VERTICAL TURRETT LATHE (CNC)? NO WAY

[jcbrock]

They are sometimes used to turn railroad wheels.

UP Albina Shop in Portland for one was using this method for wheel turning when I toured it in the early 1970's.

[rrnut-2]

I have a customer in MA that has 4 VTL's, CNC, but they are still fun to watch. One of the horizontal milling machines that they have, the operator rides in a pulpit with the spindle and it is CNC. The sindle has a 20ft height.

Jim B

[Bill Shields]

Mere toys....giggle...

You should see the one out in York PA that belongs to the folks that make runners for hydro plants...Voith Hydro

I might be wrong, but I think it is 75' diameter...and as described above, flush with the floor so that you can drive on it.

[mikeyg]

We have a beautiful 36" Bullard aboard the former USS Iowa battleship here in San Pedro. It was original equipment in 1943 as is the vast majority of machinery in the machine shop. No shortage of machine stability as they are bolted to a 6" armored deck.

Ours is in wonderful shape and was likely little used by the sailors through the years. But it took our volunteer machinist weeks to scrape the cosmoline off. Then added oil and renewed the counterweight chain and it runs like a champ.

[Greg_Lewis]

Several decades ago I went to an auction at a machine shop that closed down after being in business since the early 1920s. Among the antiques was a shaper about the size of a small SUV. There were still bits of overhead line shaft in the rafters and rolls of belting in a shed. They had one of these vertical puppies with two heads and a six-foot table; the cross beam was perhaps 12 feet off the deck. While the SB9 and the clapped-out Chinese 12-inch lathe both went for about $1600, this very low-mileage machine drew no bids at first. After some prodding the auctioneer got a single bid of $150 from a local scrapper.

I almost cried and wished I had the means to buy it and donate it to some steam museum. But the shipping anywhere out of town would probably have run to five figures.

[SteveR]

Idea for a poor man's VTL: Put a VFD on a rotary table and put on a mill? You would have to run oil coolant through it instead of the normal oil at least. What would the tooling be? Stationary fly cutter?

Thoughts?

SteveR

[Bill Shields]

Steve:

nowhere rigid enough to use as a VTL. but such combinations are used for other purposes...

[Bill Shields]

I just had to look.

The Voith VTL is 13.2 meter diameter...43 feet diameter...

https://teammachinetools.com/wp-content ... iemens.pdf

it now has a Siemens 840 control on it, so it qualifies as a CNC VTL...

not a big as I remember, but then fish are always seem larger until you get out the tape...