What is a lathe

The lathe is a machine tool for turning rotating workpieces mainly with a lathe tool. Drills, reaming drills, reamers, taps, teeth and knurling tools can also be used on the lathe to perform the corresponding machining.

Ancient lathe is by hand or foot pedal, through the rope to make the workpiece rotation, and holding the tool and cutting. 1797, the British mechanical inventor Mozley created a modern lathe with the screw drive tool holder, and in 1800, the use of the exchange of gears, you can change the feed rate and the pitch of the processed threads. 1817, another Englishman Roberts used a four-stage pulley and back wheel mechanism to change the spindle speed.

Lathes with gearboxes driven by a separate motor appeared in the early 20th century. After World War I, the needs of the munitions, automotive and other machinery industries led to the rapid development of a variety of highly efficient automatic and specialized lathes. In order to increase the productivity of small-lot workpieces, lathes with hydraulic profiling devices were popularized at the end of the 1940s, and at the same time, multi-tool lathes were developed.

Expanded Information:

The main types of lathes:

1. Ordinary lathes

Wide range of processing objects, large adjustable range of the spindle speed and feed, capable of processing the internal and external surfaces of the workpieces, the end surface, and internal and external threads. This kind of lathe is mainly operated manually by workers, low productivity, suitable for single piece, small batch production and repair workshop.

2, turret and rotary lathe

With the turret tool holder or rotary tool holder which can install many tools, it can be used by the workers to complete many kinds of processes by using different tools in one clamping, and it is suitable for batch production.

3, automatic lathe

Automatic completion of small and medium-sized workpieces according to a certain program automatically multi-processing, automatic loading and unloading, repeated processing of a batch of the same workpiece, suitable for mass, mass production.

4, multi-tool semi-automatic lathe

Single-axis, multi-axis, horizontal and vertical. Single-axis horizontal layout is similar to the ordinary lathe, but the two groups of tool holders were installed in the spindle before and after or above and below, for processing disk, ring and shaft workpiece, its productivity than ordinary lathes to increase 3 to 5 times.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Lathe