USA 10Other American Machine Tools

Planers and shapers: cutting large flat surfaces

A planer moves the table carrying the workpiece back and forth and cuts a flat surface with a stationary tool. A shaper does the reverse: a ram carrying the tool moves back and forth while the workpiece is fed sideways little by little. Both are reciprocating machines that cut on the “forward” stroke and run idle on the “return”. Flat surfaces are the foundation of machines. Nothing can start unless the guideways of a lathe bed or the base of an engine are flat first.

The planer was born in Britain, but it was built early in America too. According to Roe (1916), Gay, Silver & Co. of Massachusetts was already building planers by 1831, and they were built in Philadelphia at about the same time^[1]. In Worcester, “chain” planers, whose table was pulled by a chain, were built from around 1845^[1]. Demand for machining parts of railroad locomotives and textile machinery helped such shops grow.

Sellers' spiral pinion: smoothing the reciprocating motion

The weak point of a reciprocating machine is uneven table motion. When the table is driven by a gear and rack, the speed fluctuates each time the tooth contact changes, leaving streaks on the cut surface. There was also a method of driving the table with a screw, but to fit the screw and nut, the middle of the bed, the part you most want to be strong, had to be made lower.

In 1862 William Sellers of Philadelphia solved this problem in an unusual way^[1][3]. He drove the rack under the table with a spiral pinion on a shaft that crossed the bed at an angle. According to the company's 1873 catalog, the pinion had only four teeth, shaped like a “steep screw”, and the rack teeth were inclined 5 degrees to the direction of table travel so the table was not pushed sideways. Because the tooth contact moved across the full width, the motion was smooth, and because the drive belts and shaft were on the operator's side, planers could be lined up parallel to lathes, saving floor space. At the 1867 Paris Exposition, a British engineering journal praised this planer as one of the most original machine tools on display^[2]. Sellers is also known for giving up the ornate machine styling of the day and painting his machines gray^[1][3].

Specialist planer makers, and the handover to milling machines

By the 1880s, planers had become the products of specialist makers. George A. Gray of Cincinnati started his own company in 1883 and moved from lathes to specializing in planers^[1]. Large planers were also a strength of the Niles-Bement-Pond plants (Pond, Niles), and in Rockford, Rockford Machine Tool Co. began making shapers and planers in 1897^[1]. In shapers, Gould & Eberhardt of Newark was making gear cutters and shapers with about 400 people around 1916^[1], and in Cincinnati The Cincinnati Shaper Co. was founded at the end of the 1890s^[6]. Giddings & Lewis also built hydraulically driven shapers and small planers after 1910^[14].

But the planer has a fundamental weakness: it does not cut on the return stroke. Large flat surfaces are faster to cut continuously with a rotating milling cutter. Ingersoll, which moved to Rockford around 1893, popularized heavy “planer-type” milling machines with several spindle heads^[1]. The table and the gantry frame kept the same form as a planer; only the tool changed to a rotating milling cutter. In this way the main role in flat-surface machining gradually passed to the milling machine (Chapter 7), and some shaper companies chose another path. The Cincinnati Shaper Co. moved into sheet-metal press brakes and shears from the early 1920s, and as Cincinnati Incorporated it later came to build laser cutting machines and even large additive manufacturing machines^[6][68].

What changed on the shop floor. In the planer era, large flat surfaces were fitted by “planing and then scraping” (hand finishing with a scraper). The cleaner the planed surface, the less had to be removed by scraping. The scraping patterns still seen on machine tool guideways today remain because this finishing method has continued.

Drilling machines: specialization in hole-making machines

Drilling is the most common operation in machining. Drilling mattered in the interchangeable production of arms as well: of the 157 machines the British government bought from the U.S. in 1855 for the Enfield rifle factory, drilling machines numbered 23, second only to the 74 milling machines^[1].

