American machines in the car plants

There is a detailed record, written by an outsider, of the inside of Italian machine shops. In May 1909 an official of the US Department of Commerce and Labor toured Italian factories and reported on the machine tools in use (a survey made to help sell American machine tools).

The state rifle factory at Terni in Umbria was, for Italy, something like the Springfield Armory in the US. It had 1,400 machine tools, of which only 10 were American. In the early 1880s Greenwood & Batley of Leeds, England, had delivered about 900 machines in one lot, and all the thread-making machines were of this company's type. The report says these machines had grown old and were due for replacement^[1]. The factory drove its machines with about 1,000 horsepower generated by 8 water turbines. The system of driving machines by belts from overhead shafts was the same, but the original source of power had changed from steam engines to hydroelectric power^[1].

By contrast, at the works of the Torino car maker Itala (about 800 people), most of the 480 machine tools were American. The most numerous lathes were Hendey engine lathes; brake hubs were finished on Gisholt turret lathes in about two and a half hours each, and the small gears of the differential were cut on Potter & Johnston automatics. There were a few German Loewe and British machines, and the Italian-made ones were limited to a few metal-cutting saws, presses, grinders and boring machines that the works had built itself^[1]. At the army's precision works in Roma (Laboratorio di Precisione), German machines predominated, and among Italian ones, lathes and milling machines by Züst, from a town on Lago Maggiore, were in use^[1].

What changed on the shop floor. The Itala works of 1909, in order to make large numbers of the same part, had brought in turret lathes carrying many tools and cam-driven automatics. From a craftsman cutting on a single engine lathe while changing tools, to “let the machine remember the setup; people just load and unload the material.” Italian car plants first imported that system together with the American machines themselves (for the story of American lathes, see The Lineage of American Lathes).

Züst of Intra and the lathes of Torino

Old records of actual domestic lathes survive in unexpected places. In 2008, an annex to a decree transferring the equipment of a regional railway workshop in Sardegna to the region listed an engine lathe built in 1888 by Güller & Züst of Intra (serial no. 1429, bed length 2,000 mm, flat-belt drive) and an 1894 axle lathe by Ing. R. Züst (with two tool posts that could cut independently)^[2]. They were still on the list as equipment of a workshop machining railway axles and wheels, 120 years after they were built.

In 1911, the machinery section of the Torino International Exposition, celebrating 50 years of Italian unification, included several Italian lathes. The Torino works of Michele Ansaldi exhibited an engine lathe with geared speed changes, a motor-driven lathe, a treadle lathe and an American-style shaper. Also from Torino, Paglia & Cerruti showed a turret lathe operated by compressed air, and the car maker FIAT showed lathes, drilling machines, milling machines and planers built in its own works^[3]. That treadle lathes and motor-driven lathes stood side by side in the same hall shows how wide the range of Italian workshops was at the time. Note that the 1909 report says a planer at the Roma works was made by “Ansaldo of Turin,” but Ansaldo was a Genova company, and the works making machine tools in Torino was Ansaldi's. Which was meant cannot be confirmed.

Thread standardization and the Norton gearbox

In the 1920s Italy's mechanical industry had UNIM, a body for standardizing bolts and threads, and Roberto Züst of Züst was a member of its general assembly. In 1925, while examining a draft for standardizing thread pitches (173 Bul.), UNIM checked “whether the new pitches can be cut on the lathes now in the shops.” The answer was that on Züst's D.N. and M.N. lathes, even with an inch lead screw, a Norton-type gearbox combined with change gears could cut every metric pitch in the draft above 0.5 mm^[4].

A gearbox arranges gears of different sizes in steps and changes the speed of the lead screw just by selecting with a lever (it derives from the American Norton patent; see The Lineage of American Lathes). It eliminates the work of fitting change gears one set at a time: check the chart, set the levers, and the thread can be cut. Though built in a metric country, Züst's lathes had inch lead screws, following the American and British lathe tradition, as this article reveals.

Building your own factory's machines: OMO and Grazioli

In 1926 the typewriter maker Olivetti founded in Ivrea OMO (Officina Meccanica Olivetti) to build presses, lathes, milling machines, grinders and planers for its own plants. In 1957 the British magazine Engineering reported that all the machine tools in Olivetti's plants were made by OMO^[5]. It was machine tool building for a policy of self-reliance, not depending on outsiders for parts (for OMO's milling machines, see Chapter 5).

