Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/19/fascinating-video-clip-how-co.html
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More, please.
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My wife is a baker and she was hypnotized by these.
My favorite:
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I took a couple of terms off from college and worked in a friend’s machine shop. The work I did was repetitive and tedious – i.e. here’s a box of 10,000 small metal parts, now sand off the little metal burrs one by one for 8 hours at a stretch (then because I was the newbie, I got to scrub out the restroom at the end of the day, which was coated with machine oil and metal splinters that workers washed off their hands before using the restroom.)
Anyhow, they had about 8 big automated screw machines running non-stop, cranking out all kinds of rotary and square feed stock parts – we cranked out a hardened steel automatic transmission part, a tiny cap for the inflation mechanism on airplane life vests, and the drive shaft for an orange juicer to name a few.
The machines were similar if not identical to this Brown & Sharpe:
The rotary stock is fed in from the left – typically steel and aluminum bar stock – and it’s spun very fast while the tools are held stationary (it’s basically an automated lathe). The whole thing is coordinated by a set of cams which control the horizontal and vertical positioning of tools, advancement of the part in the collet, advancement of the tool turret etc. It looks rather simple, but these machines could (and I suppose still can) produce some rather intricate and complex parts. For some of the parts, it took the machinist a couple of days to set up for a run.
On my lunch breaks I’d sometimes just walk around the shop and watch all the machines running cranking out parts.
(edit)
Modern CNC machines can pretty much do similar jobs, but they’re just not as cool and greasy and… mechanical as these old screw machines.
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cool , but old school !! all of the froopy people these days use a fdm machine to make cookie cutters !! https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3060978
I would like to make joke about beta males but I am afraid people might not catch the irony
My uncle used to make custom cookie cutters by hand by bending the top 1" from a coffee can into shape.
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I’ve experimented with making die cutters for craft foam - which looked quite similar to metal cookie cutters, but I don’t have the hand strength to bend metal like that anymore. This video has given me a few ideas.
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