Turret lathes were all the rage back in WWII. Do a Google search for Turret lathe WWII and you will see what I mean. I have a old Gisholt turret lathe which is 1940's vintage and there were an incredible number of attachments and tooling made for that lathe for various jobs. The lathes used in a production environment were setup to do certain specific tasks/operations. And if you needed a number of different operations you just got more lathes and moved the parts between the lathes. Setup properly, a Turret lathe can be sort of a semi automatic machine. If lathes were setup next to each other I think that one operator could run two or more lathes, depending on what they were doing. My lathe has a number of adjustable stops that can be used to kick out the feed at different travel points. I think they also had hydraulic tracers for lathes back in the 40's as well.
Dave On 8/31/2016 11:42 PM, Chris Albertson wrote: > In the 40's I wonder how many of the parts were done on automated > tools. They would not be "CNC" but they might have been build on > specialized tools that only make one kind of part. I think this is > a lost technology. I worked a little bit on aircraft and what I > saw was a huge dependance on jigs, fixtures and purpose built tools > that made just one part, over and over. I was just an intern doing > production drawings on a computer plotter but got to walk around and > look at the manufacturing now and then > > On Wed, Aug 31, 2016 at 11:33 AM, R.L. Wurdack <[email protected]> wrote: >> When we were refurbishing the B-17 I was often amazed with the thought of >> all those precision parts produced mainly by hand. >> 20,000 B-17s X 4 engines X 18 pistons + spares = one huge chunk of machine >> time. A person could wear out several pairs of boots standing in front of a >> lathe for that long. >> >> Dick >> >> >> ----- Original Message ----- >> From: "Chris Albertson" <[email protected]> >> To: "Enhanced Machine Controller (EMC)" <[email protected]> >> Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2016 11:17 AM >> Subject: Re: [Emc-users] What does "CNC" really mean? >> >> >> >> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ >> _______________________________________________ >> Emc-users mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
