How about a lathe !!

geeeeez... wonder what kinda' pressure is runnin' trough that torch?!

 

holy ****, them's some big machines. that torch cutting through the giant 10 or 12 inch plate is frickin sweet

 

were these crankshafts just pressed together piece by piece?

 

I am pretty sure todays water jet cutting can do the same thing.

 

probably, but i just had no clue a torch could do that. Looks like i need some schoolin

 

Wow I love this stuff! My first job in a machine shop, was running a turret lathe from the early 20's. What a monster to operate, but fun to learn.

 

Never cut anything THAT thick, but did cut about a four foot radius on a 3 inch plate. Started with a 4' X 8" plate. Used regular pressures, but the tip was meant for the job, used LOTS of gas. Wasn't as hard as I thought it would have been. Child's play compared to what he's doing. Did have to experiment and have the torch at an angle to make a straight sided cut on my good side. Cut is much wider at the bottom then at the top. He may be cutting a 1 1/2 path at the bottom.

 

I remember a picture in a old shop book of a man sitting in a chair on the tool stand of a large lathe. Just a huge lathe.

 

The cool part about the Lead High School shop cl*** was the students were allowed to smoke by the forge. There were a lot of hoodlums in the machine and wood working cl***es. They made all kinds of things including screw jacks and wood working vices with Acme threads. They cut gears and learned the basics. The shop had a large planner, two vertical mills (one was programmable), a large radial drill press, shappers, a horizontal milling machine, surface grinder and a bunch of lathes. The forge was used a lot.

The students learned a lot and switching to computer machining would be no problem because they knew the fundamentals.

 

Niagara Machine and Tool Works was full of that kind of machines.Gear cutters,gun drills,full foundry,weldshop,heat treating.I worked on a positioner in the weldshop that could handle 45 ton.I am proud be have seen such a grand company,but still bitter how it was taken over and put out of business.
Local high school trade school has just eliminated the machine shop program for high school kids but you can be a hair cutter or personal trainer??????

 

Wow, To bad I don't have the room in my garage I could really use a torch that can cut one foot thick piece of steel.

 

You are a little bit limited on Oxy/Acetylene pressure wise. A large cutter is usually uses the same pressure setting as a small cutter it just has a larger cutting head and it uses a higher volume of gas to make the same pressure. Acetylene because extremely volatile at high pressure.

 

I toured Jorgensen Steel in Seattle when I went to school for machining many years ago. One of our instructors worked there and was able to get us in to see all of the machinery running. The pictures are cool, but they don't even begin to do justice to what it's like to see these machines up close. It's very surreal!

 

Yes, maybe some heat and shrink fit, don't know about if welded too or not..in one of the pictures you can see the piece the guy is torching in an ***embled crank...

 

That's what Eye Lids are for....

 

"My work has about a dozen of these old punches and I get the pleasure of fixing, adjusting and or rebuilding them"

I did that in the Seattle/Tacoma area many many moons ago also.

Speaking of big lathes, there used to be a steel company in Seattle that had a lathe with a 120 ft. bed and 2 carriages..It would swing about 20 feet.

That is a crankshaft cheek the pattern burner is cutting.

 

I work in an old navy facility. We have some large machines similar to what has been posted.

Our biggest lathe is ~100ft long bed, will swing 8ft or so. CNC controlled with live tooling and indexable chuck. Cost a few pennies and was just installed last year.

Most of last year I spent programming and overseeing a horizontal mill. 10ft X travel, 10ft of so Y, 3 ft of Z, another 3' or so of W (inline with Z), and 360 deg rotary table accurate to .001 degrees. This was the smaller of the 2 machines.

Later this year we plan to be installing a 4 meter long 5 axis head gantry mill, only a few years old.

 

The first photos are from a British ship builders shop.
I have seen them before and still marvel at the work being done.

Nick

 

Biggest one I ever saw pictured was a ship building one for very large shafts, I think French, in a 19th century Scientific American in our library.
This thing was in a huge warehouse sort of room and was really three separate structures forming a sort of lathe by committee.
The Headstock, tailstock, and tool post were building-sized structures with staircases and platforms for the crew. Tailstock and toolpost were mounted on railroad carraiges on full sized RR tracks and there was a surveying crew in attendance, presumably getting everything level and pointed the right way for a job. This damn thing absolutely dwarfed any other large lathe I have ever seen.
Naturally, I failed to write down the citation and I have never found my way back to that print.

 

I like to "play" on bridgeports and lathes whenever I get the chance (i do a bunch of our inhouse work at the fab shop), I am by no means a machinist even though i worked in a shop for 3 years...I always find it amazing what can be done

 

I'm not sure that art has anything to do with "libralization", as you put it. The shop was probably closed down because there was no budget left, not because those damned liberal art queers are destroying society. Lmao, are you kidding me?! Blame the broke *** state the school is in and the crooked, inept politicians who broke the state budget in the first ****in place. And believe me, I think it's a damn shame that an awesome machine shop that produced plenty of capable workers is gone. But at least an art cl*** took it's place. Think about it: Have you ever stopped to consider why it's call the Industrial Arts? Machining is an Art in and of itself, and having a Dad who's spent the last 40 years as a machinist, I can tell you this, my Pops is an artist with the Crank and Handle. Better an art cl*** than some liberal think tank

Now let's see some more pics of sweet of machines!

 

Most likely that would not be an oxy-acetylene torch, but rather a plasma torch for material that thick. When I was an electrician at the steel fpoundry they used plasma torches to cut through huge castings in the s**** yard. Those things were scarey loud!

 

After a small area of steel has been pre-heated and cutting commences, the Acetylene is turned off and pure Oxygen is used to continue the cutting.

 

The torch in the picture is most certainly an Oxy/Acetylene torch as plasma cutting began around 1980. While they do have some big plasma machines today that can cut up to 6 inches of steel, the cost of using one becomes prohibitive at about 3 inches of steel, especially on s****. On thick cast that can't be broken, burning bars are normally used because cast iron can't be cut with an Oxy/Acetylene torch. If the foundry had electric furnaces, the noise is incredible when the electrodes are lowered into the s****.

 

Yes, but check out the piece they are cutting out with the "cnc" oxy torch. It looks like the web of one of those giant crankshafts in a later pix.

 

I was at gasoline ally in Indy a few years ago and met a guy who had two Pratt & Whitney mills. One had a bed at least 10+ ft long. The other was a turret mill. They went through the shop ceiling. They were works of art! Just think of all the radial engine parts that went across them. that's when America was great... where are we heading?

 

I think bob-o summed it up quite well !!!!! We NEED LANDSCAPING AROUND THE WINDMILLS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

During WW2 some of the 16 inch guns for the Battle Ships were machined here in Pomona Ca. A friend of mind, Herb Ries told me a story of an auction in the 60's selling a lathe that made these guns. Herb asked the auctioneer where the lathes were. The auctioneer chuckled and told him he was standing on it. Herb said he look at one end of the building where the Head was and at the other end where the tail stock was. Diffently impressed him. I myself miss the big machines I used to work on since retiring, but I sure as hell don't miss the oil rain forest under these behemoths

 

Awesome! I taught welding school for the Navy at the naval shipyard in Bremerton WA and I loved checking out all the cool machinery they had.

 

I live right down the street from were they relined them. The machinery is long gone. Transformers are built in some of the buildings, and the others are used for random stuff. However they still have the 30 foot deep pits left were the maneuvered them around.