The twist drill: when the tool changes, the machine changes

Until the mid-19th century, drills were mainly flat-bladed “flat drills”, which clogged easily with chips and tended to drill crooked holes. In April 1863 Stephen A. Morse of Massachusetts obtained U.S. Patent 38,119 for a drill with helical flutes (the twist drill). The patent specification explains that the cutting edge meets the work squarely and chips escape through the flutes, so the hole goes straight^[4]. Machines to cut the helical flutes were also needed, and in 1862 Brown & Sharpe sold its first universal milling machine, which could cut drill flutes^[1]. Once twist drills became standard, drilling machines needed higher speeds and a steady feed that advanced while clearing chips. Sellers' 1873 catalog recommends upright drills with the spindle driven by belt instead of bevel gears, saying the belt runs more smoothly and drills small holes cleanly^[2].

The radial drills of Cincinnati

On an upright drill, the workpiece is moved to line up the hole position. That is impossible with large, heavy work. So the radial drilling machine was born, with the spindle head mounted on an arm projecting from a column, the arm swinging and the head moving along it. The workpiece stays put and the tool goes to the hole position.

Henry Bickford of Cincinnati began building upright drills in 1874 and had built 3,000 by 1885. Bickford Drill Co., formed in 1887, expanded into radial and universal drills^[1]. In 1880 George A. Gray, formerly a designer at Niles, founded the Universal Radial Drill Co. and built radial drills with a round column. Roe names it as the first company to build round-column radial drills. The company was absorbed by Bickford in 1894^[1]. In 1909 the name Cincinnati Bickford Tool Co. appears in a trade journal index^[11]. According to Iron Age (1924), this was the name formed that year through the merger of Bickford Drill & Tool Co. and Cincinnati Machine Tool Co.; in 1955 the company was bought by Giddings & Lewis and became one of its divisions^[12][38]. The 1919 book Modern Drilling Practice describes a steel-mill machinery plant where several radial drills were brought up to a large piece such as a machine tool bed to drill holes at the same time^[22]. The Barnes brothers of Rockford also went from drills built for their own use to radial and multi-spindle drills^[1].

Multi-spindle drills: all of a car's holes at once

Automobile mass production changed the way holes were drilled. Cylinder blocks and flywheels have dozens of holes in set positions. Instead of drilling them one at a time, the machine that lines up many spindles in one head and drills them all at once, guiding the tools with jig bushings, is the multi-spindle drilling machine. A 1919 book shows Willys-Overland drilling rear-axle parts on a National Automatic Tool (Natco) No.14 multi-spindle drill with a three-station indexing fixture, and Continental Motors drilling cylinder blocks on a Baush multi-spindle drill. Baush's station-type machine combined with a moving fixture was originally built for drilling, counterboring and reaming the 81 holes of the Ford flywheel^[22]. This idea of drilling while moving the workpiece on to the next position later led to the transfer machine.

NC spread from drilling

NC brings to mind milling machines cutting complex curves, but the first NC to spread in ordinary factories was a simple kind that only set hole positions. According to Ashburn (1988), several NC tables that sat under radial drills and similar machines to position the workpiece appeared at the 1955 Chicago machine tool show. Adrian Holmberg of the printing-press maker Goss bought two of them at $10,000 each, increased his NC machines to 22 by 1960, and had built up 20,000 paper tapes, one for each part. Most were drilling jobs, and the tapes took the place of drill jigs, which were bulky and expensive^[23]. In 1958 Burgmaster, near Los Angeles, advertised a turret drill (which changed tools by rotating a turret of six or eight spindles) fitted with GE NC, claiming that simple clamps and paper tape could be used instead of jigs^[42]. Burgmaster was bought by Houdaille Industries in 1965^[47][48]. Burgmaster's later rise and fall became the subject of Max Holland's book When the Machine Stopped (1989)^[47].

What changed on the shop floor. The multi-spindle drill is a mass-production tool that “locates holes with jigs and bushings”; NC is a small-lot tool that “locates holes by coordinates”. The drilling cycles (canned cycles) on today's machining centers carry on the idea of these NC drilling machines.

