Well Equiped School Shop

[The Metal Butcher]

I thought you guys might enjoy some of the equipment at my universities machine shop. I'd visited an auction at a tech school before and they were selling off a bunch of half decent American and Asian machines and replacing them with Grizzly crap. So I wasn't expecting much from my school. But I guess since they're a research institute they gotta have the top end stuff. (Not really though, judging by the dings on the Rivett spindle nose, nobody is doing that futzy of work.)

Anyways, the interesting stuff consisted of a 16x30 Pacemaker, two 10EEs, one Rivett 1020s, two K&T Model 2D "Die Miller"s and the usual host of bridgeports and stuff.

I was told the Pacemaker wasn't working and will be surplussed "soon". One of the die mills does not belong to the school and is available for purchase from what I heard. It had complete scrapings and looked good.

[nickel-city-fab]

Nice! I wish SUNY had stuff like that.... most of our training programs were geared towards local industry. So everything was newer: the manual shop was 6 16x40 Acra lathes and 6 Bridgeport clones. And 4 6x18 grinders.

The CNC shop was all Haas, a dozen of them. TM-1, TL-1, VF3 mills and SL2 lathes... we had to write g-code by hand for a year before we could take MasterCam.

Drooling over that Pacemaker.... you should give the guys on PM a heads-up about that one!

[Rich Carlstedt]

Thread Complaint
Where are you MetalButcher

Rich

[mattthemuppet]

when I was at Penn State there was a couple of machine/ fab shops. One small one in the Biology/ Biochemistry/ Chemistry department which had a Jet 13x40 and Acra 10x50 CNC knee mill and one large one in the Physics/ Astronomy department. That one had several lathes big enough for me to lie down and take a nap on plus a whole host of other machinery, though I didn't know enough about machine tools to know what they were at the time. Both shops were very friendly - I learned alot on the small one, doing small projects and getting supervised time on their machines, whereas the larger one let me dive through their scrap bins and take whatever I wanted. Got alot of good material from there and even some tooling that I still have. The model was that they carried out projects for faculty at cost, helping with both the design and manufacture. All kinds of cool stuff - one PhD student I was a friend with (and who gave me his anodising gear) made a complete set of mirrors and the like for his research laser. It was powerful enough to punch a couple of holes through the wall when someone wasn't paying enough attention, so serious stuff.

[The Metal Butcher]

Thread Complaint
Where are you MetalButcher

Rich

I'd like to keep that semi-private. Alabama, to be general. If you're interested in the K&T I can put you in contact. As for the pacemaker, it will go up on gov deals if and when they get to it.

when I was at Penn State there was a couple of machine/ fab shops. One small one in the Biology/ Biochemistry/ Chemistry department which had a Jet 13x40 and Acra 10x50 CNC knee mill and one large one in the Physics/ Astronomy department. That one had several lathes big enough for me to lie down and take a nap on plus a whole host of other machinery, though I didn't know enough about machine tools to know what they were at the time. Both shops were very friendly - I learned alot on the small one, doing small projects and getting supervised time on their machines, whereas the larger one let me dive through their scrap bins and take whatever I wanted. Got alot of good material from there and even some tooling that I still have. The model was that they carried out projects for faculty at cost, helping with both the design and manufacture. All kinds of cool stuff - one PhD student I was a friend with (and who gave me his anodising gear) made a complete set of mirrors and the like for his research laser. It was powerful enough to punch a couple of holes through the wall when someone wasn't paying enough attention, so serious stuff.

That's neat. I think this is a similar situation, the head machinist does projects for faculty who need them for research.

[sch]

In '06 the Calhoun CC machining shop cleaned out the remainder of unused WW2 surplus stuff that littered their
student lab. I think the instructors were leery of letting students loose on these overpowered machines for the manual
first year of a 3 yr curriculum. Students spent most of their time on 12x36 lathes (Canadian) and Bridgeports or Klausing
Kondia clones mills. When I took the pix they had been outside for a month or so, hence the rust, all were scrapped.
This was in Decatur Al.

[The Metal Butcher]

When I took the pix they had been outside for a month or so, hence the rust, all were scrapped.

That always hurts my soul to hear that.

[mattthemuppet]

That's neat. I think this is a similar situation, the head machinist does projects for faculty who need them for research.

yeah, it was a lot of fun to see the things they were working on. The small shop had one programming guy, one electronics guy and one machinist/ fabricator guy, with a little bit of overlap between them. They were always working on something different and their shop was a total aladdin's cave for tinkerers. I ended up giving them a bunch of stuff when we moved, including a really nice Leica compound scope. My wife told me that if I was bringing that then she could bring the couch. Not a direct comparison, but she's a woman so she was right and we left both behind. One of the guys gave it to his daughter's high school which made me feel a little bit better.

[lynnl]

In '06 the Calhoun CC machining shop cleaned out the remainder of unused WW2 surplus stuff that littered their
student lab. I think the instructors were leery of letting students loose on these overpowered machines for the manual
first year of a 3 yr curriculum. Students spent most of their time on 12x36 lathes (Canadian) and Bridgeports or Klausing
Kondia clones mills. When I took the pix they had been outside for a month or so, hence the rust, all were scrapped.
This was in Decatur Al.

That's a shame. I took 3 or 4 classes over there about '99/2000. Most of our (students') lathe work was done on 13" or 10" South Bends. They were all in good shape, I thought. I always preferred using the 13" SB's, but a few times the instructor put me on one of the huge lathes ...I guess because I was much older than the other students. It was kind of intimidating after being used to the 13" SB; it just felt all out of proportion working on a little1/2" X 6" piece of steel in such a monster.

For my last semester they were getting in several new Lagun knee mills. They just felt kind of shoddy or cheap compared to the Bridgeports.

[bborr01]

That's a shame. I took 3 or 4 classes over there about '99/2000. Most of our (students') lathe work was done on 13" or 10" South Bends. They were all in good shape, I thought. I always preferred using the 13" SB's, but a few times the instructor put me on one of the huge lathes ...I guess because I was much older than the other students. It was kind of intimidating after being used to the 13" SB; it just felt all out of proportion working on a little1/2" X 6" piece of steel in such a monster.

For my last semester they were getting in several new Lagun knee mills. They just felt kind of shoddy or cheap compared to the Bridgeports.

We always used Bridgeport mills in the shop that I worked at up until they started buying things like Lagun mills. The Laguns were decent machines but had cheap lock handles and other simple things like that. The machines themselves were decent machines.

[old mart]

The K&T mill has an unusual bed design.

[Doozer]

The K&T mill has an unusual bed design.

For doing trepan milling.
Table like a jig borer.

-D

[RB211]

You should of seen the machine shop in the nuclear science building at Florida State University where I picked up my 10EE from auction...