.. about four feet in diameter. Wedge-shaped flame-cut steel plate bolted flat to it hung a compound rest borrowed off a pre-War One Niles lathe built "City of Allegheny" PA a tad further out.
Common Armstrong/Williams in classical lantern toolpost and go to cutting stick-weld build-up off a 46" diameter ring about 4 1/2" tall for a Timken bearing, body of a 100-ton crane set on its side, lined up good, beams holding it stick-welded to Ells on the Tee-slotted table.
Table didn't move when in the cut on a Niles Tool Works boring lathe of that age.
The spindle was an advancing quill about 11" in diameter - sorta like a drillpress laid-over.
Two places the operator could choose to stand. A step plate in the casting fore side or rear side, just back of the faceplate. ISTR there were three steel steps up to the catwalk along each side of the headstock that led to those exalted thrones of honour. Or
messy suicide. Take yer pick. It was still a free country back in the day.
The handwheel feed was about the size of the quartermaster's helm on a War One "four stacker" flush-deck US Navy destroyer.
Pick the back side step, eyeball the compound coming up, reach out, match speed, click in a thou on the dial. Ready for a pass.
Now advance that quill by hand steady as can be, at around 6 RPM 'til you've traversed the 4+ inches. Retract, power-down. Go get the other hand assigned to hold the far-end of a 60-inch B&S vernier caliper and take the measure.
Lather, rinse, repeat each 8-hour shift for three days, hit the mark dead nuts, and fit twelve thouand 1963 dollars worth of REBUILT Timken bearing.
Tell yah one damn thing. Foreman George Armstrong "the Eagle" never said a word to me about HOW, just gave me the print. He also never said another f***king word about my walking in the door three days earlier, the only mic to my 18-year-old name a B&S zero to 3/8".
Virgin no longer, he just sent me off to an 8-foot Niles VERTICAL Turning Lathe to make the fool hold-down ring. Gravy job. "virgin" plate, no corn-cob stick-weld.
Which wasn't the same piece of cake, even so, given it was thin enough "relatively" to need a reglar Stonehenge on steroids of studs to keep it flat whilst a slope and step was cut into it by hand and eyeball and vernier. Micrometers were, after all, clearly meant only for "small shit". Felt CHEATED the other two shifts worked on that one. Time I came back, second day, the bugger was done.
"Outsourcing to low-cost labour China" being as close as barefoot-poor West By God Virginia those days?
Well... OSHA weren't around, but I figure they'd have shit fired red clay brick enough
retroactively to have duplicated Philahooliga's Independence Hall had they only known what we did every day all day with what and how!
Union shop, too, and proud of it. "Featherbedding" was where you shagged yer lady. Everybody just
worked when on the clock.
Yah wanted a USWA Steel Worker to "strike"? Yah hadda go up the road to Pittsburgh. Where they had earned enough money to AFFORD that silly shit and still eat.
End of the day? It's only steel. It's all "relative". Person could do this s**t on a Levin or a Derbyshire just as well as on a Niles Tool Works dinosaurian as might have seemed already old when Adam still had hair and Eve still trusted snakes.
Even a Southbent can do it, operator don't chicken-out.