Horizontal boring machines and jig borers: large holes and accurate holes

Boring is the process of enlarging the inside of an existing hole with a single-point tool to finish its diameter, roundness and position. Drilled holes are not very accurate in size or position, so where an accurate hole is needed, it is finished by boring.

Horizontal boring mills: Giddings & Lewis

Large box-shaped parts (gearboxes, pump and turbine casings) cannot be rotated on a lathe. Setting the workpiece on a table and cutting the hole with a boring bar on a horizontal spindle is the job of the horizontal boring machine. Sellers' 1873 catalog also shows a machine that drilled and bored from the side with the workpiece on a table; with a faceplate it could also serve as a facing lathe, and the feed could be varied steplessly with friction disks^[2].

The leading 20th-century maker of horizontal boring machines was Giddings & Lewis of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. It began in 1859 as a sawmill machinery shop and moved into machine tools at the turn of the century. From around World War I it built horizontal drilling, boring and milling machines; by the end of the 1920s it offered spindle diameters of 2.5 to 8 inches (about 64–203 mm), and in 1939 it introduced a large series of 6 and 7 inches. In World War II the government had it build a war plant and produce large horizontal boring mills^[14]. In 1948, at NACA's (now NASA's) Lewis laboratory, a photograph was taken of a 72-inch (about 1.8 m) compressor casing being machined on the company's horizontal boring mill^[36]. The company put effort into NC from the 1950s; its 1966 annual report lists NC machining centers and NC drilling and boring machines, and says that the decision ten years earlier to concentrate on NC development had paid off^[50].

Jig borers: setting hole positions in the toolroom

Mass-production drilling needs jigs. The jig plate must have bushing holes, which guide the drill, at accurate positions. The machine for drilling those jig holes accurately is the jig borer. Precise scales and measuring devices are fitted to the spindle and table feeds, and hole positions are set by coordinates.

Among jig borers, the Swiss SIP is famous (it was imported into Japan before the war too and served as a model; Japanese Archive Chapter 5), but the maker that made it a toolroom standard in America was Moore Special Tool of Bridgeport. The company, which began in 1924 as a tool and die shop, could not obtain machines capable of die accuracy, so from 1930 it began developing its own jig borer, building the first machine in 1931^[25] (the company's current history gives 1932^[24]). Earlier still, in August 1917, Pratt & Whitney had completed its first jig borer, which located holes on the principle of the measuring machine^[20][21]. The key was a hard lead screw, hardened, ground and lapped. Until then, soft screws had been used with their errors compensated^[24].

The jig borer had one limitation. It could only bore holes in soft material before hardening, and distortion from hardening shifted the positions. In 1940 Moore built the jig grinder, which made it possible to grind holes to the correct positions after hardening^[25][24]. The company made a policy of teaching how to use its machines through books, publishing Precision Hole Location in 1946 and Holes, Contours and Surfaces in 1955^[25]. By 1950 more than 1,500 No.1 jig borers and 500 jig grinders had been sold, and in 1967 the company built a jig grinder that ground contours under NC^[24]. Even John Parsons, the father of NC, drilled the calculated coordinate points one by one on a Swiss jig borer when making templates for helicopter blades^[23].

What changed on the shop floor. After the jig grinder appeared, “harden first, then locate by grinding” became the standard for holes in press dies and molds. That is also why jig grinders are indispensable in Japanese die shops. For the history of grinding machines, see also Chapter 8.

Vertical lathes: cutting heavy work laid flat

When a large-diameter, disk-like piece (a wheel, a flange, a gear blank) is turned on an ordinary lathe, its weight deflects the spindle and re-chucking is hard work. If the table rotates horizontally and the workpiece is laid flat, the table carries the weight. This is the vertical lathe (vertical boring mill). Roe writes that the Swiss Bodmer, working in Britain, had described this form as a “circular planer”, but it was little used in Britain and is considered a machine developed in America^[1].

