Totally enjoyable. Jonesy takes apart an ancient machine tool and gives us a history lesson along the way. It's funny how there seems to be a sharp dividing line between people who are mechanically inclined and people who aren't.
I first ran into Whitworth when I bought a custom Triumph Bonneville when I lived in Houston. It had an Italian front brake, so there were some metric parts. The engine may have been older than the frame, or maybe it was vice versa. In any case some of the nuts and bolts were American and some were Whitworth. It came with a set of Whitworth wrenches, which I had never seen before, or since, for that matter.
Whitworth has pretty much gone away, but back in his day, he was a big deal.
How a Cincinnati Toolmaker Built the Machine That Made American Factories Automatic
The Tool Archives and The Tool Autopsy
Great history of Cincinnati Milacron, though when it gets toward the end he starts ranting about who's to blame, which is kind of pointless now. Those who study history and are smart enough will learn something without it being pointed out.
Note that Cincinnati one N in the first Cin and two Ns in the 2nd Cinn, and Milacron has only one L. YouTube videos always include the name of who posted the video and a link to their YouTube page, except this one. The link for The Tool Archives and The Tool Autopsy, the purported makers of this video, goes nowhere. The Tool Archives does have a website.
Why didn't I know about CNC machining until the 1980s if it had been around since the 1950s? Maybe I had heard of its existence but I never ran into any of it. Kind of irritates me now.
I Bought a Liquidated 45 Ton Metal Bending Robot
Watch Wes Work
I remember going with Marc a few years ago to look at used CNC machines. They were awful. Huge boxes of custom alien electronics. I did not understand how anyone could make these work without spending a fortune on more obsolete, alien electronics. Marc did eventually buy one machine and got it to work, at least a little bit. I wonder what ever happened to it.
I'm watching this video and I am confused by what I see. Is this guy using some weird camera setup that is distorting the image of the propeller? Is it an AI thing? And then I notice the two pieces that go on either side of the mount and I realize the hub of this propeller is really twisted. Who makes a twisted mount like this? And how would they do it? I think this was done before the advent of CNC. Or maybe the Brits had a secret CNC project to machine parts like this. I don't think I've ever seen anything crazier. And oh yeah, don't put that prop back on the airplane.
Waking A Forgotten Cat and Boring A Stretched Hole
Watch Wes Work
Watching Wes work is the YouTube equivalent of comfort food. It brings a feeling of calm reassurance that at least in some parts of the world, all is well.
"Sir, Your Parking Brake Exploded" - Fixing a Ford
Watch Wes Work
Jack has been working on making his lathe cut 30 threads per inch. He brought a bunch of pieces to lunch yesterday for show and tell, but he put them away before I managed to take any photos. Probably have to go pay him a visit. He had to make a couple of gears, and to do that he needed a cutter to cut the gear teeth. He tried making his own cutter, but that didn't work out so well. He ended up buying a set of expensive cutters.
Jack needed to cut some threads at 30 threads per inch, but none of the settings on his lathe allowed for this, so he had to make a gear to drive the feed screw. He made the gear cutting one tooth at a time using a rotary index table on his milling machine. He made the gear out of aluminum and so far it seems to be holding up well.
I'm not sure whether this is AI or carefully staged. Everything in here could be real, there is nothing impossible. Chrome plated machine tools are possible, but I don't think I've ever actually seen any. There is more kinds of factory automation crammed into this one short clip than I seen anywhere else.
He's introducing the video and he says "I think I might have to add it to my encyclopedia of cute machinery along with the Renault FT tank and the Myford Super 7 lathe."
Let's Build a Locomotive! Pennsylvania A3 Switcher, Part 1
Blondihacks
Jack recommended Blondihacks to my attention a couple of months ago and I finally got around to looking her up. I picked this video because I posted about a live steam model train not too long ago. In this one she spends a lot of time laying out the ground work, including sourcing materials, which turns out to be a bigger problem than I imagined. Very entertaining, if you like obscure technical info.
The Triumph of America (1933) | Chevrolet’s Legacy 🇺🇸 – Part 1
TheCarScene
This video was made almost 100 years ago and automation had already made great strides. At 4:19 the narrator lays out the how much raw material goes into building automobiles. It's a surprisingly large fraction of all production. People wanted cars and were willing to pay for them. This video came out in the midst of the Great Depression. This is a new upload, Part 2 hasn't been posted yet.
P. S. Jam Handy (1886-1983) was an Olympic swimmer as well as a prolific film maker.
Industrial machinery is getting out of control. Who am I kidding? It's been out of control ever since they started smelting iron. Now it's just running riot. I would have thought that you could buy a new diesel engine to replace this antique 16 cylinder monster for less than this custom machining project cost, but who knows how much work it would take to fit a new engine to the old job? The pump needs to be running, fitting new exhaust manifolds is going to be easier than replacing the whole engine, and you can do it this year? Great! Git it done.
