MNC – Mechanical Numerical Control

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

Check this out and then be amazed at the designers who came up with this machine. The film is dated 1951 in the credits. I wonder if there are any still in existence?

Even the setter/programmer must have been a highly-skilled man.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

I like the chap working with molten iron in his shirt-sleeves at the start!  But an impressive machine, good find.

[John Doe 2Participant @johndoe2]

Those electrical switches sound incredible: operating to a precision of “a fraction of a 1/1000 of an inch”

Perhaps Dave could use one for his pendulum detection ?

Really lovely old film, and a very impressive machine. Interesting to see this factory and its lack of health and safety at the time. But similar factories are still in use today in the third world, where they hammer hot iron, and weld, and do all sorts of big dangerous mechanical processes wearing sandals and loose clothing and almost no PPE at all.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

No video just a blank white space for me

[John Doe 2]

On John Doe 2 Said:

Those electrical switches sound incredible: operating to a precision of “a fraction of a 1/1000 of an inch”

Perhaps Dave could use one for his pendulum detection ?

 

My home brew “X home” switch on my CNC lathe is good to a micron repeatability, so not so hard to achieve.

[MikeKParticipant @mikek40713]

Interesting.  But I bet it was just cheaper to employ humans.  That machine is very complicated and getting those stop blocks set to the correct distance would have been a pain.

Mike

 

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

In either helmshore textile museum or the one in Queen St Mill Burnley (can’t remember which) they have an automatic pirn winder. The pirn is the bobbin of thread that sits inside a shuttle on a loom and so it is not very big and needs replacing quite frequently. This machine accepts empty pirns in a basket, fits them onto the winding spindle, winds on the thread and then tips them into another basket, lots at a time and fully automatic. Not a computer on sight.

[bernard towers]

On bernard towers Said:

No video just a blank white space for me

Likewise 🙁

My Bug-report has still not been actioned.

MichaelG.

[Ian PParticipant @ianp]

Works for me (Windows 10)

Dont hold your breath on a bug report!

Ian P

[Ian P]

On Ian P Said:

Works for me (Windows 10)

Dont hold your breath on a bug report!

Ian P

I wasn’t planning-to, Ian

… merely sharing a statement of fact.

MichaelG.

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

If you can’t link to the video on here you can search for it directly in YouTube, ‘Man-Au-Trol’. I thought it was French at first sight, LOL.

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Thanks, Chris

… and then I could post the URL

https://youtu.be/rFVz9cT-h08?feature=shared

MichaelG.

[bernard towersParticipant @bernardtowers37738]

Im still on manual numerical control!

[mark costello 1Participant @markcostello1]

I am also on Manual numerical control, but needs a good debugging sometimes.

[FulmenParticipant @fulmen]

A good soak in alcohol (dis)solves most problems on those units.

[Kiwi BlokeParticipant @kiwibloke62605]

Manual NC? I’m on Mental NC – I just do what the voices in my head tell me to do…

Good video! Thanks for the link.

[Chris CrewParticipant @chriscrew66644]

“Manual NC? I’m on Mental NC – I just do what the voices in my head tell me to do…”

I like that line, it’s a way of working that resonates with me. I have stated in the past that when a beginner asks what to do when, to more experienced workers the solution would be obvious, that if you just apply logic and common sense to any problem you will find that you have more skill and knowledge than you ever thought you had. It can’t apply in every instance, of course, because we all might have to seek advice at some point, but as an everyday way of working it’s pretty sound. It has let me down once or twice I must admit but, by the same token, I have managed to amaze myself on the odd occasion too!

[Michael Gilligan]

On Michael Gilligan Said:

On bernard towers Said:

No video just a blank white space for me

Likewise 🙁

My Bug-report has still not been actioned.

MichaelG.

Fingers crossed, I posted a suggestion on this yesterday and was firmly rejected with “Forbidden 403”.

Looking at the HTML code, I noticed that the iframe containing the youtube link is set to ‘lazy load’.

“Lazy-loading of iframe elements defers offscreen iframes from being loaded until the user scrolls near them. This saves data, speeds up the loading of other parts of the page, and reduces memory usage.”

I can’t replicate the bug in Firefox/Ubuntu or Firefox./Windows 10.

The bug may be a browser thing, perhaps dependent on the platform.

Try scrolling and clicking in the white space to see if that wakes-up the youtube start image.

If necessary, this article explains how to disable lazy-loading in Firefox, Edge and Chrome.  I couldn’t find a way of disabling it in Safari, and also found a note dated 2023 that Safari’s implementation of lazy loading is unfinished.   Might be the forum end:, at one time WordPress had their own approach, which didn’t always work.  I’m not HTML savvy enough to tell if the forum sends standard lazy-load instructions or not.

Dave

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Thanks for taking an interest in this, Dave

Nothing I do this end seems to change the behaviour … BUT … thanks to your hint, I have just found this:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/images-not-loading-in-safari-when-lazy-loading-is-activated/

MichaelG.