In Milano, Giacomo Grazioli, who had worked at Breda, opened his own works in 1928 and began making engine lathes. According to the recollections of workers, there was then no large works in Italy making lathes or milling machines, and machines came from Germany and Czechoslovakia, so he set out to make a domestic lathe. In 1938 he built a large works with cranes on via De Sanctis and opened a machinist school within the company. The small lathes Fortuna and Dania 180 sold well, and former workers say Grazioli lathes stood in the training shops of vocational schools all over the country^[6].

What changed on the shop floor. Italian lathes of this period were mainly belt-driven engine lathes, and production machines (turret lathes and automatics) were bought from the US or Germany. The strength of domestic lathes lay in “one machine cuts anything” work, such as railway and factory repairs and school training. As gearboxes spread, thread cutting changed from a job of calculating and changing gears to a job of checking a chart and setting levers.

Postwar engine lathes and multi-spindle automatics (1940–1969)

Graziano of Tortona

Tortona in Piemonte lies in the middle of the Milano–Genova–Torino triangle and was originally a town making parts for tractors and harvesters. In 1940 Graziano was founded here and began making horizontal engine lathes^[7][8]. Postwar Graziano lathes were known by the name SAG. In 1961 the SAG 180 toolroom lathe (center height 7 in ≈ 178 mm, 40 in and 60 in between centers) went on sale in Britain^[11], and in 1964 the British trade journal Machinery featured the SAG 12 engine lathe^[12]. A toolroom lathe is a lathe for accurately cutting jigs, dies and prototype parts, with tighter spindle runout and feed accuracy than an ordinary engine lathe.

In May 1968 Prime Minister Aldo Moro visited Graziano's Tortona works. At the time the company's president, Wilmer Graziano, was president of the machine tool association UCIMU and a member of the European machine tool committee. Newspapers reported that Graziano engine lathes were exported around the world, including to China^[15].

Grazioli in the war and after

By 1943–44 Milano's Grazioli had become a works of about 300 people. During the war most of its lathes were sold to arms plants such as Ansaldo, and the works was placed under German military supervision as a war plant^[6]. After the war the business went badly; it went bankrupt in 1959–60 and passed to Carle & Montanari, later moving to Gruppo Rosso and closing in 1987^[6]. Its machines served for a long time as lathes in school training shops, but the company did not survive into the NC era.

Multi-spindle automatics: from IMIS to Gildemeister Italiana

A multi-spindle automatic arranges several spindles in a rotating drum; each time the drum indexes, the workpiece in each spindle advances to the tool for the next operation. Tool feeds are set by cams, so one part is completed with each turn of the drum. It is the mainstay of car and appliance parts plants that cut tens of thousands of small parts such as screws, pins and fittings.

In Brembate di Sopra in the province of Bergamo, a works registered under the name IMIS in 1966 was making small multi-spindle automatics and exporting them. The major German multi-spindle automatic maker Gildemeister (Bielefeld) acquired IMIS's export division in 1967 and a majority of the company in 1969, and Gildemeister Italiana was born^[14][13]. From then on the Brembate works became the base for making the German company's multi-spindle automatics in Italy (for the story of German automatics, see The Lineage of German Lathes).

BI-MU and UCIMU

In October 1968 the 6th BI-MU (machine tool biennial) was held in Milano. There were 730 exhibits (560 of them from manufacturers), and about 10,000 tons of machines from the US, the USSR, West Germany, Britain and Italy, plus 16 other countries, were on show. The machine tool association UCIMU explained that its roughly 120 members (out of about 200 domestic makers) held 80% of the home market, and looked back, saying that before the Second World War the industry could not even meet domestic demand and imported much of it^[16].

What changed on the shop floor. In postwar Italy, domestic engine lathes and toolroom lathes such as Graziano's SAG spread through factories and began to be exported. A division of labor also took shape in this period, with small mass-produced parts made on the multi-spindle automatics of German-owned Gildemeister Italiana. Multi-spindle automatics take time to set up and get cheaper per part the more you make, which suited the “economic miracle” era, when mass production of cars and appliances was growing.

NC lathes, crisis and restructuring (1969–1999)

SAG 24 NC: an NC lathe that changes its own tools

In late 1969 the British trade journal Machinery and Production Engineering featured Graziano's NC lathe SAG 24 NC as having “automatic tool changing facilities”^[17]. An NC (numerically controlled) lathe moves its tool post by numerical commands. With a mechanism for changing tools automatically, operations needing different tools, such as turning the outside diameter, facing and threading, can be cut in sequence without anyone turning the tool post. Whereas a cam automatic “cannot cut a different part without making new cams,” an NC lathe can move to another part just by changing the tape (program), so even small-quantity work could now be automated.

Graziano began producing CNC lathes (NC lathes using computers) in the 1970s, and eventually its whole range became CNC. Sources disagree on when this began: a 2007 trade journal says “the early 1970s,” and DMG MORI's site “the late '70s”^[7][8].