Bullard: from 37 inches to the Mult-Au-Matic

The man who turned this machine into a mass-production tool was Edward P. Bullard of Bridgeport. Bullard, who had worked at Colt and Pratt & Whitney, opened a lathe shop in 1880^[5], and in 1883 designed his first vertical boring and turning mill. It was a 37-inch (about 940 mm) machine with a single belt-fed toolhead; Roe calls it the first small vertical boring mill for the precise work previously done on a lathe faceplate. Earlier vertical boring mills had been used only for large, rough work^[1].

The next step came from his son, Edward P. Bullard (Jr.). Visiting the Paris Exposition in 1900, he saw the demand from the French automobile industry and began designing a vertical turret lathe that combined the vertical boring mill with the turret lathe^[7]. By fitting a turret (a holder carrying several tools that rotates to change them) on the crossrail toolhead, and adding a side head on the column so tools could work close to the workpiece, the vertical boring mill became in effect a “vertical turret lathe”^[1]. American Machinist in 1912–13 introduced Bullard's new turret design and a 36-inch vertical turret lathe^[15][16].

In 1914 Bullard brought out the Mult-Au-Matic. Several spindles stand on a round carrier; each time the carrier indexes, the workpieces move on to the next toolhead, and each toolhead cuts a different operation at the same time. Roe describes it as a vertical multi-spindle automatic chucking lathe with five independent toolheads, concluding that the lathe had come this far in the 115 years since Maudslay's slide rest^[17][1]. The Mult-Au-Matic became a mainstay of automotive parts production, and Bullard was for a long time one of America's largest machine tool makers^[7]. The company went public in 1929 as The Bullard Company, was later bought by White Consolidated Industries and declined, and its Bridgeport plant was demolished in 1983^[5]. The merger with WCI took place in March 1968^[52]. In October 1945, as the war ended, the company had already unveiled Man-Au-Trol, an electrical and hydraulic system that advanced the operating sequence automatically, on a vertical turret lathe^[31][32]. In NC vertical lathes, Giddings & Lewis also presented a machine in 1966 for machining Caterpillar transmission cases^[50]. The history of the lathe itself is covered in Chapter 6.

Broaching machines: finishing in one pass

A broach is a long tool with dozens of teeth, each slightly higher than the last. Pulled (or pushed) through a hole, each tooth cuts a little, and when the last tooth has passed, a square hole, spline or keyway is finished. The tools are expensive and dedicated to each shape, but for high-volume work they are overwhelmingly fast and give consistent shapes.

The idea is old: Roe writes that in the 1850s Richard S. Lawrence of Robbins & Lawrence used broaching in making Sharps rifles and greatly reduced costs^[1]. The man who popularized the broaching machine as a machine was Joseph N. Lapointe, who had worked at Pratt & Whitney^[1]. A 1953 Ann Arbor newspaper reports that he introduced the broaching machine in the early 1900s as a new idea in metal cutting, and that the first machines pulled the broach with a belt-driven pulley and a lead screw^[8]. In the American Machinist index, the name Lapointe Machine Tool Co. appears in 1904, a keyway-cutting broaching machine in 1906, and articles on the company's broaching machines in 1913^[9][10][16].

His son Francis J. Lapointe founded the American Broach & Machine Co. in Detroit in 1916 and soon moved it to Ann Arbor. He obtained about 70 patents in his lifetime, most of them on broaching machines and broaches. The company merged with Sundstrand of Rockford in 1936^[8]. American Machinist in 1913 also had an article on broaching the internal teeth of automobile gears^[16], and the broaching machine became a tool for finishing holes in automotive parts in one go.

What changed on the shop floor. With the broaching machine, spline holes and keyways went from “one at a time on a shaper or slotter” to “a single pass”. For how keyways are machined today, see also the Machining guide.

Metal-cutting band saws: DoALL

For a long time, metal was cut mainly with power hacksaws, which move a hacksaw blade back and forth. Being reciprocating, they do not cut on the return stroke and can only cut straight. Band saws, which keep a looped band blade running in one direction, were used in woodworking but could not cut metal.