I do wonder how they bored out the passages in the manifolds. That seems like it must have been tedious.
When I hear about 'infrastructure' in discussions about the economy, I think of roads and bridges and dams, huge things that you can't friggin' miss if you go outside. What isn't often mentioned, and what you seldom see is all of the machinery inside of all of the factories that are busy making all the widgets that make our cushy, civilized life possible.
Bustednuckles has a post up that gives us a peak behind the curtain. He had a very long day at work yesterday installing a gear box for a 'large leveler'. This machine is for relieving internal stresses in sheet metal as it is taken off of big rolls. The way it works is nuts. Why would bending sheet metal back and forth multiple times relieve stress? Sounds like it would just add more stress, but what do I know? Evidently it's a proven technique, so every place that is taking in big rolls of sheet metal direct from the rolling mill is going to have at least one of these.
Guy using a lathe and a milling machine to make a captive nut puzzle. Unlike some machining videos, this one moves along at a steady pace, no long shots of turning or milling a part, just short clips that are just long enough for you to get the gist of what he's doing. Plus it's a puzzle for the viewer. He shows you all the pieces, so you might be able to figure out how it works.
I started watching this thinking I might get some laughs, and I did, but he also spends some time talking about his new Flow Mach 200 waterjet, a high pressure water cutting machine, which is definitely very cool.
What are DIFFERENTIAL THREADS #864 tubalcain
mrpete222
I enjoyed the heck out of this video. Shortly after I graduated high school, I got a job in a machine shop in the radiology department at the OSU hospital in Columbus, Ohio. I spent maybe a year there making widgets for the guys who were doing stuff with radiation. I don't think I ever met any of those who were deciding what we were going to build, I mean somebody had to be making those decisions, I certainly wasn't. But we built some very odd stuff. I may have posted about it before, I don't recall. Actually there is a whole lot of stuff in this blog that I don't remember posting. I am sure I did it, it looks just like something I would do, so I don't think someone else is sneaking in here and planting subversive information, I'm doing it all myself.
'tubalcain' in the video title sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall who it was, so I asked the great and powerful Google and I found a bunch of stuff. First off the origin:
Google didn't serve up much in the way of images of Tubal, this one is missing the fire and the forge, but at least you can clearly see a man with a hammer. Science Photo Gallery offers this description:
Tubal Cain is mentioned in the book of Genesis as the son of Lamech and Zillah. He is referred to as an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron" in other words the first smith and the inventor of metal working (metallurgy). The name Tubal Cain plays a prominent part in Masonic rituals as a password.Taken from a 14th century fresco.
Okay, now that we know who the original is we can move on to a couple of oddities.
The Tubal Cane was a big canal boat that was wrecked in Lake Michigan in 1867. She was carrying 18,000 bushels of wheat, all of which was lost, but the crew all escaped. The odd thing about it is how much the Wisconsin Historical Society knows about it. It was just one of a zillion commercial vessels that have plied the great lakes. I'm surprised that it has become immortal here on the internet.
It's a very swoopy, zoomy kind of video, so it's kind of fun to watch, but there are a couple of things worth noticing. One is making this video. I imagine there some parts might be speeded up, and there are some cuts where there could have been a crash, but it looks pretty damn seamless. Flying through the inside of a car being assembled and not smashing into one of the robot arms that are reaching to do actual work (not just making a stupid movie to entertain the mindless masses) is a pretty good trick no matter how you do it. I don't think it was faked, I mean with all the insanity running around loose these days, it could have been, but I prefer to think it was really recorded by some dude flying a drone, some dude with some excellent piloting skills. I wonder how many hours it took him to get this good, or did he just pick up controller and instantly know how to fly it like James Bond? Yes, I'm supposing it was a guy. If it wasn't, let me know and I'll put up a post about her because guys love chicks who are competent and savvy.
The other thing is what it shows about cars being made. Taking sheets of steel and stamping them in a giant press to form them into an entire side of the cabin, and casting big chunks of a aluminum to become part of chassis. The amount of engineering that went into designing those parts, the machines to make them and then the tooling needed to adapt those machines to make those parts is tremendous. But once you get all that done, Bob the drone can turn out one bazillion dollar part after another. The cost of the labor to assemble an automobile is pretty much fixed - x dollars per car. But the upfront engineering expense might be on the order of a billion dollars. You need to sell 100,000 cars for $20K each to pay for that. If you only sell 10,000 cars, you are going to have to sell them for $200K each.
