William Doxford & Sons (Engineers) Ltd.

The places I've worked in the past have had what I'd call some big machines, but, nothing even close to comparing to this sort of stuff. I've always been fascinated with this sort of stuff, especially considering the era. This was state of the art technology in its time.

The sheer size of things though is what really impresses me. I could stick my machine shop area into the radial drill press they had! (might be exaggerating slightly, but not a whole lot). That is one serious plazma cutter there too. Some of their chips look big enough to make small parts from :D Could you call them forged now?

For most of us, what we visualize as big equipment usually is small potatoes compared to really big stuff. I've done work for fab shops that had some pretty good size fab tools, but when you compare their presses to the biggest presses our there, its like comparing a kneemill to some of the things shown here. The biggest press I know of in the US is one up in CT iirc. Tonnage is similar to dropping the Ronald Reagan a few stories on to the part. It's big. And it's small compared to others in the world now. Mostly it makes magnesium belly pans for 747s, one shot, wham, next... Oh, and frames for big screen TV's too. Talking stadium sized tvs now. I'd never have guessed they were "big" projects for a press that size.

Thanks for sharing that.
 
That is really neat to see... hard to believe the scope of it all...
 
Mind boggling indeed

On the other end, there are achievements in "tiny" that challenge the imagenation as well.
 
Some of it looks like the stuff Jackie Schmidt uses.
But then again he works on ships and boats too.
Do a search I remember somewhere seeing some pics posted of some of the machines in his shop.
 
All of what you see and much more was broken up and sold as scrap to the chinese and indians back in the '80's when Doxfords went the way of all British ship building ............down the pan!

Where those machine shops once stood is now a retail park with a supamarket in the middle. Where once highly skill machine operators considered themselve extreme fortunate to get a job stacking shelves and pushing the weekly shopping of the east european immigrants who poured into the country to live on government benifits and social security handouts, thru the tills.
 
4Mesh. No plasma cutters there, those are Oxy-Acetylene cutting torches following patterns.

The largest machine tool I am aware of was a WWII surplus torpedo tube lathe that a local company had converted to the making of fiberglass pipe. It's 44 feet between centers, with a 12 foot swing over the carriage - and the operator rides the carriage (cross slide).
 
Hambone said:
All of what you see and much more was broken up and sold as scrap to the chinese and indians back in the '80's when Doxfords went the way of all British ship building ............down the pan!

Where those machine shops once stood is now a retail park with a supamarket in the middle. Where once highly skill machine operators considered themselve extreme fortunate to get a job stacking shelves and pushing the weekly shopping of the east european immigrants who poured into the country to live on government benifits and social security handouts, thru the tills.
Click to expand...

Wow Hambone. That is really bad news. Brings a tear to the eye.
I worked in the San Diego Shipyards. They don't even compare. Mostly repair yards.
Performed Field Service work at Newport News Shipbuilding. Wow. What a place....
 
What tip size

I wonder what size oxyacetylene tip was used to cut the thick steel in the flame cutting image.

The image testpit.jpeg has a nice barrel blank in it for my 1000 yard BR rifle.

Andy.
 
zippy06 said:
Wow Hambone. That is really bad news. Brings a tear to the eye.
I worked in the San Diego Shipyards. They don't even compare. Mostly repair yards.
Performed Field Service work at Newport News Shipbuilding. Wow. What a place....
Click to expand...

It brings more than a tear to the eye to many a Brit. 250 years of industrial heritage and skill sold off wholesale to the yen and the rupee.

What was it Napolian said about a nation of shopkeepers...................................
 
Google strikes again.
The phrase "a nation of Shopkeepers" ("une nation de boutiquiers") is a disparaging remark supposedly used by Napoleon to describe the United Kingdom as unfit for war against France.
"L'Angleterre est une nation de boutiquiers."
—Napoleon I
This phrase can be translated from French to English as:
"England is a nation of shopkeepers."
—Napoleon I
The phrase, however, did not originate with Napoleon. It first appears in The Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith, who wrote:
"To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers."
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
 
I once owned a catalog of the 1923 British machine tool exposition, but unfortunately it was lost in the rising damp here earlier in the year.

I recall a couple of pieces of equipment I wondered at. One was a big mother of a shaft tuning lathe, where the operator was seated on the saddle. Unlike the shots of the web page guy standing, he had a chipbreaker cage built in front of him. The other was a machine that took the drive wheels of one of the big steam locos & recut both wheel flanges simultaneously.
 
I have a friend who works on the railroad running a machine that re-sets tracks. It's very cool to watch, and it was here just today, as well as Friday, working just 40 yards out the front door. I heard it come by, and when I heard it I went to take a look. This thing rides the rails of course, and it's real heavy! It has a boom that goes out the front to a cart that rides about 60 or so feet ahead of the machine. The cart has sensors in it and logs data back to the machine. As the cart is re-oriented, data is collected about what attitude the track has at the cart. Then, when the machine gets there, it can be fixed.

This machine can lift the tracks, put new ties underneath, pull the tracks in, push them out, move them sideways, up, down, twist, it can tilt them for banking, re-grind, and checks for cracks in the rail, all at I'm gonna say 20 ties a minute. This is pulling the spikes and replacing if need be too. He can do 1.5 miles of track a day. It is mind blowing how fast this thing goes. It has these arms that are vibrating, and they jam down into the stone and lift the ties, even putting new stone under if need be.

While talking to him some time ago, he mentioned that he was doing a job for a movie that was filming here in northern PA. Maybe a Denzel Washington flick? In any case, they had a high speed train scene that the track would not support, so he had to go in, fix a RR Crossing, and bank the tracks just for the movie. Then, when they were done shooting, go back and put the track back the way it was.

The machine belongs on modern marvels, cause its just hard to imagine that much power and precision at the same time.

Also brings me back to the railroad weed whacker I saw here once. They have this weedeater that rides on a train car, had a big arm with a trimmer end on it. It'll eat up 6" caliper trees like they're not there. :D That thing throws wood chunks 150'!
 
Look at the age of these men. I wonder how long it takes to get up to there skill level? I wonder how long it would take to tour that place? Love these type of photo's.
 
4mesh
I guess at 150' it would be safe to say that there were no exposed human operators?
 
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