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Meyer & Burger UW 1 universal machine tool

hansvandongen

Aluminum
Joined
May 10, 2005
Location
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Hey,

Coming out of the closet, so to speak with my Meyer & Burger. I've made up a web page web page about the machine, not in the least because I have a couple of Astoba (precursor to the Meyer & Burger ) for sale.

mb_draai.jpg


enjoy,

Hans
 
Hans,

Great web site and photos of your machines, thanks for sharing them! I was not familiar with these machines, and I was quite surprised when I saw this photo:

mb_vert_univ.jpg


Quite the neat little beastie!!

--Larry
 
Hans,

quite a tool and a great website.

I've been looking at the same machine at lathes.co.uk various times and found this one in addition to the Hommel UWG-1 & 2 very interesting machines.

Would be tempted to buy one of the Astoba's but ....


Congrats on your finds.


Regards,


Piet
 
Welcome aboard and thanks for shareing, I love to see new ideas and machines that I previously have never seen. I hope someone else will have something similar and a good discussion will develop.

Charles
 
Fantastic.... I love them..... and tempting on the sale of the others.... but they look like like chopped liver after seeing your beauty..... maybe it's good that my wife told me to take it easy for a while after my last expenditure....

How tall is that and in that photo of it upright what is the distance from table to floor.... also how long does it take to change if from lathe to vertical mill?

Thanks for sharing and welcome.
 
Those are impressive looking maschines. I've never heard of them.
But who where the target customers? It must be a total hassle to switch over from milling to turning and back. You constantly loose your setup. Getting two separate machine could not have been much more expensive. I see high collectability, but little practical usability.
 
Larry, Charles: thanks for your comments.

Piet: Strange, isn't it, that the Hommel UWG has sort of a "Cult" following (people are going crazy over them on german Ebay), while the Meyer & Burger (way cooler IMO) are virtually unknown

Rivett : I've posted some sizes:


mb_size1.jpg


mb_size2.jpg


As you can see, with the (fixed) table in the lowest position, the "headroom" is a full 14 inches (355 mm) from spindle nose to table.

with me being 1 meter 97 (6'7" ) tall, the machine is a bit on the low side; I have to be careful not to develop a hunchback


Changing over from lathe to vertical is a matter of minutes, most of it spent on cleaning: remove workpiece from spindle -->take off the compound slide --> set the bed in vertical --> attach table -->attach vice/ dividing head etc to table --> put workpiece on table --> put milling cutter in main spindle --> dial in --> mill as required.

Martin: My (somewhat educated) guess is that the machine would have been used in facilities where machining was not the main activity, but occasionally precision parts would have to be made, e.g. laboratories and such, and where space restrictions were a factor.

I certainly don't think of it as production machine, although Edwin Brunner (who, by the way, apparently sold a lot of UW1s to Rolls Royce) also tells me that the machine was used in machine shops to have an extra machine at hand that could be set up to do any precision job; so if all the mills were occupied they would set up the UW 1 for milling, etc.

I agree that losing setups is a factor when repeatedly changing over, although I think with some clever planning and jig-making this can be minimized, and repeatability is very good, at least in one axis (i.e. that t-slot is in the same place every time.)

Maybe you should buy two! (wink, wink, nudge nudge
)

But the fact that only about 3000 of them were ever made in 50 years shows that the market for such an expensive machine wasn't very large.

Me, I'm glad they exist, because I only have a very small workshop on the 3rd (wooden) floor, and yes, I may be more of a collector than a machinist (I have a Schaublin 90 and a Zeiss toolmakers microscope in my dining room (ahh, projects, projects), and a Strobel blind stitch sewing machine in the sitting room. And it's a miracle I'm not single anymore
)

Hans
 
Looks like the metal working version of the American built "Shop Smith". Built in the 50's-60's there was a wood working tool that converted something like your machine. It boasted being a table saw, a joiner, a router, a wood lathe and a drill press. All in the same package..it would sit horizointal or vertical as yours...

Very interesting machine, thanks for sharing. Wonder how the geometric alignments like being used in the verticle and horizontal settings...seems that Connelly and perhaps Mr Moore might have something to say about this...... ;)
Cheers Ross
 
Ross:
Could be some kind of synchronicity, the shopsmith and the UW 1 certainly seem to share the basic idea.

re. the vertical and horizontal geometry, you got me thinking ; I had just read a post somewhere on PM about the SIP scraping regime; I doubt my machines would have mapped optical interference plots for way scraping.

But looking at the machine, it struck me that in horizontal (lathe) mode, the balancing spring (running below the bed) is fully tensioned, pushing the bed toward concave and the headstock ways to tilt slightly forward, so to speak. In vertical mode, the spring is almost fully relaxed, but the same effect would be done by gravity. So I suppose in a clever design like this they specced the spring to equal the gravity effects.

mb_pushpull.jpg



And then a horrifying thought hit me: I had the ways reground WITHOUT the spring in place: this would mean the bed is now slightly concave. Aaaarrrrrgh! Any ideas on how much difference this would make?
 
Hans,

I'm assuming that the bed is a one piece deal and not a split one??

If it is a one piece bed isn't the spring there just to aid in raising the whole thing into the vertical position??

I seriously doubt that a spring can pull the bed in a concave shape.

As far as Martin's comment is concerned, that's why I like the Hommel UWG-1 over the UWG-2, just for it's shear dinkyness that allows you to do small parts sitting on the couch whlile watching TV. Try that with a FP-4.

Even would like to have a Golmatic if they weren't so ridiculously priced. But at least a M&B and UWG-1 can cut threads where the Golmatic can't.


