Some big tools

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Brian H on 23/01/2019 17:07:44:

Shame that much of this has nothing to do with Big Tools!

Brian

In all honesty most of the vid in the orignal posting had little to do with machine tools.

Neil

[vintage engineerParticipant @vintageengineer]

Well I don't what those big machines are if they are not machine tools!

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 23/01/2019 19:27:25:

Posted by Brian H on 23/01/2019 17:07:44:

Shame that much of this has nothing to do with Big Tools!

Brian

In all honesty most of the vid in the orignal posting had little to do with machine tools.

Neil

[Phil WhitleyParticipant @philwhitley94135]

I'm sorry Neil, I have jumped in again and caused an off topic ruckus! I will comment no more on this thorny subject!!

Phil

[SillyOldDufferModerator @sillyoldduffer]

Posted by Phil Whitley on 23/01/2019 19:04:31:

Posted by Mark Rand on 22/01/2019 23:04:51:

…

1. One reason that France has had the cheapest electricity in Western Europe for the past 40 years is that they invested in large numbers of essentially identical nuclear reactors. They have been exporting 2GW of cheap power to us for the last three decades…

…

6) By " they invested" you mean, "the French government paid for" One of the reasons the French have cheap power is that the French Government backed EDF is using the vast profits it is making in the UK to subsidise the cost per unit in France! At 40 years old I would think that the early ones are coming to the end of their design life, or will be soon. They have not been exporting 2gW of power to us for three decades, this is simply wrong, look at http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ all the europe interconnects work in both directions, and the direction of power flow changes daily, sometimes hourly.

…

I too don't want to put anyone's nose out either but I think you're both wrong – maybe! A trap engineers often fall into is to undervalue the financial importance of an operation. We tend to concentrate on the efficient operation of technology and ignore or demean the uncomfortable fact that it has to be paid for. Recent threads bewail the cancellation of projects like Black Arrow, TSR2 etc and blamed these 'mistakes' on evil accountants! I'd say they were engineering failures due to cost overruns.

In France EDF inherited a state-subsidised Nuclear Power programme that claimed to be producing cheap electricity. The accounts are murky but It probably isn't true: the experience of everyone else is that – despite obvious advantages – Nuclear is expensive.

In most of the developed world energy is managed by selling it wholesale at prices agreed before consumption. In the UK several providers compete one day in advance to sell electricity made in various different ways – coal, nuclear, gas, wind, solar etc. Famously coal electricity was recently the most expensive and for the first time ever in Britain, no coal powered electricity was generated at all.

Renewables might seem to be at a disadvantage. Actually they bid on the basis of the next days weather forecast which, although locally unreliable, does predict the overall capacity available nationally with reasonable accuracy.

French nuclear energy is bought and sold in the same market and it follows that the UK only buy when it's cheaper than the alternatives. The French aren't much profiting from the arrangement, rather it's a way of reducing the cost of running their nuclear power stations by keeping them working flat out. In practice, the French taxpayer is probably subsidising British consumers.

My main point is that it is money rather than straightforward engineering considerations that matter most in this system. An engineer can explain how best to run a generator at optimum efficiency, but his wise advice is utterly pointless unless the electricity has a customer. True that engineering considerations cannot be ignored completely because in practice a supplier may not be able to meet the contract. The market has a number of financial mechanisms for dealing with this, for example Spark, Dark, Quark and Bark Spread can be used to calculate the cost of bringing power stations on or off stream in the event this has to be done unexpectedly. The role of the engineers in this game is to find cheaper and more flexible ways of meeting demand, not to tell customers what they can have. Until the technology goes wrong that is!

Engineers and accountants have always had a difficult relationship. Accountants don't understand technology, but they know exactly what it is worth at the moment, which might be nothing. They bankrupt companies by refusing risk and missing future opportunities. Engineers who don't understand the need to balance the books bankrupt the company by costing more than customers are prepared to pay. Then they blame the customer for not appreciating the 'quality' of their over-priced products.

Best results are achieved by team work but it's not easy – specialists rarely understand each other.

Dave

 

 

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 23/01/2019 22:08:36

[KettrinboyParticipant @kettrinboy]

Heres the "big tool " I used to work , this is circa 1985 I was 22 yrs old and a couple of years out of my 4 yr apprenticeship and happily working in the turning section of a printing press maker in Kettering , then I was asked to train up on this beast because the bloke who worked on it was leaving , its a milling machine converted from a big planer , made by Futurmill a firm based in Brighouse Yorks , table size 12 ft by 5 ft and a 50hp motor , with the 8 inch facemill which you can see fitted a roughing cut on cast iron which is about the only material this machine ever did was full width of the facemill 1/4 inch depth at 30ft p/min feed , its max was 50 ft p/min , this machine did all the preliminary milling of the baseplates and sideplates for the presses , typical size of a baseplate was up to 6ft square and after the top and side surfaces had been milled (you can just see the side head behind me ), then a load of drilled and tapped holes ranging from M5 to M30 had to be done , when I first did an M5 hole I thought how can this massive thing do a tiny thread like this, but by using a sprung holder and getting used to using the fine controls on the pendant it became everyday stuff , sideplates were typically 4-6 ft long and 3-4 ft wide by 2-3 inches thick and the tolerance on all thicknesses was +/- 0.002" which it would pretty easily get to ,I worked on this machine for 6 yrs and I am glad I used facemasks from early on with it as the black CI dust produced was horrendous , every day you needed a new mask as a new mask put on in the morning would be black on the outside by knock off time, I don't know if its still working today as I left the firm in 1990 and havnt been back since so I might have to have have a peek in the shop sometime as its only down the hill from my house.

regards Geoff

[vintage engineerParticipant @vintageengineer]

I know what you mean about CI dust! I used turn 72" dia mill rollers that where 100 yrs old!

