Next time you are wondering what to do with that empty little space in the corner of your basement, consider picking up one of these to fill up the extra room!
http://www.manufacturingcenter.com/man/articles/1204/IMAGES/m12-MTRpic1.gif
And, yes, that is not a mistake - the lathe bed is 100 feet long, not 100 inches!
-dave
I can’t believe the tolerences they achieved with that, especially on a deadline and tight budget :ahh:
Holy cow…
The size of that is the first shock. but the most astonishing fact lies within the details…
"MTR combined two WWII lathes to produce a lathe with a nearly 100’ bed, capable of turning ship shafts with a spindle runout of only 0.0002" TIR."
Holy cow… is that a mistake??? If not, that is awesomely impressive for a machine that large.
Basically what that means is that the diameter of the shaft that is made is within 0.0002" of it’s desired size.
In manufacturing, there are tolerances on parts, so that a circle drawn in CAD with a diameter of 10" and a tolerance of plus or minus 1" can be from 11" to 9" and still be acceptable.
Looking at the size of that machine, I can only guess that a part that is drawn and spec’d out to be 20" in diameter can maintain a diameter of 20.0002" - 19.0008".
That’s almost unheard of. The standard tolerance to all the parts I have drawn in CAD so far has been from .002" to .005" which is still small, but it’s like a width of a thumb as opposed to a human hair almost… lol (That’s kind of an extreme analogy, but it’s true.
That is more impressive to me than the size of the machine for sure.
edit: Jay beat me to the statement, and it looks like he is also impressed. 
If you find huge things like this cool do some reasearch on fairbanks-morse engines.
That is some huge stuff
I think a well maintained HAAS CNC mill with good tooling and good programming can only maintain about .0004 .0002 especially over that length is truly incredible. even .002 would be.
100’ lathe!? What about that monster chunk of metal in there? Oo, let’s lathe an entire tree!
And stop dragging me away from writing my report.
I always wondered what kind of machine could make a prop shaft for this engine. Now I guess I know! 0.0002 TIR over 100 ft. That is simply amazing.
And I thought the big green GIDDINGS & LEWIS 12U Numerilathe with 15” chuck I ran at my previous job was big!
This reminds me of the time I crashed it once doing 4’’ diameter aluminum pipe fittings about 2 1/2 feet long.
The parts had two different ends/programs and I accidentally but the wrong end in first to be machined… Whoops :ahh:
BTW is he riding on the carriage/tool post?
I’ve seen one nearly as large as this, but you could probably turn a midsize sedan on. There’s lots of cool things to be found in government machine shops
So the game field is going to be more than twice as large as last year’s. Gotcha. 