Kind of considering one of the Astoba's you're offering but have to get rid of a fully loaded ML-7 and a Arboga U-2508 first before I end up being single.
 
I seriously doubt that a spring can pull the bed in a concave shape.
I don't know, that spring is pretty strong, the force could be as much as 600 N (60kg)(SWAG);

I've found when aligning the tailstock that by leaning against it I could make a 0.01 mm indicator go off by several notches. I fear iron isn't as rigid as it's made out to be, certainly when it's "only" a hundred kilos


Hans
 
Friend of mine has a Meyer & Burger - he has occasion to phone the German factory with a query and their first response was to ask him how much he'd sell it for. Someone appreciates them!

Regards, Jim
 
Very nice machine Hans
I first read about it on Tony's site and immediately lusted after 1.Compact size and does everything, perfect for the model engineer.
I used to search German ebay for a long time but never ever saw 1 so just gave up, not that I would have been able to afford assuming everyone and their brother would be bidding on it.

Martin
Those Hommels do bring crazy money, atleat the 2 or 3 that I saw.1 was very completely outfitted, with every imaginable accessory and a lot of tooling.I am sure the Hommel is a great machine but I can't stand that friggin animal print paint job, plus I am allways reminded of mutton when I think hommel. :D
hommell.jpg


Heres a Hommel cyclindrical/surface grinder that was on Ebay.de
ws8.jpg
ws7.jpg

ws4.jpg


One more thing
It seems like every Swiss lathe has the black plastic collect closer/draw bar.The one on your UWG looks like the 1 on my schaublin 102N and I have seen it in other machines too. Don's Whali also has a similar looking one.
 
Hans,

That the machine weighs just a 100 kg is really a surprise to me. I would have thought it to be more in the range of 250 kg that was why a was surprised that it was upstairs and on a wooden floor. I was expecting the machine to end up with the neighbors from downstairs soon and was contemplating to just become your downstairs neighbour.

Note: just went to Anglo Swiss tool and they're claiming the machine weighs 300 kgs. So the 100 kg you mentioned likely just covers the bed.

About the tailstock drift reading what were you measuring against??
If it was against the tailstock barrel, was it locked?
Where was the measurement against. i.e. head stock, bed or cabinet??

Even so, it should not be a real issue, you may turn convex on heavy cuts but that will be, almost, entirely corrected on your finishing pass(es).

Spud,

That are some neat examples of Hommel usages. That's true multi tasking. The very top picture was offered on E-bay a couple of weeks ago with the owner asking 4,200 Euro's (yeah, right) but there were no bids.

UWG-2's tend fetch far more than UWG-1. The UWG-2 being a very heavier build machine than the UWG-1 so maybe is more valuable to the Semi-pro market. The UWG-1 would look good as a mantle piece, still would like to have one if I can pick one up for little money.


I recently bought on of the most useless tools that I will likely never have any use for but I bought it because it was cheap and I thought it was pretty cool. It's the old MasterMill which is the predecessor of the VersaMil VersaMil . It came with a bunch of accesories and almost rented it out last week to a local machine shop to cut long slots in a couple of drill-pipe pup joints in order to accept some MWD (measuring While Drilling) tools.

Slots hat to be two meters long and he did not have milling capability for that length. In the end he turned down the opportunity as he was too busy anyway. But other opportunities may be around as well.

Sorry for straying off topic there.

Whatever people say about multi-tasking machines, there will always be some market for them. And there always be people that either collect them or use them in a HSM environment. If clever designed, I think these are great machines. Loosing reference points between switching from one task to the other is no issue to me as you will have the same problem as you take a part from the lathe to the mill and back again so we can put that one to bed.
 
Piet,

The whole machine is supposed to weigh about 300 kg, including the standard equipment. Wooden floors are actually quite strong; think four adults in a group hug (Yikes!) - that's about 300 kilos.

the bed and headstock weigh between 100 - 150 kilos. I took the machine up the stairs in pieces; the biggest problem was actually the cabinet because it's the biggest part, and the stairs are spiraling and narrow.

re. the tailstock drift: I put a test bar between centres, locked the tailstock and put an indicator on the test bar near the tailstock (reading horizontal). I could just about manage to move the indicator reading by .02 mm by bumping gently into the tailstock body with my full weight (90 kilos) behind it.


on another note: I found a couple of videos of another dutch Astoba (not mine - I don't know him) on google video:

video of an Astoba in slotting mode
"Here I have changed over my refurbished Astoba UW1 to show what it's like to use as a slotting machine, for instance to cut spleens"


video of the Astoba UW1 turning a flywheel housing
(thanks to Paul Lanner for pointing this one out:)
"Here I am turning an inside fitting on a flywheel housing; the casting could not be machined on a conventional lathe because the diameter is too large. On the tiny Astoba it's simple; because of the adjustable center height turning diameters up to 420 mm (16,5 inches) is possible"

(apart from the fact that that would have been easier to bore on a milling machine, that's pretty amazing, isn't it?)

Hans
 
The slotter is hilarious
I can see that you wouldn't want to rev that up too far or the whole machine might take itself for a walk around the block.
 
Hans,

great video's.

Actually the machine concept is almost identical to that of the Wali that was posted in this forum some time ago. It also had a spindle that could be lowered and raised to accomodate larger diameters and for use as a mill.

The only difference is that teh Wali could not be postioned vertically. Now I come to think of it, yours doesn't need to be either. You can still perform all functions, milling, drilling etc in horizontal mode as well.

That slotting mode must be putting quite a bit of stress onto the machine and vertical slides.

P.S. sent you a PM about the for sale topic. Proves to be that the one looking for an Astoba is P. Lanner. (small world isn't it)

regards,

Piet
 








 
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