Production. Milling machines and machine castings. Many minds, many heads, many skills went into the construction of this large, hydraulically-operated milling machine. The slender shaft just below the figure "100" in the upper right is a tracer finger, so called because it feels its way gently around the edge of a pattern so that the cutters reproduce the pattern exactly in tough steel. This tracer, so sensitive that it can be deflected with the edge of a piece of cardboard, controls the movement of tons of machinery exerting fifteen or twenty horsepower of cutting force

Production. Milling machines and machine castings. A large tracer-controlled multiple spindle vertical hydraulic milling machine being tried out on the runoff line of a large machine tool plant, for its eventual job of helping to make master connecting rods for radial aircraft engines. Four of the partially completed rods are mounted on the fixtures in the foreground. When in operation, the machine will have fixtures for eight such rods, so that while the completely automatic tracing finger guides the four cutters (extreme background) around one set of four rods, the operator can be unloading and reloading the other four fixtures with new parts to be milled. This machine will probably be the fourth or fifth of a series of perhaps a dozen different sizes and types of machine tools which will each have to perform their operations before these parts become finished connecting rods

Production. Milling machines and machine castings. It's all a matter of relative angles and turning speeds. Properly set, this gear-cutting machine tool will produce any kind of beveled, spur, hypoid or other kind of gear. The small hypoid bevel gear shown partially cut in the center of the picture will soon become part of another machine tool after it has been heat-treated, ground, lapped and thoroughly tested and checked

Production. Milling machines and machine castings. Another scene in the runoff line where three-inch shells are being run through a centerless grinding machine which grinds them to exactly correct roundness, size, straightness and smoothness. Designed to be blown to bits as soon as possible, each shell must nevertheless be made and finished as carefully as if it were to last as long as the piston of an automobile engine

Production. Milling machines and machine castings. A close-up of a milling operation on a large bed. Note the multiple-touch cutter, larger than an elephant's foot, turning at the left. Facing it on the other side of the casting is another cutter of the same size, milling the other side. Special fixtures and cutters are used for different shaped castings machined on this special milling machine, produced in a large Midwest machine tool plant

Production. Milling machines and machine castings. Many minds, many heads, many skills went into the construction of this large, hydraulically-operated milling machine. The slender shaft just below the figure "100" in the upper right is a tracer finger, so called because it feels its way gently around the edge of a pattern so that the cutters reproduce the pattern exactly in tough steel. This tracer, so sensitive that it can be deflected with the edge of a piece of cardboard, controls the movement of tons of machinery exerting fifteen or twenty horsepower of cutting force

description

Summary

Public domain photograph of 1930s-1940s US industrial development, Second World War, US war production, indusry, no copyright restrictions image - Picryl description

date_range

Date

01/01/1942

person

Contributors

Palmer, Alfred T., photographer

United States. Office for Emergency Management.

place

Location

Mid Calder, 55.89261, -3.48002

create

Source

Library of Congress

link

Link

http://www.loc.gov/

Public Domain

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