In 1933 Leighton A. Wilkie of Minneapolis built a band saw that cut metal and named it “DoALL”, a name he later gave to the company too^[26][27]. The earliest trade-journal article this chapter could confirm is in the new-products section of American Machinist in 1935, where Continental's Do-All appears as a machine that “saws and files” by switching between a saw band and a file band. Bench models and deep-throat models followed in 1936^[28]. Band saws cut continuously, so they are fast, and by steering the blade along a curve they can cut out contours, which also suits them to roughing die shapes out of a block. Wilkie emphasized selling by demonstration and built a nationwide network of industrial supply outlets^[26].

Special-purpose machines and transfer machines (linked to Chapter 3)

Multi-spindle drills and the Mult-Au-Matic were machines that cut different operations simultaneously while moving the workpiece to the next position. The transfer machine, which automatically moves the workpiece on to the next machine, expanded this idea to the scale of a factory. Ashburn (1988) suggests that the first continuous automatic production line in today's sense was probably the automobile frame line installed by A. O. Smith of Milwaukee in 1920, and writes that the transfer machine grew from a machine built in 1924 at Morris's plant in Coventry, Britain, which lined up standard machines on one bed to perform 53 operations on an engine block. Its weakness, however, was “inflexibility”: if a model did not sell, the whole line had to be scrapped^[23]. Transfer machines in auto plants and “Detroit Automation” are covered in detail in Chapter 3.

EDM: cutting with sparks

Electrical discharge machining (EDM) fills the gap between an electrode and the workpiece with a fluid such as oil and fires tens of thousands of small sparks to melt away the metal little by little. Because there is no cutting tool, it can sink shapes even into hardened steel and cemented carbide. The accepted view is that the principle was invented in 1943 by the Lazarenkos in the Soviet Union, but the National Museum of Nature and Science's technology systematization survey says research on applying it to metalworking began in both America and the Soviet Union^[30].

From a machine for removing broken taps

In America it began with a shop-floor headache. According to the trade journal Cutting Tool Engineering, at about the same time Harold Stark, Victor Harding and Jack Beaver in America were building a machine that used sparks to break up and remove drills and taps broken inside aluminum castings. At first they adapted an electric engraving tool and lacked power, but with a strong spark power supply, automatic repetition and a mechanism to change the fluid it became practical, and later designs used vacuum-tube power supplies to fire thousands of sparks per second^[29]. By 1946 the Elox Corporation of Clawson, Michigan was selling three models of this "disintegrator"^[34][35]. That EDM is still the last resort for broken taps today goes back to this beginning (How to remove a broken tap).

From hard-to-cut aircraft materials to small die shops

By the mid-1950s many EDM makers had appeared in the Soviet Union, Europe and America. In America it was used to machine special aerospace parts^[30]. Even so, a 1958 U.S. equipment survey counted 578 EDM machines, a tiny fraction of all machine tools^[41]. In the early 1960s Elox of the U.S. and others completed machines that used electro-hydraulic servo valves to feed the electrode, allowing the spark gap to be held quickly and accurately^[30]. In 1961 American Machinist ran an article on “EDM for the job shop”^[44], and in 1973–74 the Elox division of Colt Industries, under an Air Force contract, researched producing gun barrel bores and rifling in hard-to-cut materials by EDM^[58].

The traveling wire electrode

In die-sinking EDM, the electrode itself wears. If a fine wire is kept running and used as the electrode, the worn part is constantly replaced by new wire. A tech brief from the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA in August 1967 describes “traveling wire electrode” EDM built in the shop of Argonne National Laboratory. Brass or copper wire down to 0.005 in (about 0.13 mm) in diameter was fed at 10–15 in per minute and run back and forth in place of a plate electrode. With no electrode distortion, accuracy improved, and it was used to cut rare-earth metals, meteorites and radioactive materials^[51]. Commercial wire EDM machines that follow contours under NC were developed in Switzerland, the Soviet Union and Japan; Japan's story is covered in Japanese Archive Chapter 6.

What changed on the shop floor. EDM made it possible to “harden first, then sink the shape”, which greatly changed setups in die shops. Along with the jig grinder (previous section), it is a machine for achieving accuracy after hardening.

