Experts in door manufacturing machines, but they can make all kinds of handicrafts, such as knives, saws, needles, drills, cones, mills, shafts, sets, gears, bed frames, etc., in fact The machine is assembled from these parts.
The earliest boring machine designer-Da Vinci boring machine is called “Mother of Machinery”. Speaking of boring machines, we must first talk about Da Vinci. This legendary figure may be the designer of the first boring machine for metal processing. The boring machine he designed is powered by hydraulic or foot pedals. The boring tools rotate close to the workpiece, and the workpiece is fixed on a mobile table driven by a crane. In 1540, another artist drew a picture of “Firework”, which also had the same drawing of a boring machine. At that time, the boring machine was specially used for finishing hollow castings.
The first boring machine (Wilkinson, 1775) was born for the processing of cannon barrels. In the 17th century, due to military needs, the development of the cannon manufacturing industry was very rapid. How to make cannon barrels became an urgent need. A big problem solved.
The world’s first true boring machine was invented by Wilkinson in 1775. In fact, to be precise, Wilkinson’s boring machine is a drilling machine capable of precisely processing cannons. It is a hollow cylindrical boring rod with both ends mounted on bearings.
Wilkinson was born in the United States in 1728. When he was 20, he moved to Staffordshire and built the first ironmaking furnace in Billston. As a result, Wilkinson was called “the blacksmith master of Staffordshire”. In 1775, Wilkinson, 47, worked hard in his father’s factory to finally create this new machine that can drill cannon barrels with rare precision. Interestingly, after Wilkinson’s death in 1808, he was buried in a cast-iron coffin of his own design.
The boring machine made an important contribution to the watt steam engine. Without the steam engine, the first wave of the industrial revolution would not have occurred at that time. In addition to the necessary social opportunities for the development and application of the steam engine itself, some of the technical prerequisites cannot be ignored, because the parts of the steam engine are far from as easy as carpenters to cut wood, and they need to make special metals. Shape, and processing precision requirements are high, it is impossible to do without corresponding technical equipment. For example, when manufacturing cylinders and pistons of steam engines, the accuracy of the outer diameter required during the manufacturing of the piston can be cut from the outside while measuring the dimensions, but to meet the accuracy requirements of the cylinder inner diameter, it is not easy to use general machining methods. .
Smith was the best mechanical technician of the eighteenth century. As many as 43 watermills and windmills were designed by Smithton. When making a steam engine, Smith was most troublesome with machining cylinders. It is quite difficult to machine a large cylinder into a circle. To this end, Smith produced a special machine for cutting inner cylinders at the Karen Iron Works. This type of boring machine driven by a water wheel is equipped with a cutter at the front end of its long shaft. This cutter can be rotated in a cylinder to process its inner circle. Since the tool is installed at the front end of the long shaft, problems such as shaft deflection will occur, so it is very difficult to machine a truly circular cylinder. For this reason, Smith had to change the position of the cylinder many times for processing.
For this problem, the boring machine invented by Wilkinson in 1774 played a great role. This boring machine uses a water wheel to rotate the material cylinder and advance the tool aligned with the fixed center. Due to the relative movement between the tool and the material, the material is bored with a highly accurate cylindrical hole. At that time, a cylinder with a diameter of 72 inches was made with a boring machine, and the error did not exceed the thickness of a six pence coin. Measured by modern technology, this is a big error, but under the conditions at that time, it was not easy to reach this level.
However, Wilkinson’s invention was not patented, and people copied it and installed it. In 1802, Watt also talked about Wilkinson’s invention in his book, and copied it in his Soho Iron Works. In the future, Watt also applied the magic machine of Wilkinson when manufacturing the cylinders and pistons of the steam engine. It turned out that for pistons, cutting can be performed while measuring the size on the outside, but it is not so simple for the cylinder, it is necessary to use a boring machine. At that time, Watt used a water wheel to rotate the metal cylinder and let the fixed tool advance forward to cut the inside of the cylinder. As a result, the error of the 75-inch diameter cylinder was less than the thickness of a coin. It is very advanced.
Workbench lift boring machine was born (Hutton, 1885). In the following decades, many improvements were made to Wilkinson’s boring machine. In 1885, Hutton of the United Kingdom manufactured a table lifting boring machine, which has become the prototype of modern boring machines.