[MikeK]

On MikeK Said:

Interesting.  But I bet it was just cheaper to employ humans.  That machine is very complicated and getting those stop blocks set to the correct distance would have been a pain.

Mike

 

I’d take that bet, except it’s unethical to take sweeties away from baby!   We know what happened to machine tools after 1951.

Production is not like general-purpose work!  Manufacturers introduced various simple forms of automatic in the 19th century, particularly in the US where labour was expensive and skilled labour hard to find.   Production demands cheapest possible output, meaning fast methods and low error rates.  People are slow, error-prone and expensive.   They go sick, fail to turn up, jump ship, steal, start fights, make mistakes, cause accidents, and want more money, better conditions, reduced hours, more holidays, and big pensions.

In contrast, any significant production job that can be done on an automatic will cheaper than the same job done by humans.  Plenty of exceptions such as prototyping, repair, and low volume production, but manual production has been in decline since about 1930.   When to switch to an automatic is usually only obvious to an accountant; it’s a cost-benefit decision, nothing to do with shop-floor skills.

Automatics started with cam driven machines,  then hydraulics, and then electro-mechanical.  Electronics rule today, almost everything is  computer controlled.

Cam driven automatics are a major pain to reconfigure, and can only perform a small number of operations.  Quite specialised, and only paid if hundreds of thousands of identical parts were needed.   Hydraulics and electro-mechanical automatics opened the door to being programmable, reducing the size of the minimum economic production but still many tens of thousands.

As can be seen on the Burnett machine, electro-mechanical technology severely limits the number of operations a program can do.   I doubt many Man-Au-Trol machines were sold, because electronic controllers were on the horizon, and these are more capable.  And the Man-Au-Trol was competing with tape-controlled machines too.

Modern CNC is a different world : enclosed machines with up to 12 axes, a tool-change autoloader, and maybe a conveyor belt to remove the few tons of swarf it makes per day.  Parts are modelled in 3D-CAD, from which g-code is generated, and loaded straight into the CNC machine.   The operator isn’t a conventionally trained machinist and he’s probably responsible for several machines:  skilled work, but not as a 1948 Myford owner might understand it!

Over the years prices have dropped, making CNC as an on-line service viable even for amateur one-offs.  Ten years ago, far too expensive. Still expensive by my standards, but much closer to my budget.   Worth keeping an eye on!

Dave

 

 

 

[Martin KyteParticipant @martinkyte99762]

Just think of the millions of highly intelligent people condemned to do repetitive production work in the factories of the past. The trick with automation is to release most of the workforce to be more creative.
regards Martin

[Martin Kyte]

On Martin Kyte Said:

Just think of the millions of highly intelligent people condemned to do repetitive production work in the factories of the past. The trick with automation is to release most of the workforce to be more creative.
regards Martin

I thought the trick with automation was to release most of the workforce off the payroll.

Mike

 

[Martin KyteParticipant @martinkyte99762]

It is for the company but the intelligent country will retrain and redeploy.

Martin

[duncan webster 1Participant @duncanwebster1]

I visited a factory on the south coast once where the machines made big industrial vacuum pumps. The day shift loaded the castings onto the machines, then turned the lights out as they left, leaving the machines to do 2 shifts unsupervised ready for the next morning when the finished parts were taken off and the next lot of castings loaded. They probably changed the tips on the tools etc as well, so still fairly skilled work. If they had stuck to manual machines they’d have been uncompetitive, and no-one would have had a job.

[Martin Kyte]

On Martin Kyte Said:

It is for the company but the intelligent country will retrain and redeploy.

Martin

That’s right.  Successful economies redeploy people into more productive jobs.

Some schools of political thought are dead against state intervention, expecting individuals to sort themselves out, which can be pretty brutal.   The decline of car making in the USA dropped a bomb on Detroit, forcing unsupported workers to abandon homes (which no-one wanted to buy) and start again elsewhere.   Whole neighbourhoods became derelict, crime soared, and public services and commerce slumped.

Even when governments do intervene, change can still be extraordinarily painful.  British communities that profited almost exclusively from coal mining for hundreds of years suffered terribly when the party ended.  Ditto shipbuilding and many other industries, the decline of which 50 years ago is still causing problems in the North.  Rarely quick or easy to replace large unprofitable enterprises, and beyond a certain age most people hate change, and many of them can’t cope with learning new tricks.    There’s a chance whatever governments decide to do will go wrong, as we’ve seen with HS2.   Intended to open up business opportunities in the North, it’s fallen short!

Either way, it’s important to keep an open mind.  Whilst making things is one way of earning a living, so is providing services that customers need.   In the UK, services are more than twice as profitable as manufacturing, so ‘big picture’ it makes sense to redeploy industrial workers into the service sector.

Sadly, making ‘big picture’ sense does not reduce the pain experienced by individuals forced to make the jump.   They are likely to go through the 5 stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.   Not everyone makes it to acceptance.

Dave

 

 

 

 

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