Big Vintage Lineshaft Shop

[Limy Sami]

I've not seen this before, so apologies if it's a repeat.

Source

https://imgur.com/P5pxkJh

 

[M.B. Naegle]

Some of these old factory pictures, I imagine if we sent an Osha inspector back in time to evaluate the shop, the dialog that would take place.

"You can't have exposed belts."
".... why?"
"Someone could loose a finger."

How long would the inspector last before the lynching?

 

[jmkasunich]

bring your kid to work day was every day

 

[Richard King]

Tuckahoe museum in Easton Maryland has a building with all vintage belt driven machines. Paolo volunteers there. They have live stream tractors there too. Check out their website.

 

[Joe Michaels]

At Brooklyn Technical High School, there were a number of machine shop classrooms not too much different than the photo. Bklyn Tech dated to 1922 or thereabouts, and the line-shaft driven machine shops were original, new when the "new" Brooklyn Tech HS building opened for students. Some earlier generation of 'Tech students had taken to calling the line shaft driven machine shops "Belt Jungles". Some of the original "Belt Jungles" had been modernized with new LeBlond Regal lathes and other motor driven machine tools. Some "Belt Jungles" were a mix of newer motor driven machine tools and some line-shaft driven original machine tools. I remember using bench lathes where we had to step on pedals to shift the belts (tight and loose pulleys). I can also recall our machine shop teachers showing us kids 'how to walk a belt'. There was maybe a 16" or 18" swing cone-head engine lathe, driven from a cone pulley on a countershaft up in the overhead. The teacher shifted the belt to the countershaft to get the lathe turning under power. He then used the edge of his hand to hit the moving belt, knocking it off the step of the headstock cone pulley it had been running on. With a good shot from the edge of his hand, the teacher had that moving belt climb onto the next steps on the countershaft and headstock pulleys. He walked the belt up and down the step cone pulleys. As he explained, you had to look out for the lacing hooks if you used your hand. Us kids were told to use a hammer handle of the smooth shank of an open-end wrench or a piece of round stock. We walked belts after that. We also learned that if a belt was too slack, a classmate could help you get your work done. Namely, the classmate took a large open end wrench with an smooth oval cross section to its handle, or a hammer handle, and used it to apply pressure to the slack belt. This got the belt to where it did not slip and you got your cut taken. Then, you returned the favor for your classmate. These 'belt jungles' had leather flat belting, and the belting was not 'taken down' (run off the pulleys) except over summer vacation time. Humidity and being under constant tension caused the lathe belts to stretch and remain slackened. The teachers had belt dressing in stick form, which helped some. Otherwise, they'd put in a request for the machine shop maintenance crew to take a piece out of that belt.

We kids worked on ca 1922 machine tools and thought "War Production Board" geared head lathes and horizontal mills were "modern". We ran engine lathes, shapers, horizontal mills, camelback drills, radial drills and plenty more. No safeguards or emergency stops with braking. Other than an occasional cut finger or skinned knuckle or bruise, there were never any serious accidents. We had great teachers who had 'come out of industry'. I got a wonderful education at Brooklyn Technical HS, as did thousands of other boys (it was an all boys school up until the 1970's or thereabouts). Lineshaft machine shops are from an era when people were expected to take responsibility for their own actions, no safety shutdowns or guards on moving machine parts. If you were not capable of 'knowing where your body began and ended' and working with forethought and working safely, it was on you if you got hurt. No digital readout and plenty of wear so you had to know how to take out the backlash or take a heavy enough final cut to keep worn machine tool parts from 'swimming around'. There were no 'youtubes' to show you how to do machine shop work, no smartphones or other devices to do your thinking. We were taught to setup jobs on old machine tools and how to figure out how to operate machine tools without any manuals, nor were there labels or data plates on too much other than lathe quick change gearboxes or feed boxes on mills and radial drills. Progressive generations have gotten softer and expect to use some kind of artificial intelligence rather than their own minds, eyes, bodies, and maybe a 'Machinery's Handbook" and a pad of paper and the micrometer collars on the machine tools.

 

[ironmadman]

Very interesting comment @joemichaels, my father went to Brooklynn Tech during that time. To see what it was like for him is amazing. Thanks

 

[dundeeshopnut]

"Take responsibility for your actions",,,, boy has that ship sailed in the workplace or job site. Now, it is shield and guard the machine until it is barely usable or even worse serviceable!

 

[john.k]

Somewhere online I found a series of pics of the Starr Arms Co new Yonkers shop ,opened in 1863.

 

[L Vanice]

By 1935, Hardinge Brothers Inc. had moved from Chicago to Elmira, NY and introduced their new line of Cataract bench lathes with individual electric motors under the bench. They ran this ad in the leading machine tool magazines and printed them individually to mail to potential customers. The top picture looks like it has all Cataract lathes and mills and could be their own factory, maybe the one in Chicago. One of Franklin Hardinge's patents was for the benches and overhead supports made with iron gas pipe and custom castings.

