DocsMachine
Well-known member
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2006
- Messages
- 1,849
'Couple of notes;
One is that in the old days- and to a certain extent today- a person's tools were his own. You bought and owned them, and carried that box from job to job. The latter meaning both in different factories, but also in different parts of the factory.
The company would provide cutters and some specialty tools, but you were responsible for your measuring tools.
The problem there is that Machinist A may have a shiny new mic, and Machinist B has an old and worn one. Machinist B keeps rejecting A's parts as being out of spec, or worse, cutting them to the wrong dimension.
Eventually companies had to start supplying and calibrating the necessary measuring tools.
Another is the fact that switching to a different part is basically just loading a different program. The operator no longer has to carefully fit and adjust a cutter, adjust depth stops , and so on. And, in the case of the above photos of a nice tool assortment, hardly any production machinist needs a tap or die holder, a center gage, a height gage or a spring caliper.
And finally, the simple fact is there just aren't that many of us anymore.
We've all seen pictures of old factories with row after row after row of lathes or mills and the like. That's how production was done back then- a blank would go into the first lathe, where all that guy did was drill centers into each end. That would get handed off to lathe #2 where the guy would set it up between centers and turn the OD to a single size. Off to #3 where a step might be machined on one end. And so on 'til a finished pump shaft came out the other end.
An old article about Smith & Wesson said that a revolver sideplate went through something like a hundred and thirty machines before getting hand-fitted to a receiver. Mills, drills and shapers, each one making just one cut using a jig or fixture.
And of course with the advent of CNC, one machine and one operator can now do the job of those hundred-plus machines, each one needing a separate operator. (Ian at Forgotten Weapons has spoken a couple of times about display that FN has at their Belgian plant, showing a whole row of a dozen or more separate machines used to produce a single part.)
Doc.
One is that in the old days- and to a certain extent today- a person's tools were his own. You bought and owned them, and carried that box from job to job. The latter meaning both in different factories, but also in different parts of the factory.
The company would provide cutters and some specialty tools, but you were responsible for your measuring tools.
The problem there is that Machinist A may have a shiny new mic, and Machinist B has an old and worn one. Machinist B keeps rejecting A's parts as being out of spec, or worse, cutting them to the wrong dimension.
Eventually companies had to start supplying and calibrating the necessary measuring tools.
Another is the fact that switching to a different part is basically just loading a different program. The operator no longer has to carefully fit and adjust a cutter, adjust depth stops , and so on. And, in the case of the above photos of a nice tool assortment, hardly any production machinist needs a tap or die holder, a center gage, a height gage or a spring caliper.
And finally, the simple fact is there just aren't that many of us anymore.
We've all seen pictures of old factories with row after row after row of lathes or mills and the like. That's how production was done back then- a blank would go into the first lathe, where all that guy did was drill centers into each end. That would get handed off to lathe #2 where the guy would set it up between centers and turn the OD to a single size. Off to #3 where a step might be machined on one end. And so on 'til a finished pump shaft came out the other end.
An old article about Smith & Wesson said that a revolver sideplate went through something like a hundred and thirty machines before getting hand-fitted to a receiver. Mills, drills and shapers, each one making just one cut using a jig or fixture.
And of course with the advent of CNC, one machine and one operator can now do the job of those hundred-plus machines, each one needing a separate operator. (Ian at Forgotten Weapons has spoken a couple of times about display that FN has at their Belgian plant, showing a whole row of a dozen or more separate machines used to produce a single part.)
Doc.
Might be why Kennedy is in the doldrums. An industry that has lost any growth, decades ago.