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Two Bullard VTL's, Radial Drill, Shaper, and Other Old Iron at NJ Auction

Joined
Feb 4, 2004
Location
Metuchen, NJ, USA
Here's an interesting auction with two Bullard VTL's, a 42" and a 36". The 42" is described as a "Man-Au-Trol" What's that?

http://ind-auctions.com/auction/1000001400_NortheastFluidPowerCoInc.asp

The G&E 16" Toolroom shaper seems to have everything that's usually missing from a shaper, like the vise, clapper box, and outboard support. The table can definitely tilt left-to-right.

I have no interest in this whatsoever and I am not planning to bid on any of it.

JRR
 
From a 1948 24 page Bullard catalogue, here are a few pages on their Man-Au-Trol lathes.

I hadn't noticed before, but Bullard also offered a Man-Au-Trol "Spacer" which sounds like a useful semi-auto positioning table for use on a drill press. A 2 axis table which would move hydraulically to pre-set locations.

If anyone wants other pages or higher resolution, let me know.

Bullard 1948 pg 02 edit.jpg Bullard 1948 pg 02.jpg Bullard 1948 pg 03.jpg Bullard 1948 pg 04.jpg Bullard 1948 pg 22.jpg
 
I have a production engineering book of 1950 and "Man-Au-Trol was the latest technology ,basically an electro hydraulic auto cycle I think.
 
I worked on one of those Mult-au-matic machines about a year ago. That thing was a trip. Imagine how complicated a machine would be if you took 8 turret lathes and stuck them all together with a mechanical indexing table to move parts from lathe to lathe. There could have been 1 million parts in one of those machines.
 
From a 1948 24 page Bullard catalogue, here are a few pages on their Man-Au-Trol lathes.

I hadn't noticed before, but Bullard also offered a Man-Au-Trol "Spacer" which sounds like a useful semi-auto positioning table for use on a drill press. A 2 axis table which would move hydraulically to pre-set locations.

If anyone wants other pages or higher resolution, let me know.

View attachment 200831 View attachment 200832 View attachment 200833 View attachment 200834 View attachment 200835

Bullard also made Hor Bores Peter, any illustrations in your catalogue.

Regards Tyrone.
 
Tyrone,

There is no mention of Horizontal Boring in this catalogue.


Maybe they had a separate brochure for the Hor bores. They definitely made them and they look to be a nice machine as do the vertical boring machines in your photo.
I always rated " Webster & Bennett " vertical boring machines but the " Bullard " machines look technically more sophisticated.

Having said that technical sophistication isn't always a good thing. It needs to work all of the time.
" Webster & Bennett " were more basic machines but very rarely went wrong.

Regards Tyrone.
 
Imagine how complicated a machine would be if you took 8 turret lathes and stuck them all together with a mechanical indexing table to move parts from lathe to lathe.
Oh jeeze, I'd forgotten. Either Cleveland or Lees-Bradner made an eight-spindle hobber that was actually eight machines on a table like a merry-go-round. The operator could stand in one place and change stacks of parts as the machine(s) rotated past him.

Now that's automation !! :D
 
That's how the Mult-au-matic works. The mechanical indexing is only accurate to about .020", so that kind of limits the work you can do with one.
 
I've seen the Bullard hor-bores in a catalog, but never seen one in the wild. I wonder how many they made.

Me neither but I wouldn't have thought many would have made it over here. We had several makers of our own also.

I did see a photograph of one once, it would have been a 5" or 6" spindle machine. It looked a very nicely finished off machine.

I've got to admit American styling of machine tools especially in the hey day of 1940 to 1970 was superior most of the time to British design. We did have one or two stylish makers though.

Regards Tyrone
 
Sykes was doing cutter-relieving years ... decades ? ... before anyone else. And the later Sunderlands were awesome ...

I was really referring to the styling of the machines. Brits were good at innovation but we had a tendency to over engineer stuff, as in the old joke -

" A scientist is asked what does 2 plus 2 add up to ?
The scientist 'Says 4 of course'.

Next an engineer is asked the same question.
He says ' Well it's 4 alright but let's make it 10 just to be on the safe side ".

Our machines were well made normally with plenty of beef but lacked a bit in terms of style. American styling was really " cool " in the old days.

The US makers were also better at " Labour saving " ideas on machine tools.
We were poor at this aspect of design because skilled labour was plentiful and cheap over here

Regards Tyrone.
 
We were poor at this aspect of design because skilled labour was plentiful and cheap over here

I'm not sure this is really a plus for American machine tools.

From my perspective, part of the reason the Japanese ate our lunch in the late 1970s is that they were willing to put in the hand work to make a really good machine while we Americans tried to automate our way out of it.

I work on a lot of really old US made equipment. I've seen some really dodgy practices. One big thing is the quality of the castings was really not that great. I've seen pulleys with 4 keys broached in them because the first 3 broke out. I've seen core shifts so bad that tapped holes completely miss their bosses. And the "scraping" they did was just awful.

I guess the grass is always greener...
 








 
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