B&S Screw Machine Info?

There's a machinery auction coming up nearby, and looking through the catalog I see a Brown & Sharpe single spindle screw machine...

I'm just a riflesmith with a small shop- but have a weakness for restoring and using old iron.
I'm fascinated just by the looks of the damn thing- doubt I'd use it much, if ever- but thinking it might be a cool way to spend more time I don't have messing with an old piece of history.

Most I've seen are big muthas, way too large for a small shop but this one looks to be small "enough", bout the size of a decent shaper.

I'm thinking they're not worth much to a modern job shop, so price should be reasonable if not cheap (?)

Someone talk me outta this, please

OK.....

You get a low introductory price, but the tools are what costs money.

I have about 20 assorted tools for my machine (which is really a bed turret unit to fit the lathe, not a full turret lathe), and it is not nearly enough. There are still gaps that limit productive use of the machine.

One expensive item that I have not acquired is a die head, such as "Geometric" or similar. They ain't cheap, and then you need a set of chasers for each different thread. There are lots of thread sizes.......... OK, you can "cheat" as I have, and use a releasing die holder that uses dies you already have, but it is slower, you have to reverse the spindle, where the die head pops open and can be directly retracted.

So it is a "slippery slope". Time, money, with some fun and satisfaction.

Being a gunsmith, you of course might justify it for making runs of odd screws and parts...... but you'd be spending much more than just buying those parts would run, and could not bill for it. And you might need only a couple of any given part, where a turret lathe needs 50 or a hundred parts to begin to be economical.

It's also boring and so forth to operate after a couple dozen parts.....

Is that a good start at convincing you?

It's also boring and so forth to operate after a couple dozen parts.....

Click to expand...

-Pretty sure the OP is referring to a screw machine, not a turret lathe. Something like this.

In that case, the biggest hurdle is designing and setting the cams. It's not a trivial exercise, and not usually something you do for just a few parts.

Once set, yeah, the thing will sit there making you hundreds of parts per hour for however long it has raw material, but if you don't need hundreds of parts per hour, it's really kind of a waste.

Yeah, I agree, I'd love to have one to fiddle and play with, but I have no real use for one, and don't really have the time to sit down and figure out how to "program" it.

Doc.

You are correct. Brain fart.......

Screw machine adds the cams to the rest of it, but does not change the need for tooling.

Makes the operator work less for production, more up front.

Even more of a time suck and money pit unless it is something you can put to work effectively. I cannot see it making sense unless you have a product line to put out a lot of the same parts for. Switching parts might be a fair nuisance, it's not like CNC, where you put known tools in the changer, and load the same program as last time.

There is a part of me that thinks screw machines are just plain fascinating devices. They are, but so are many other expensive mechanical devices. And I do not have a product line that needs one. The OP seems like he does not either.

Even if the OP has a product line, a screw machine will make scrap just as fast as good parts. Then you have to find out why.

tobnpr said:

Someone talk me outta this, please

Click to expand...

Easy, don't pay any more than absolute rock bottom price, ....and get yourself a copy of the B&S book

Construction and Use of Brown & Sharpe Automatic Screw Machines, Also Automatic Turret Forming Machines and Automatic Cutting-off Machines''

Which will bend your brain nicely out of shape - while you wait for the scrap price to go up

Seriously - as a learning exercise etc etc - fine, ........but unless you have a cam auto (screw m/c) mass production type job forget about using the machine for anything else.

There are versions of the B&S screw machines designed for hand-use which look very interesting- but probably more in the camp of a turret lathe than an automatic machine. I've not operated one but it looked to me like a turret lathe designed to use screw machine tooling, including the bar feed system and so on; so no cams but designed to operate with the screw machine tooling systems.

Thank you gentlemen, sanity is restored. I'm curious as to what it ends up selling for.
I'll concentrate on trying to snag the Harig 618 surface grinder.
At least it's more practical

Greg Menke said:

There are versions of the B&S screw machines designed for hand-use which look very interesting- but probably more in the camp of a turret lathe than an automatic machine.

Click to expand...

-Well, B&S was in the convention of calling even their small manual turret lathes "screw machines", so that does blur things a bit.

Doc.

Yeah, there's "hand screw machines" (manual turret lathes) and "automatic screw machines" (cam driven production machines). The former is of use, if you need to produce multiples of something. The latter, since the advent of CNC, are basically scrap metal.

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