HN

Comments (59)

• Menu

  ghm2180
  Thank you for making this. My dad(now retired) owned a machine tool manufacturing space in the 70s and 80s in a small town in north india. After foreign CNC machines left no demand for manual/semi automatic ones in the country, he switched over to a foundry to manufacture cast iron parts in a blast cupola furnace and later a rotary furnace(better for smaller on demand work). But he kept the lathe around along with an employee to finish the parts. And your animation brings back a lot of memories for me. I learned to operate the lathe and had all manners of fun. It is kind of like yak shaving. Your clothes turn black but you just love the mechanical back and forth of it. He made pulleys, Truck engine parts, housing for water motors(fun fact municipal water is scarce and not of adequate pressurized in homes, farms, factories etc so these are ubiquitous) etc.I sent this to my dad. I am sure he will enjoy reading this.
• Menu

  glinscott
  Author here. This is a sequel to my beam engine article: https://glinscott.github.io/beam-engine/.I started digging into Watt's challenges getting an accurate cylinder bore for his pistons, and it spiraled out from there :).The article covers some of the key techniques developed during the industrial revolution to measure and make incredibly precise parts. There are a lot of animations and interactive figures to explore how it works.
• Menu

  qchris
  Anyone interested in this might also enjoy the book The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created The Modern World, by Simon Winchester. I read it a few years ago, and thought it was a really interesting journey through bootstrapping precision and how that fundamentally changed our relationship to certain types of things, particularly related to mass production of "good enough".
• xenadu02
  An amazing page, thanks for posting it!I got a lathe a few years ago as a hobby and really enjoy making something with high precision by hand with no computer or LLMs involved. Of course I make everything nice because I make it twice (due to my own errors).The history of lathes always interested me - especially how some features are so standard we think of them as integral to all lathes but that was not the case! Most lathes in use today are technically screw-cutting engine lathes.Every increase in precision in your tools leads to even greater precision in what you can make if you are careful and clever. In that sense every machinist has to start with a lathe because a lathe is the most versatile machine and is capable of making replacement parts to improve itself. Even a relatively crude home-made lathe can be enough to machine better parts to install onto the lathe to keep improving it. Even my little import hobby lathe (PM-1030V) can make parts to a tenths precision (tenths = 10,000th of an inch or .00254mm) with some care and it is not what you would call a rigid and accurate machine.You might wonder how humans turning a wheel were able to cut metal but in those days they didn't have HSS let alone carbide tools so they had to use whatever would hold an edge (carbon steel for a long time). That meant much much slower turning speeds, much smaller depth of cut, and much more frequent sharpening. I believe it was around 1869 Robert Mushet invented Mushet steel and later Maunsel White and Taylor worked with Bethlehem Steel Co to invent the first modern "tool steel" alloy. They are of course called High Speed Steel because they allow you to turn the work at high speed when cutting. Something of an ironic name in the modern world as carbides are far higher speed than HSS.Manual machining has declined thanks to CNC but there are still plenty of jobs where manual machining is faster and cheaper than setting up a CNC program. Of course those of us doing it as hobby aren't bothered by such things.
• Menu

  Joker_vD
  > After repeated copying and correction, Maudslay made a master screw five feet long and two inches across, with fifty threads to the inch and a foot-long nut that engaged six hundred of them at once.That's the stuff I like to read about the historical endeavors. A fifty-threads nut doesn't average the distance between the grooves quite accurately enough? Then let's make a nut with six-hundred threads on it, and so what if it's foot long.
• Menu

  mitthrowaway2
  > Maudslay also devised an ingenious method that used two imperfect screws to guide the tool cutting a third. Equal gears turned both guide screws at the same speed. A bar joined their two nuts, with the tool fixed at its midpoint, so the tool's position was the average of the two nut positions. Where one guide ran ahead and the other lagged, their errors partly cancelled. Each guide contributed only half its error to the new screw.Actually, this invention is Leonardo Da Vinci's! Here's what his screw-copying machine looked like.https://cdn.britannica.com/39/60539-050-BCB3019D/machine-Leo...https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/c0661830/800wm/C0661830...The screws can also be taken out and flipped end-over-end, averaging out the errors even further.
• pillars
  Great Work! I want to share some great resources related to Precision Engineering:[1] Origins of Precisionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58[2] The books that taught me precisionhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM9X_gjnleY[3] 2.75 FUNdaMENTALs of Design - Alexander H.Slocumhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgMq7yha9wU&list=PLksE8LDXGX...[4] Building the most accurate DIY CNC lathe in the worldhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEr2CJruwEM[5] Design Principles for Precision Mechatronicshttps://www.dspe.nl/knowledge/dppm-cases/[6] Tutorials in Optomechanicshttps://wp.optics.arizona.edu/optomech/tutorials-in-optomech...[7] American Society of Precision Engineering - Recommended Readingshttps://aspe.net/resources/recommended-readings/[8] What books should a precision engineer read?https://precisionmindsetllc.com/recommended-readings.htmlPrecision engineering is the biggest rabbit hole,an endless supply of interesting stories and artifacts.
• Menu

  HPsquared
  I've sometimes thought of making a YouTube series where the foundations of precision are created as increasingly precise artifacts, building on each other and following the history. Something like the "Primitive Technology" channel but for machine tools.
• Menu

  WillAdams
  This sort of thing makes me wonder what the successor is to the Gingery Books now that they're going away:https://gingerybookstore.com/Chris Borges has done some pretty cool little machines using 3D printed forms filled with concrete:https://www.printables.com/@ChrisBorgeand of course there are more CNC router designs than one can shake a stick at (ob. discl., I work for a company which makes one)
• laybak
  excellent interactive education content. this reminded me of the steam engine exhibits at the science museum in London
• djriley
  Something I feel was sort of left out here was precision grinding which began to come in to play right around the same time period this article focuses on. Grinding is what really allowed the industrial revolution to explode. Tight tolerances and good surface finishes allowed things to run faster and more efficiently. Automation and repeatability lead to high production of tooling and products that eventually lead to mass production.
• Menu

  hexapus
  This is very neat. My engineering nerd friend was immediately turned off by the seeming conflation of "precision" and "accuracy" in the title/subtitle though. As this article seems aimed at laypeople, clearing up the difference upfront by defining them might be helpful, as they are not interchangeable.
• Menu

  nayuki
  Good work! Your style of animated articles reminds me of the work of Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/archives/ , https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski
• adm4
  Jo Blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauge_block
• peterldowns
  Industrial history and the history of precision manufacturing is extremely exciting to me. This is an excellent overview and the animations — while not quite as smooth as https://ciechanow.ski/ — add to the experience.If you liked this blog post, you may enjoy the book “English and American Tool Builders" by Joseph Wickham Roe.
• Menu

  anitil
  What really surprises me about these precision machines is how recent all of these inventions are, only a couple hundred years
• Menu

  here_to_learn
  I love these kinds of articles, of how we bootstrapped technology.I would welcome suggestions for books that describe the advance of technology from early times.Im a distractible reader so I prefer books that are a bit more personal and story telling rather than dry.Thanks!
• Menu

  jeeshan
  how did you make these videos? ive struggled to understand mechanical systems from static figures and these are super helpful
• UltraSane
  This page deserves some kind of award for excellence in pedagogical design.