Laser cutters and waterjets: cutting with light and water

Lasers

In August 1960, Theodore H. Maiman of the Hughes Aircraft research laboratory (Malibu, California) reported in Nature the stimulated emission of light from a ruby crystal, in other words laser oscillation^[43]. In 1964 C. K. N. Patel of Bell Laboratories reported a laser that oscillated continuously using carbon dioxide molecules (the CO2 laser)^[45]. CO2 lasers are easy to scale up in power, and many later sheet-metal laser cutters used this type.

One of the earliest factory uses was drilling small holes in extremely hard materials. In 1966 Western Electric reported in a trade journal that it had succeeded in piercing the holes of diamond dies for drawing wire with a laser, and said this promised to cut the time and cost of die making^[49]. In sheet-metal cutting, Cincinnati Incorporated, which had started with shapers, brought out commercial laser cutters in the 1980s and later built laser cutters driven by linear motors^[6].

Waterjets

Water forced through a tiny orifice at ultra-high pressure can cut things. In May 1968 Norman C. Franz of Ann Arbor, Michigan filed a patent for a method of dissolving long-chain polymers in water to keep the jet from breaking up, and obtained U.S. Patent 3,524,367 in August 1970^[53]. Flow describes him as originally a forestry engineer looking for a more efficient way to cut wood^[54]. The first commercial system was built by McCartney of Ingersoll-Rand and went into service in November 1971 at a paper tube plant of Alton Box Board^[55][56].

It was Flow of Kent, Washington that made it a product. Founded in 1974, it commercialized an intensifier pump capable of continuous operation in 1975^[57]. At first it cut soft materials such as corrugated board, paper, insulation and disposable diapers^[54]. Mohamed A. Hashish and colleagues then devised a method of mixing abrasive into the water jet and concentrating it in the center of the stream to reduce nozzle wear. The first application was filed in October 1982 and became U.S. Patent 4,648,215 in March 1987^[61]. According to the company, the first commercial abrasive waterjet came out in 1984^[62]. The abrasive made it possible to cut even hard materials, and the ability to cut without heat proved valuable for materials that must not be burned or altered.

Measuring machines: Sheffield and Brown & Sharpe

Precision machines need precision measuring tools. Sheffield Corp. of Dayton, Ohio was a gauge and measuring instrument maker formed in 1941 when Louis Polk combined City Machine & Tool and Sheffield Machine & Tool. Its column-type comparator, the Precisionaire, was used in World War II aircraft production and later for in-process measurement on machine tools. It came under Bendix in 1956^[40].

The beginnings of the coordinate measuring machine (CMM) are covered in the British chapter (Other British Machine Tools). Surprisingly, the company that became a major CMM maker in America was the old-line machine tool maker Brown & Sharpe. According to its 1994 filing, through a series of divestitures and acquisitions in 1985–93 it changed from a machine tool company into a dimensional metrology company. It bought the industrial metrology division (precision CMMs) of Wild Leitz of Germany in June 1990 and in June 1994 agreed to buy DEA, the CMM company of Italy's Finmeccanica, stating that it was the world's largest in CMM sales^[66]. That metrology business was sold to Hexagon of Sweden under an agreement of November 2000, and the remaining company dropped the Brown & Sharpe name^[67]. A company that began in 1833 as a clock and instrument shop ended up on the “measuring” side. For today's approach to measurement, see also Gauges and the article “Measurement Errors”.

Additive manufacturing (linked to Chapter 5)

Additive manufacturing, which builds shapes by adding material instead of cutting it away, also spread from American patents. In August 1984 Charles W. Hull filed a patent for a stereolithography apparatus that solidifies liquid resin one layer at a time with ultraviolet light, and obtained U.S. Patent 4,575,330 in March 1986^[63]. He co-founded 3D Systems in 1986 and in 1987 released the first commercial 3D printer, the SLA-1. ASME designated it a Landmark in 2016^[59]. In October 1986 Carl R. Deckard of the University of Texas filed for a method of sintering powder with a laser (SLS)^[64], and in October 1989 S. Scott Crump of Stratasys filed for a method of extruding and stacking molten material (FDM)^[65]. In 2014 Cincinnati Incorporated, which had started with shapers, jointly developed BAAM, a large polymer printer, with the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and printed a car body in 44 hours at IMTS in Chicago^[68]. In January 2015 a replica Shelby Cobra printed on BAAM was displayed at the Detroit auto show^[69][70]. Metal additive manufacturing and current trends are covered in Chapter 5.