When I rebuilt my 1936 Hardinge 59 bench lathe, I improved the underdrive a bit, including changing the means of raising the motor for belt shifting and adding a belt guard below the headstock.

I never owned one, but Hardinge made an optional wooden desk-like bench for the 1930's lathes that did actually completely enclose the belts.

My favorite Hardinge lathe is on a bench I built. It has the traditional vertical posts to support a motor, jackshaft with wood and paper pulleys and a Rivett countershaft controlled by three foot pedals.

Larry

 

[blcksmth]

I have used the first photo for many years when demonstrating blacksmithing at the Wood County Museum blacksmith shop in Bowling Green, OH. A gentleman in Toledo donated his garage machine shop to the museum and I assembled it in the museum blacksmith shop. An electric motor is belted to the main line shaft. One pulley on that shaft powers a floor drill press with a tight pulley / free pulley clutch operated by a foot pedal on the base of the press. Above the lathe is a jack shaft containing 2 pulleys with clutches and a step pulley above the lathe step pulley. Two pulleys on the main shaft are belted to each clutched pulley above the lathe with one belt crossed so the lathe can be reversed - It has a milling attachment.

After demonstrating operation of the machinery, I show folks the photo in the first post here explaining the we have a smaller version of of the photo. About the photo, it is my opinion that the shop in the photo is too large to be a school shop. I believe that the young folks in the photo are apprentices learning the trade. Typical apprenticeship programs were 5 to 7 years. If it was a 7 year program, to be finished by age 21 the starting age would be 14 or so.

I would love to see the engine that is driving the shop in the photo!

Bob
WB8NQW

I took photos yesterday in the museum blacksmith shop of the line shaft system described above.

 

[Joe Michaels]

In the Hardinge advertisement, the 'first picture', showing the lineshaft driven bench lathes, is what we had in one of my machine shop classrooms at Brooklyn Tech HS. The pipe-frame to carry the countershafts is just what we had in place. As I recall there was a regular flat belt and a crossed belt to give forward and reverse spindle rotation. There were foot pedals to work the belt shifter forks. There were two (2) rows of bench lathes with the pipe framing and line shaft running down the center between the two rows.

In the 'modernized' Brooklyn Tech machine shops, there was a mix of bench lathes. Some were the 'old style' headstock (open cone pulley) and some were the enclosed headstocks. These were mounted in rows on wood-topped benches with individual motor drives mounted underneath the bench tops. I recall that some of these "modernized' bench lathes were made by Rivett, some by Hardinge. Some bore property tags from Carl Norden (the bombsight maker) or Sperry (gyroscope related navigational instruments). These were WWII surplussed by the "Defense Plant Corporation" and wound up at Brooklyn Technical HS. Sperry's original plant was on Flatbush Avenue Extension, within walking distance of Brooklyn Tech. Norden was either in Connecticut or on Long Island, also within easy reach of Brooklyn Tech. When WWII ended, I am sure the Defense Plant Corporation had lots of machine tools to either offer for sale to the owners of the plants they were in, or to transfer to
public usage (schools, municipal or county maintenance shops, etc). We had other machine tools such as geared head engine lathes that had the "War Production Board" and "Defense Plant Corporation" tags on them mixed in with the original 1922 lineshaft machine tools.

All students taking basic machine shop were first required to grind HSS toolbits from blanks (Rex M2, 5/16" square, sold in the HS book store), then given simple jobs on the bench lathes. After that, we moved to the engine lathes. Seeing the Hardinge photo brought back the memory of that 'jungle gym' bench lathe setup.

 

[M.B. Naegle]

Even for someone going to tech school, 5 to 7 years seems too short to pick-up a trade, but an immersive on the job experience is about the best start you can get. Even today, In my experience some of our best workers were kids that started young and were ok doing the basic stuff for a while leading towards a carrier rather than flipping burgers for a paycheck before going to college. I think lots of kids, and even more parents, are warry of getting "locked into" a carrier early on. In college you can change majors like under wear and in the end get a generic degree to apply and get hired wherever you want, but really have no experience in that field. I think they are afraid of putting time into something they might not like and waste time when really the opposite is true. If a teenager came in my door and said he was apprenticing as an electrician for two years but wanted to try something different, golly I'd hire him right there over the kid with no experience who is constantly asking for raises while playing on their phone and watching the shop get messy.

Thanks to how may parents raised me, I wanted to be a machinist since I was 9, but really I was an oddball in the Millennial crowd. I think people need to remove the stigma around "child labor" in getting kids started early. They should work safely and give priority to studies and "being kids", but they have the ability and often the desire to learn trades if we support them in it. Parents views of work also heavily influence the kids. If the parent is constantly griping about their boss and dreaming about the weekend when they can get out on the bass boat, they shouldn't be surprised when their kid has zero desire to join the workforce.

 

[dundeeshopnut]

Growing up on a dairy farm, you learned quick to never say you have nothing to do, and forget the notion of having your parents drive you to sports events and other silly shit. Excellent apprenticeship though.