Fig. 681.
[Fig. 681] represents the J. Morton Poole calender roll grinding lathe, which has attained pre-eminence both in Europe and the United States from the great accuracy and fine finish of the work it produces.
In all other machine tools, surfaces are made true either by guiding the tool to the work or the work to the tool, and, in either case, guide-ways and slides are employed to determine the line of motion of the tool or the work, as the case may be. These guideways and slides are usually carried by a framing really independent of the work, so that the cutting depends entirely upon the truth or straightness of the guideways, and is not determined by the truth, straightness, or parallelism of the work itself. As a result, the surface produced depends for its truth upon the truth of the tool-guiding ways. In the Poole lathe, however, while guideways are necessarily employed to guide the emery wheels in as straight a line as is possible, by means of such guides, the roll itself is employed as a corrective agent to eliminate whatever errors may exist in the guide. The rolls come to this machine turned (in the lathe [Fig. 730]), and with their journals ground true (on dead centres).
Fig. 682.
[Fig. 681] represents a perspective view of the machine, as a whole. It consists of a driving head, answering to the headstock of an ordinary lathe. b b are bearings in which the rolls are revolved to be ground. c is a carriage answering to the carriage of an ordinary lathe, but seated in sunken V-guideways, corresponding to those on an ordinary iron planing machine. Referring to [Fig. 682], f is a swing-frame suspended by four links at g, h, i, j, which are upon shafts having at their ends knife edges resting in small V-grooves on the surface of standards s, which are fixed to carriage c. The frame f being thus suspended and being in no way fixed to c, it may be swung back and forth crosswise of the latter, the links at g, h, i, j, swinging as pendulums. At the top of f are two slide rests a a, one on each end, carrying emery or corundum wheels w, and the roll r, which rests in the bearings b, rotates between these emery wheels. The carriage c is fed along the bed as an ordinary lathe carriage, and the emery wheels are revolved from an overhead countershaft. Now, it will be found that from this form of construction the surface of the roll, when ground true, serves as a guide to determine the line of motion of the emery wheels, and that the emery wheels may be compared to a pair of grinding calipers that will operate on such part of the roll length as may be of larger diameter than the distance apart of the perimeters of the emery wheels, and escape such parts in the roll length as may be of less diameter than the width apart of those perimeters; hence parallelism in the roll is inevitable, because it is governed solely by the width apart of the wheel perimeters, which remain the same, while the wheels traverse the roll, except in so far as it may be affected by wear of emery-wheel diameters in one traverse along the roll.