Links with Japan

Drilling machines. In Japan, in 1912 Rokuroku Sangyo built a domestic arm-type drilling machine using technology learned in the U.S., and the National Museum of Nature and Science considers it likely to be the first case of foreign technology being introduced (timeline of Japanese Archive Chapter 5). Radial drills were a staple of Japanese makers before and after the war, and Okuma's DRA-J high-speed radial drill of 1958 advertised “precision drilling on a par with a jig borer” (ibid.).

EDM. In Japanese EDM research too, America was the yardstick. A 1965 University of Tokyo paper by Hisao Kurafuji and Takashi Suda lists Elox's “Elox oil” as one of the references for comparing machining fluids^[46]. Mitsubishi Electric's DWC-50 of 1972, Japan's first domestic wire EDM machine, followed drawing lines with an optical drawing-tracing device developed in the U.S. instead of expensive NC^[30]. Japanese makers then improved performance and quality by developing NC units and power supplies, and by the late 1970s they had caught up with Switzerland's Agie and Charmilles and America's Elox, until then the world leaders, and gained the advantage in price^[30] (Japanese Archive Chapter 6).

Vertical lathes and NC. The vertical turret lathe pioneered by Bullard was built in Japan too, and an NC vertical lathe from OM Ltd. appeared at the 1st Japan International Machine Tool Fair in 1962 (timeline of Chapter 1 of the Japanese archive). Meanwhile, in May 1982 Houdaille Industries, which had a machine tool division, petitioned for the investment tax credit to be denied to companies buying Japanese-made machining centers and NC punch presses (the petition was rejected in 1983)^[23], which led to the later voluntary restraint of exports to the U.S. (Chapter 5).

Additive manufacturing. ASME's Landmark materials cite a 1980 application by Hideo Kodama of the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute as the first patent application in the prehistory of stereolithography. Kodama published a paper in 1981 on a method of building 3D objects by stacking layers of UV-curing resin^[59][60].

FAQ

What is the difference between a planer and a shaper?

On a planer, the table carrying the workpiece moves back and forth while the tool stays still; it suits large, long parts. On a shaper, the ram carrying the tool moves back and forth while the workpiece is fed sideways a little at a time; it suits flat surfaces and slots on smaller parts. Neither cuts on the return stroke, so for flat surfaces on large parts they gradually gave way to milling machines, which cut continuously with a rotating cutter.

Who made the vertical lathe a production machine?

Bullard of Bridgeport. In 1883 he designed a small vertical boring and turning mill with a 37-inch capacity; from 1900 his son Edward P. Bullard (Jr.) developed the vertical turret lathe, and in 1914 the company brought out the Mult-Au-Matic multi-spindle vertical automatic lathe, which became a mainstay of mass-producing automobile parts.

What is the difference between a jig borer and a jig grinder?

Both finish holes at precise coordinate positions, but a jig borer cuts with a tool, so it suits soft material before hardening. A jig grinder cuts with a grinding wheel, so it can finish holes in hard material at the correct position after hardening has distorted the part. In the U.S., Moore built a jig borer in 1931 and a jig grinder in 1940.

How did EDM begin in the U.S.?

According to a trade-magazine article, it began in the 1940s when Harold Stark, Victor Harding and Jack Beaver built a machine that removed drills and taps broken off inside aluminum castings by eroding them with sparks. It then spread to machining difficult aerospace materials and to die making, and in 1967 a government tech brief described the "traveling wire electrode" EDM of Argonne National Laboratory.