For Heavy Duty Metalworking a Karusselldrehmaschine is the Norm

Posted by audreytaylor on April 3rd, 2013

A lathe is a mechanical tool for making objects with a rotational symmetry or for performing operations during which the workpiece has to be rotated along its axis. Popular kinds of lathes include the Karusselldrehmaschine and the Schwerdrehmaschine, for more heavy duty work.

Lathes have been developed in ancient times, dating back to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. The first lathes were hand operated, using a rope to turn the workpiece and several sharp implements to carve it. Over the centuries several improvements have been made, replacing hand-turning with pedals and poles and later using horse power to make stronger and more accurate objects. The woodworking lathes were the first to occur and all the other varieties were inspired from this rather simple concept through constant innovation.

A lathe may have legs or a stand, raising it to within the reach of the worker. Smaller varieties have no such frame and sit directly on a working bench. The typical lathe is made up of a headstock and its counterpart the tailstock, between which the object to be modeled is affixed and which will turn it at the required velocity for the shaping to take place. The tool rest provides a fulcrum to ensure the necessary force for the modeling. In woodworking lathes the tools are held by hand against the tool rest while in metalworking ones the tools are usually fastened more securely. The workpiece is usually secured to a faceplate which is in turn secured to the headstock (as the objects being modeled are of varying sizes and shapes and rarely fit snugly on their own).

The Karusselldrehmaschine are used commonly in metalworking, metal spinning, woodturning to produce various items such as gun barrels, cue sticks, candlestick holders, musical instruments (preponderantly woodwind instruments). Known also as a VTL machine, the Karusselldrehmaschine is mostly used for the production of duplicate parts in rapid succession. Evolving from early lathes, it has been added a turret, a toolholder that permits many easy cutting operations with different tools to be made with no effort or intervention on the part of the operator, such as setup tasks and tool changing. There are many types of machines, some manual and some fully automated where both the input and output are computer controlled.

The first turret lathe ever recorded historically is a classic horizontal bed manual turret lathe, appearing during de middle of the nineteenth century when the idea of mounting an indexable turret on a bench lathe first occurred. We have come a long way since then, to the Schwerdrehmaschine of today, and who knows what will come next. After the end of World War II, computers evolved into a practicality from the state of theory and laboratory experiments and that offered new perspectives concerning industrial production, where manual labor was replaced with much more accurate and never tiring machine work that could be centrally controlled and supervised. The existing manual and mechanically automated machines quickly became obsolete as computing technology became more and more accessible and the Schwerdrehmaschine of today is a state of the art testament to the advancement of humankind.

For your metalworking needs a Karusselldrehmaschine is the operating standard. If you need more power, try a Schwerdrehmaschine.