SMLE bolthead manufacturing process

[jmoore]

yeah they had "castle" turrets on the lathes....each side of 6? or 8? held a one tool job...

That sort of thing is the father of CNC machinery. A general purpose piece of equipment which can be relatively easily retooled for different jobs.

I'm thinking of machinery that is built expressly to do one operation on a specific part, or maybe a few operations at once. But not good for much of anything else except for the one part that it was built to process. When production is done, then the machine is usually scrapped or rendered down for components. The dedicated tooling/machinery could be fairly small and ganged with other tools in a small area. So what would now be normally done on one machine with multiple operations and "flexible tooling" (i.e. quick change), was done at a series of stations, each performing only a single task or two.

Of course, there would be the usual lathes, turret lathes, various sorts of milling machines, drill presses, etc. which weren't special built, but did have assigned tooling for the production line.

Somewhat in between the two types of equipment would be such things as rifling machines. Good for only one task, but capable of being converted to different bores and twists fairly easily and without permanent modification.

Not quite on topic, but during the bulk of L-E production the machinery was usually remotely powered via overhead belting. So less cost there when changing out machines. Way higher maintenance requirements, though!