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Largest parts you've worked on?

metalmadness

Hot Rolled
Joined
Nov 25, 2015
I just received a customers raw stock today and got to thinking about metal producers and the biggest blocks of metal they can make. That led me to this forging/mold:

Largest Aluminum Injection Mold Ever |



CompositesWorld


In my old shop, we used to make oil and gas components, needless to say those were pretty large. Routinely I was working on 300lb plasma cut rough blanks. Our lathe guys were turning 48" round bar 4140 stuff for proprietary housings we made.

Some of the bodies we made were plasma cut from 4" thick plate that came to us in 12x12 foot sections.

What is the biggest parts you guys have made or worked on? Got any cool pics?

I'm usually working on small stuff so when big pieces come my way I get excited.
 
This goes back to Gulf war 2.

My son was working for a company that had a bridge crane mill. The bed was a special railroad car sixty feet long with up to eighty feet X travel. The US army placed a special rush order for an Aluminum bracket made out of T6 stock four inch thick by two feet by fifty feet. They ran that part 24x7 for a month straight. All he knew was it helped get Abrams tanks on the air transports.

I still have a huge pile of AL scraps from that job. These pieces weigh nearly two hundred lbs.
 
I got to help fit main shaft to a propeller for a Navy refueling ship that ran aground. I don't remember the exact size, but it was between 25 and 35 feet diameter one piece fixed pitch in bronze. Came out of a warehouse somewhere with the taper rough machined. Shipyard finish machined the shaft then with the prop flat on cribbing used a big crane to set the blued up shaft in. Torque the nut to a lot and then take it apart. Check contact then start grinding away at the blue spots inside the taper with a 9" grinder. Took a couple weeks.

Also did a lot of work on 16V149TI Detroit gensets. I have shoved my entire 6'3 body inside the sump through a side cover.
 
By no means big, but I was impressed many years ago, a few years prior to OSHA. At the tender age of 16 I turned some 24" cast iron valve casting on a 48" Bullard. It is possible to generate fear and caution in a teenage male.

Bob
 
Does mobile machining count? ;)


Mobile machining is where the $$$ is at.

One of my biggies was the Azimuth track for the Greenbank Virginia telescope. The raw forgings were AR-400 16" thick 36" wide and 14' long forged on a 100 meter radius. I machines each segment then the weld shop would put two together and I would face the warp out on the Ingersoll planer. (Ever see the Vid on Ingersoll website with the 300hp cut and the broom catching fire from the chips)?

As I would get a segment completed it would get hauled from Savannah GA to Virginia. For the install the telescope was rotated just enough to cut out an old section between the wheels and weld in the new section. once all the sections were installed I mounted a tool holder on the telescope trunnion frame itself and faced the 200 meter diameter to within .010 inch flatness. I wonder what the error of .010 would be over a couple of light years distance.

That was a thrill riding a 17 million pound 485' tall VTL!!!

GBT Part.jpgtele.jpg


Our portable lathe was 18' x 200' but I didn't care for it too much. Having to wear a fall rope and harness while between 50,000 pounds of turbine blades and rotor spinning at 20 or 30 rpm's was more dangerous than the fall from the carriage. The wind from the blades would blow my fall line against the blades so had to have another guy behind me holding the rope back with a safety officer watching his rope.



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Over 75 tons for the largest fabrication. Largest single cast or forged piece was over 50 tons. Plenty more in that neighborhood. These days I much prefer smaller workpieces.
 
Just last week I used a post hole digger to dig a low precision hole in the earth. 7,917.5 miles diameter, 13,170,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds. Lucky it is safer then smaller work that can fall onto you. You can only fall onto it unless there is an earthquake. No need for fall protection in most cases. 75% already has flood coolant. Low pressure air blast is installed 100%.
BILL D.

Rumor is God made it with a 3d printer. Not sure where he bought the materials or who shipped them to the factory. I would have liked to get those contracts.
 
At 22 years old, the big boss and owner drags me out of the office to go turn the OD on a couple of steel bars 18" diameter x 7 foot long. He didn't trust anyone else in the shop to do it. I still get the hibie geebies thinking about it over the years. Same shop, line bored a double ended trepanner that was over 120 foot long and swing 5 foot over the ways! I know, it don't count. Ken
 
Found an old photo of a decent sized fabrication set up on one of the larger machines. This is a 7" spindle G&L HBM for size reference. This fab was in from the steel mill for reconditioning. It had split bearing caps. The base needed remachined and to have liners made and installed to restore original geometry and the caps and base had to have their splits re-machined to provide stock for line boring back to round again. Several setups to get all the work done.

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Here I am running the crane flipping the part up to machine the bottom:

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Photos aren't the best, had someone else taking pics and it was pretty dim in there.
 








 
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