Posted by Kettrinboy on 24/01/2019 11:18:52:

Heres the "big tool " I used to work , this is circa 1985 I was 22 yrs old and a couple of years out of my 4 yr apprenticeship and happily working in the turning section of a printing press maker in Kettering , then I was asked to train up on this beast because the bloke who worked on it was leaving , its a milling machine converted from a big planer , made by Futurmill a firm based in Brighouse Yorks , table size 12 ft by 5 ft and a 50hp motor , with the 8 inch facemill which you can see fitted a roughing cut on cast iron which is about the only material this machine ever did was full width of the facemill 1/4 inch depth at 30ft p/min feed , its max was 50 ft p/min , this machine did all the preliminary milling of the baseplates and sideplates for the presses , typical size of a baseplate was up to 6ft square and after the top and side surfaces had been milled (you can just see the side head behind me ), then a load of drilled and tapped holes ranging from M5 to M30 had to be done , when I first did an M5 hole I thought how can this massive thing do a tiny thread like this, but by using a sprung holder and getting used to using the fine controls on the pendant it became everyday stuff , sideplates were typically 4-6 ft long and 3-4 ft wide by 2-3 inches thick and the tolerance on all thicknesses was +/- 0.002" which it would pretty easily get to ,I worked on this machine for 6 yrs and I am glad I used facemasks from early on with it as the black CI dust produced was horrendous , every day you needed a new mask as a new mask put on in the morning would be black on the outside by knock off time, I don't know if its still working today as I left the firm in 1990 and havnt been back since so I might have to have have a peek in the shop sometime as its only down the hill from my house.

regards Geoff

[Mike PooleParticipant @mikepoole82104]

This little machine was being installed around 1974 while I was an apprentice. When I finished my time I was a sparky in this tool room for three years and this was one of my patients when it broke down. Each axis had a 40hp ac motor for rapid traverse and a DC speed controlled motor for feeds. The main spindle motor was a 100hp DC speed controlled. It’s capacity was 10ftx12ftx16ft

Mike

Edited By Mike Poole on 24/01/2019 15:17:55

[Phil WhitleyParticipant @philwhitley94135]

SOD Dave, we don't have a like button on this forum, so LIKE!!

[Ex contributorParticipant @mgnbuk]

made by Futurmill a firm based in Brighouse Yorks

Now long gone. I'm pretty sure that the old mill that used to bear their name on Wakefield Road is now the site of the Lidl I do my weekly shop at. Kendal & Gent still appear to be in business, though no longer building large machines.

Mike's Ingersoll is about the size of the Craven (with Futuremill head) at Broadbents in Mytholmroyd – my first "proper" job after finishing my apprenticeship. A bit of a change after my last year at Boxfords ! The Craven was also in a pit (to give clearance for the overhead gantry crane), which had a sump with a permenantly running drain pump in one corner as the pit base was below the water table – the canal towpath ran behind the electrican's shop (next to the pit) at about head height & the river Calder was just across the road. The Broadbent works is also long gone (as is the old Boy Lane, Wheatley, Boxford works) – now the site of several appartment blocks.

Nigel B

[Howard LewisParticipant @howardlewis46836]

In the 60s, just up the road from the Sentinel Works (Then the base of Rolls Royce Oil Engine Division), in Shrewsbury; on the Harlescott estate there was a firm making huge boring mills.

We're talking thirty inch diameter cutters!

The machines were assembled in a pit large enough to take a detached house, with the top of the column sticking out another twenty or so feet, above ground.

The amazing thing was that the slideways were covered with Formica, because when oiled, the coefficient of friction was on a par with wet ice!

Don't know what the machines were used for. (Milling gas holders from the solid??????)

Howard

[Chris GunnParticipant @chrisgunn36534]

Kettrinboy, that takes me back, I did my apprentiship at Timsons as well, but I was long gone by 1985.

Chris Gunn, another Kettrinboy

[Mark RandParticipant @markrand96270]

And while we're posting pics, Here's the 14 foot swing 1948 Craven sliding bed lathe that was at work. I actually took this picture because of the 'chuck guard' that H&S made the factory fit. In my time at work, this was used to grind the blade tips of turbines with a 5hp toolpost grinder. Its turning duties had been taken up by the larger Waldrich Siegen further down the shop.

 

And here's the crane that serviced the bay that it was in. The bay was originally the 'Erecting Shop', where steam turbines were assembled and tested. Later it was called the '100 ton bay' (the crane got uprated to 120 tons 10-15 years back), There's a second 100 ton crane in 16 bay further down the factory. That's the Royce that later partnered with a Mr Rolls. Another bit of engineering heritage!

Edited By Mark Rand on 24/01/2019 23:39:37

[Colin HeseltineParticipant @colinheseltine48622]

Back to the big tools. Earlier this week spotted this set of rather large rolls by the old Dry-Dock on Suomenlinna island just a short boat ride from Helsinki. It was about -25 degrees at time so snapped quick photo and then found a cafe for a hot drink.

Colin

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