In the early 1980s, I worked on Bullard three-head vertical boring machines for Canadian Steel Wheel in Montreal. The machining of train wheels with a diameter of 33, 36 or 42 inches required this type of machine, but with a turntable with a diameter of 52 inches. A simple change of wheel diameter to be machined required an 8-hour set-up. I have seen train wheels fly off these machines during the machining process, following the breaking of the bolts holding the jaws to the turntable. When this happened, the safety instruction was to run as fast as possible.

As a consultant, I had a client company that had half of their very large facility filled with these Bullard machine tools to produce their products which were large machined castings used in the pipeline and petrochemical industries. The company started in the 50s and most of their Bullards dated from that time, including some they bought from other machine shops in the area. The level of accurate work and heavy machining they did always made it interesting to call on them. The other half of their facility was filled with CNC machining centers. This video filled on some gaps in my knowledge about the capabilities of the Bullard tools.

People who developed these mechanisms were extremely intelligent.

The shop I was at had a 36 inch Dyn-Au-Trol and a74 inch Dyn-Au-Tape, which is still there but broken right now, it's pretty tired. It was fully rebuilt and Fanuc control in the mid 90's.

CNC of the old times. I enjoy watching these kinds of videos and have a lot of admiration for the brains that put all this together with no computers or calculators. Thank you for these videos and I hope that these kinds of machines are sitting in museums or still in use.

We had a Bullard vertical lathe at a place I worked at in 2010 that was dated 1927.A lot of brass fittings on it.A lot of holes to squirt oil into.Had those drip lubricators too.

I’ just turned 22 and i feel happy for my self knowing i can use them manually on Bullard machines

A mechanical computer. These machines are amazing!

Very cool. I still use these machines today, but only manually. I always wondered how the automatic worked. Now I know. I like how he set it up, started it and just walked away. Fully confident no mistakes were made.

These were the days when a person could think for him self you were trained as a machinist.

Ran one of these till 2016 making aircraft frames. Real workhorses, most operators were scared of them. Maintenance guys didn’t want to touch them. Usually cutting 2 or 3 surfaces at the same time. Can’t say I miss it

Bullard made great machines. I ran a vtl for many years, manual only. Our Man-au-trol machines were worn out and used only manually by the time i got there but were robust and strong.

Baby weve come a long way.

Marvelous Afrikan machines developed by the brainstorming that has always been central there.

I worked at Bullard back in 79 detailing tooling for turn key machines.

Great video showing the mechanical version of NC and of course CNC machining! Like shown here all of these mentioned above still need a Machinist to set them up! John, Australia.

Well ahead of its time

Marvelous......thank you so much for posting this...bravo, from an old machinist n Florida

As someone else noted, that would be a repairman's nightmare after a few years.

Great machines for their time!

Got to love Mechanical Computers!

I ran a Bullard multiple spindle D16 at pacific valves many years ago

Can you find a film on the Mag/Demag, chuck control to round it out. Was introduced to them in 1973 as an electrician. They were absolutely fantastic. Mod-u-trol if I remember right

Very nice video, thank you. That technology is as good now as when it was devised. Elevators worked in a similar fashion until the 1980s, but the mechanical aspects are still being used. Of course, the transistor and servos made the next great leap in control systems possible. Though not as robust, setup times decreased a hundred fold, with computer code replacing all those dogs, wires, and adjustments.

" a new set up can be completed by a team of engineers in as little as two months!"

Amazing.

ABOUT THE TIME THAT THIS FILM WAS MADE I OPERATED A BULLARD 6 CHUCK MACHINE IN ENGLAND MAKING SIMILAR CROWN GEARS CASTING

... someone from the world of programming microcontrollers at the level of line-by-line OP-CODE instructions would probably feel right at home with the discipline it must take to transcribe each step in a sequence of machining operations onto what seems like a radial punched card. Does anyone know how many "rows" there are on the drum used to encode each operation? Each segment looks like approx. 10 degree wide so guessing maybe 36 operations ... The ingenuity of combining several machining operations into a given horizontal or vertical pass is so great to see demonstrated ...

watching for a second time, just noticed at beginning, this was a IATSE Union made film

It's a shame some billionaire doesn't hunt down a bunch of these old machines and open a working museum with them. The evolution from Hard programming here and on the Jacquard loom through paper/mylar tape through modern CNC is fascinating.

Can you see if you cn find any footage of Jimi Hendfrix's concert at Central High School in 1968?

Some machine still operate with the many of these principles. Like screw machines

Cool, I wish they showed the contouring cut. I don't see how they could do it except having a form tool doing a step down program and that would have to be a continuous radius. How about a changing radius cut?

9:15 - "This is the skull of Man Au Trol!" Please, someone must make a low-budget horror movie called _The Skull Of Manautrol_ .

Just imagine doing offsets mechanically throughout the day.

Ahhh the slide rule ; went to the moon and back 🤔

Looks like a motch-merrywether to me

maintenance nightmare

Seems to me the world of machinists, die makers, mold makers etc. is being overtaken by computers which means the operators can be paid less, have less skill, less education. The machine does the thinking. It's like that in a lot of things, people working at fast food places at one time had to know when to start a batch of french fries by looking at a temperature gauge so the oil had recovered to the required temperature otherwise you have greasy fries. Now the friers lower the basket into the oil when appropriate, and the baskets rise out of the oil when done, about all you need to do is dump frozen fries into the baskets, even a slightly educated monkey can do that. The history of the highly skilled machinists and tool makers are about gone, probably still some hanging on before they retire. It's too bad this has happened.

That is an absolutely awful name. What were they thinking?

How do,you cut a radius or a contour or an angle