Vertical lathes: Carnaghi and Sculfort

Large, heavy workpieces such as generator and turbine discs or the slewing rings of construction machinery would hang from the spindle on a horizontal lathe and sag under their own weight. So the spindle is stood upright and the workpiece laid on a large rotary table: this is the vertical lathe. Starting in Busto Arsizio in 1922 with forging and small machine tools, and building shapers from 1939, Pietro Carnaghi moved into vertical lathe production in 1973, later becoming a maker of vertical lathes with table diameters of 1 to 4 m^[18].

Graziano, focused on horizontal lathes, also tied up with Sculfort-Somin of France in 1984 and agreed to sell Sculfort's TV 30 vertical lathe in Italy. Newspapers reported that Sculfort vertical lathes were widely used by European car makers^[23].

Graziano's crisis and extraordinary administration

In August 1977 Graziano's chairman, Wilmer Graziano, died^[19]. In 1982 Graziano (about 600 people), a leading maker of engine lathes and NC lathes, fell into crisis, dragging in about 100 subcontractors in Tortona and even the foundry that made machine tool castings^[20][21]. Lathe beds and headstocks are castings, so lathe makers were closely tied to foundries.

On May 16, 1983, the state placed Graziano e C. under the extraordinary administration of large companies (amministrazione straordinaria, under a 1979 law, the so-called Prodi Law), letting it carry on business for two years under a commissioner. The related foundry company F.I.M.U. (Fonderia italiana macchine utensili) was given the same treatment in June^[22]. Even under extraordinary administration Graziano went on making NC lathes, and in December 1985 a delegation from Dezhou Machine Tool of Shandong, China, visited Tortona to negotiate buying the rights to build some Graziano NC lathe models in China. At this time Graziano was also working on “turning cells” that took commands directly from a computer^[24].

In September 1987 a new Graziano S.p.A. was born. It was formed by the milling machine maker of Pfronten, Germany, MAHO, and Bassano-Grimeca of Bologna, taking over Graziano & C. from extraordinary administration, with MAHO holding two-thirds of the shares. In newspaper advertisements MAHO explained that its group had never made lathes before, and that the NC lathe market still had room to grow outside Italy^[25].

CNC lathes in the 1990s: the GT300

In 1998 the US magazine Design News (in a case study by a control maker) described the inner workings of Graziano's CNC lathe GT300. The NC unit was Indramat's MTC200, based on PC technology, connected to the servomotors by digital fiber-optic communication (SERCOS), moving the X, Z and Z2 axes at 30 m per minute. The bed was artificial stone (synthetic granite), which absorbs vibration. Instead of sliding guideways it used linear guides with balls, and the motor was built directly into the spindle (14 kW, 6,000 rpm, 130 N·m)^[28].

The cast bed with sliding guideways and the belt-and-gear headstock, the basic form of the lathe since Züst's day, were here largely replaced. Build the motor into the spindle and the gears disappear, and speed can be varied steplessly by NC command. Linear guides have little friction and hold position even at fast feeds. Around the same time, Gildemeister Italiana in Brembate was a major multi-spindle automatic maker of about 340 people, listed on Milano's over-the-counter market^[26].

What changed on the shop floor. With NC lathes, setup changed from “making cams” and “adjusting the tool post” to “writing a program and entering tool offsets.” In the CNC lathes of the 1990s, built-in spindles and linear guides raised cutting and feed speeds, and running even jobs of a few dozen parts automatically became normal. How to write programs today is covered on the NC programming page.

★CNC lathes and international groups (2000–)

Into the Gildemeister group

On May 18, 2000, Germany's Gildemeister AG brought Gildemeister Italiana and its subsidiaries into its consolidated accounts. In the 2001 annual report, Gildemeister's stake was 86%, and Graziano Tortona S.p.A. was a wholly owned subsidiary of Gildemeister Italiana. Gildemeister Italiana was in the middle of switching from cam multi-spindle automatics to CNC multi-spindle automatics, while Graziano revised its range, brought in 3D CAD, reorganized assembly and logistics, and raised productivity per unit of floor area by 43%^[29]. A 2007 trade journal dates Graziano's entry into the group to June 2001^[7]. By what route Graziano, owned by MAHO from 1987, became a subsidiary of Gildemeister Italiana could not be fully confirmed.

