4th axis milling May 1, 1945!

[Sleazey]

Here is a beautiful picture of a Cincinnati milling machine with a universal dividing head mounted, along with what looks to be two hydraulic tracers. Mounted on the dividing head is a turbo charger impeller being milled. Notice all the axes appear to have a power feed.

I can only imagine what the setup and milling time for this job was.



Sorry for the picture size, but this is a case where bigger is better.

If anybody can tell me where I got this picture from, I would appreciate it. There are a bunch of other hi-res machine shop pictures there, but the link I thought I saved does not take me to the pictures. It's a set of pictures from the old NACA, the precursor to NASA.

Thanks!

[Liger Zero]

That's amazing. 1945... wow.

[gwilson]

The mill has a little Bridgeport vertical head on it. I have the 12,000 RPM high speed version of that head,which is hard to get. Uses a flat belt.

[mochinist]

Really cool, thanks for the picture

[fasto]

George has it absolutely right. That's a 1930's Cinncinatti horizontal mill with a Bridgeport M head on it (I think I can see a quill handle).
So, the next time someone says that an M head is useless....

Note also the 2 tracer styli. One is running on a template that's on the rotary axis, the other template is fixed.

The control boxes look to have an Art Deco nameplate of "DUDCO" on them.

[Sleazey]

GWilson:
Yea, I noticed that BP head on there. I wondered about that.


Fasto:
I assume the fixed template is used for milling the impeller base, and the template mounted on the rotary axis is used for milling the actual blades. I can't find any company named Dudco except a hydraulic pump and equipment company.

[darryl]

What?- there's a BP head on there- does it leak?

[Robin R]

I think you will have seen the pictures on the Internet Archive, this search probably has the picture you posted, plus others. http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=nasa%20milling

[Rich Carlstedt]

Keller was the fore runner in the 30's with Hydralic tracers
Cincinnati was also way ahead with the "Hydrotel"
The first "CNC" were really hydrallic operated using electrical control in 1947 and were Cincinnati's

Rich

[toolmaker76]

This brings back some memories! Haven't worked on any setup that elaborate, but have spent many hours running a tracer mill, or "keller."

Had one of my younger bosses ask me one time, "How did you guys do this stuff before CNC?"

It got done!

[Evan]

Very interesting. If you look closely at the two patterns the one on the left is for profiling the blade edges. The one on the 4th axis has two sides and is used to profile the blade faces. Each time the axis is indexed the pattern is realigned with respect to the table to cut the next blade.

[S_J_H]

Thanks for posting the picture. It is now my new wallpaper!

Steve

[winchman]

When I was working for Avco-Lycoming in the late '60s, we made impellers for our air dynamometers for testing gas turbine engines for helicopters. The impellers were about 30 inches in diameter and 12 inches long.

The machining of the blades was done on a large manual milling machine much like the one in the picture, but I don't recall it using a contour tracer. A lot of hand finishing was required after it came off the mill.

Seems like the procedure was to set the position of the impeller for a particular blade, set the offset of the spindle with respect to the centerline of the impeller, and plunge in to a specified depth with a ball end mill. It took hundreds of cuts to do both sides of each blade, and there were a bunch of blades.

[gwilson]

I also have a brand new tracing attachment for my Bridgeport. It was sold to an old guy who wanted it to skim off alloy wheels and recondition them. He couldn't get it to work out. ended up going CNC. That work seems like a tough way to earn a living. the unit cost $10,000 new. I mentioned I would like to have one to the company's salesman,and he told me I could get this one for $2000.00. It is a Mimik.

Have you guys ever seen pictures of a shaper set up with tracing attachment for making propeller blades for boats? Pretty neat what they could do manually back then.

[BobWarfield]

I think you will have seen the pictures on the Internet Archive, this search probably has the picture you posted, plus others. http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=nasa%20milling

Yep, that one is called "Impeller in Machine Shop" if you want to download a bigger version.

I captured some others on CNCCookbook if you want to see them without searching around:

http://www.cnccookbook.com/index.htm

Cheers,

BW

PS Still got some Monarchs in this 2009 photo: http://ia311040.us.archive.org/1/ite...op001_full.jpg