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 |   Tales from real life |
| Well, if they're not true, they oughta be! |
When I was with Summit Engineering, way back in 1980, I worked on a project to retrofit an H. W. Ward turret lathe with a Bandit CNC. Ward was a venerable British machine tool company founded in 1889, and Summit was an American startup barely ten years old. The Bandit was one of the first machine tool controllers to incorporate a microprocessor, and H. W. Ward wanted to make their entry into the 20th century. For reasons that were never clear to me, the Ward lathe project began in rented space at an industrial park in suburban Chicago. It seemed that the decision to embrace computers and automation wasn’t popular with everyone at the company. The man in charge of the project told me at different times that it was being kept secret from competitors or that it had to be protected from the old-school naysayers who wanted to see it fail. Either way, I wound up spending two weeks at that industrial park helping the Ward technicians adapt our control to their machine. There were two things that bothered me in Chicago, the bitter February cold and converting between metric and english units. Great Britain converted most of their measurement systems to metric units in the 1970’s. When I traveled to England in the 1980's, I found currency based on 100 new pence per pound and petrol sold by liters instead of gas sold by gallons. Britain also changed their standard for nuts and bolts from British Standard Whitworth (BSW) to Metric SI units. BSW fasteners are defined in fractions of an inch and metric fasteners use millimeters. The thread shape and pitch of the two systems are not compatible, and neither are the wrenches used to work with them. A third standard for nuts and bolts is used in the U.S. The UNC standard defines coarse threads and UNF is for fine threads. The UNC/UNF standards are based on BSW but differ enough that those two systems are also incompatible. Today, BSW is rarely used but it’s still common to distinguish fasteners as being either english or metric. Even though it’s the U. S. that uses english units and the English actually use metric now. Confused? Well then, you’re up to speed on what we faced with that lathe. The lathe project began with an existing H. W. Ward machine that was designed in feet and inches with BSW fasteners. The big cast iron parts for the machine slides and the headstock were shown on drawings with english units. Newer bits, such as ball screws and motor mounts, were designed with metric dimensions and metric fasteners. And the newest parts that were sourced in the U.S., like our Bandit CNC, used english units and UNC/UNF fasteners. That created a comical situation with 3 sets of drawings, 3 toolboxes full of wrenches and 3 shelving units with bins of incompatible nuts and bolts. There was constant swearing as the technicians tried to remember which parts used which units and needed which wrenches. Stripping a thread by jamming a fastener into the wrong type of threaded hole wasn’t unusual. And it was often necessary to search for missing wrenches that had migrated to the wrong toolbox. Despite the compatibility challenges, we got the machine up and running. The H. W. Ward people boxed up all those different parts and shipped them back to their factory in Droitwich. I went home for a couple of weeks, but I wasn't finished. The next phase of the project was to prep the lathe for the big Birmingham machine tool show in April. So, I went to England in March and continued to play my supporting role. It was my first transatlantic trip, and I found it difficult to adjust to the time zone change. I arrived at The Raven Hotel on a Saturday, crashed too early, and found myself wide-awake at 4 am. I had to wait a couple of hours for the hotel restaurant to open. After breakfast, I wandered around Droitwich for a few hours and then crashed again. So, it turned out that the hotel bar was my only option to get something to eat at 9 pm on a Sunday. The menu was limited, but there was a beef stew sort of thing that sounded okay, so ordering food was easy. But what to drink? Just about the only place in Britain that successfully resisted metrification was the pub. Their traditional beer glasses were sized for the classic British pint, and they still are today. I'd seen this scene on TV, so when the bartender asked what I’d have to drink, I knew just what to say. “A pint of beer, please.” “Bitter or stout?” Hmm, bitter doesn’t sound very tasty, I thought, but what the hell is stout? I had no idea what the guy was talking about. Neither of those choices sounded like beer to me, but I didn’t want to admit my ignorance. “I’ll have the stout,” I declared as though I knew what I was doing. I don’t remember the brewery name, but their stout was like mud compared to the American lagers I was used to. I tried not to make a face as I slowly chewed my way through that glass of syrup. One pint of English stout has more alcohol than two American beers and one was enough for me. From then on, I ordered bitter beer and liked it. But what about the turret lathe? We got it prettied up for the show and it generated a bit of interest, but the naysayers prevailed in the end. I have to admit that it was more 'proof of concept' than finished product. At any rate, it never went into production, we never sold them any more controls, and a few years later the H. W. Ward company passed into history. |
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