Graziano's 2007 CNC universal lathe used linear motors on some axes (eliminating ball screws to reduce wearing parts), a servo turret that indexes to the next tool in 0.15 seconds and a hollow spindle of 200 mm diameter, with a choice of NC units from Siemens, Heidenhain and GE Fanuc. Its parts went to car, hydraulics, pneumatics, gearbox, farm machinery and construction machinery customers^[7]. Cam multi-spindle automatics became CNC, and machines descended from the engine lathe gained linear motors and servo turrets. By the early 2000s, the lathes of Tortona and Brembate had become machines whose controls and drives worked almost entirely by electrical commands.

DMG MORI and Japan

In July 2009 a new assembly and logistics building was completed at Graziano's Tortona works (€3.4 million, 12,200 m² of assembly area, 154 people) to build CTX series lathes^[30]. In 2014 DMG MORI opened a new plant and technology center costing over €15 million in Bergamo (the former Gildemeister Italiana)^[13]. In April 2016 Japan's DMG MORI CO., LTD. announced that it held more than 75% of Germany's DMG MORI AG and would conclude a domination agreement^[31]. Thus the lathe plants in Tortona (DMG MORI Tortona) and Bergamo became part of a group headed by a Japanese company. Tortona now handles “universal” lathes that cut medium-sized parts in small lots with frequent changeovers^[8].

Large vertical lathes and 5-axis

The vertical lathe maker Pietro Carnaghi brought out Flexturn, a 5-axis vertical lathe that does turning and milling on one machine, in 2015, and joined France's Fives group in 2025 (Villa Cortese plant, about 260 people)^[18]. A machine that turns a heavy workpiece in a single setup and goes straight on to drilling and slot milling, the vertical lathe has become a “turning center for large parts” (for the story of multitasking, see Japanese Archive Chapter 7).

What changed on the shop floor. Italian lathes today are built in the plants of German, Japanese and French groups, concentrating on their specialties (medium-sized universal CNC lathes, multi-spindle automatics, large vertical lathes). Seen from a job shop, even Italian-made lathes use NC units and drives from Japanese and German suppliers, and their operation and maintenance differ little from any other machine in the world. For choosing a lathe, see the Lathes page, and for cutting conditions, the Machining page.

Links with Japan

In this research we found no record of Italian and Japanese lathe makers being tied directly, through technical tie-ups or the like. The links are indirect, through groups. Graziano of Tortona joined Germany's MAHO in 1987 and the Gildemeister group in 2001, and when Japan's DMG MORI CO., LTD. came to hold more than 75% of Germany's DMG MORI AG in 2016, it became a plant within a Japanese company's group^[25][29][31]. Graziano's 2007 CNC lathes could be ordered with NC units from GE Fanuc (a joint venture of Japan's FANUC and GE of the US), alongside Germany's Siemens and Heidenhain^[7].

Comparing figures shows the difference between Japanese and Italian lathe building. A 1991 report by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) says monthly output of CNC lathes reached 200 units in Japan, against 40 in many European countries. The same report says 72% of Italian machine tool makers (a survey of 300 of about 450) had fewer than 50 employees^[35]. Where Japan chose to make the same CNC lathes in large numbers, Italy built lathes with small makers each specializing in a type. For the course of Japanese lathes, see the timeline of Japanese Archive, Chapter 1, and for the waves of Japanese NC lathe exports, see The Lineage of American Lathes.

FAQ

Who first built lathes in Italy?

No source has been found that can settle who was “first.” The oldest we could confirm is an engine lathe built in 1888 by Güller & Züst of Intra, a town on Lago Maggiore, which was still in the equipment register of a railway workshop in Sardegna in 2008. At the 1911 Torino International Exposition, engine lathes from Michele Ansaldi's works and a turret lathe from Paglia & Cerruti were exhibited.

What does “SAG” in Graziano's lathes mean?

It is the model designation of the lathes of Graziano of Tortona. British trade journals mention the SAG 180 toolroom lathe in 1961, the SAG 12 engine lathe in 1964 and the SAG 24 NC lathe with automatic tool changing in 1969. In this research we found no separate lathe maker called SAG.

What became of Graziano?

It came under state extraordinary administration in 1983, was taken over by Germany's MAHO and Bassano-Grimeca of Bologna in 1987, and joined the Gildemeister group in 2001. Today, as DMG MORI Tortona, it builds medium-sized CNC universal lathes. Since 2016 it has been a plant of the group in which Japan's DMG MORI CO., LTD. holds more than 75% of Germany's DMG MORI AG.

Are there links between Italian and Japanese lathe makers?

We found no record of direct technical tie-ups. The biggest link is that, through the DMG MORI group, the lathe plants in Tortona and Bergamo belong to a Japanese company's group. Graziano's 2007 CNC lathes could also be ordered with GE Fanuc NC units.