Engineers

Yes 5000 max diameter, 100t workpiece max.
Hobbing head as well as gasher.
New management scrapped it within a couple of years, decided engineering was finished, buy everything from O/S.
This sort of thinking will bite Aus on the bum one day, no apprentices, all the old heads have gone.

Years ago I worked for Macson, the division of McPhersons Ltd that built Macson lathes and other machine tools. The had one of the largest horizontal grinders in the country. The received a Government subsidy to keep it in working order for large Defence jobs.
Another department of said Government gave them an ultimatum: either receive import concessions on lathes they are importing, or get sales tax exemptions on the ones they are making but not both. They chose to close down and continue importing. I never did hear what happened to the grinder.

I have come across some "tradesmen" that made some unbelievable stuffups, such as installing a toilet in the passageway of a house being renovated. (He mistook east for north) but I know an older Latvian builder who can do virtually anything. He must be nearer the age of 70 than he is to 60. I do not know what qualifications (if any) he has. These days he mostly builds houses but told the story that back home he moved a solid stone church 200 metres and turned it through 90 degrees. He dug under the foundations and put in a network of steel beams and jacked the whole building up a metre. He then built a railway underneath and through the turn, to it's new location. He had very little in the way of equipment. It took five trucks and a tractor to tow the church to it's new foundation. The job took 18 months and he did not lose a stone or crack any of the religious paintings on the plaster walls, nor a stained glass window.
There are good and bad in every profession!

Morris there's a couple of answers to where your grinder went.
First one was it was scrapped so no-one could use it to start up in opposition to the original user. This is common practice.
Second it was scrapped and replaced by a "safer" machine.
When OWHS really took hold, it became apparent via the insurance underwriters that engineering shops were dangerous places.
So groups of old fashioned open machines were replaced by single multi use fully enclosed machines.
Vertical lathes, boring machines, millers and a host of other gear could be replaced by a single machine centre.
I installed a 5-axis Carnagi machining centre, fully enclosed where up to 7t work pieces were machined on cassettes. The blokes set up the next job on the cassette clear of the working area. All the tooling and heads were likewise loaded into spare slots in the machine ready to go. When the job was finished, the doors opened, one cassette rolled out and the next one went in.
All tools have a memory chip so the machine knows when to put that tool back and grab a new one.
The tool room crew has a full time job replacing tungstens and resetting each tool, back on a trolley and then into the machine's magazine. The machine also has a magazine of different heads for the various purposes.
We also installed a Carnagi gantry miller. Again it was designed with 15m long travel so the working area was shielded from the next job setup area. Still a very dangerous place as the bed is slippery as a butchers cock.
Everything is covered in cutting fluid, swathe and chips.
So you can see the idea is to keep the workers well clear of the danger areas as there's pretty impressive hp involved with the cutters.
When working at capacity, it's a full time job keeping the scrap bins empty, especially on the gasher. It cut on the up and the down stroke so you can imagine the amount of metal removed on a 600mm face width gear.
Continuing from Lang's comment re-design draftsmen, most readers wouldn't realise the old method of tolerancing an item on a drawing doesn't work with CNC machines. The machines don't know what + or - means.
So all items are dimensioned exact and the draftsman has to know the machine's working tolerances, then apply that thinking to his item's dimensions.
You can see how the move to CAD paperless drawings involved a lot more than just re-drawing on a computer. The draftsman has to have intimate knowledge of every machine. Only way to gain this is feedback from the blokes driving the machines.
Easier to buy from O/S in a lot of situations and employ an in house quality control team, but who trained the team?

Rockwiz just had a look at this and it would seem to confirm the Architects have been around a long time.

University of Chicago (N.Pevsner)

From a long paper on the subject studying the Greek and Roman systems.

Many passages in Cicero, Pliny and others plus many inscriptions (for the first time collected by Carlo Promis in 1873) prove that "Architectus" was by that time not infrequently used and as a rule signified "planning architect" just as it had done in Greece eg with Plato.

Polit - "The architect is not himself a workman, but the ruler of workmen."

In an age when almost nobody except scholars and clerics could read (it was about 1300 before the first English king - Edward 1st - could read) it is unreasonable to suggest a standard stone mason had the very advanced education necessary to design any sort of major stressed structure.

Of course they could have built lesser works such as smaller buildings, barns, walls, small bridges and many decorative structures just as a chippy or builder can do today from their own knowledge without reference to an outside designer. There is no downside to being a trade mason, his skills are there for the world to see but as previously mentioned the people who designed the big works were no tradesmen but well educated blokes.

The word mason came in to much wider use in the middle ages and meant more than just a stone artisan. Just as "soldier" means anyone in the army nobody would suggest a Private Rifleman or even a sergeant major has the skills and education of a General to command a Division. Likewise Master Mason, Mason-Builder, Mason-Architect described the educated planners not necessarily the artisans who were also called Masons. They have always been there whether called Architects, Engineers or Master Masons and I think it would be almost impossible to find anyone in history who had risen through the ranks from apprentice stone mason to the medieval " Master Mason" capable of designing castles, cathedrals and large bridges'

Of course in modern times this is entirely possible with universal education.

With the influence of the French language on English in the centuries after 1066 the Latin based words moved west. Many European castle-designers were using the word architect from the Romans and the naming distinction became more and more common in England until today we have the designers called exclusively Architects (or Engineers) and the expression Master Mason reserved for the most skilled artisans and tradesmen.

Lang

Why then
do the call a train driver an engineer








cya

Probably because the train is called an "engine" From the Roman describing anything of a mechanical nature.

eer
WORD ORIGIN
a noun-forming suffix occurring originally in loanwords from French (buccaneer; mutineer; pioneer) and productive in the formation of English nouns denoting persons who produce, handle, or are otherwise significantly associated with the referent of the base word (auctioneer; engineer; mountaineer; pamphleteer); now frequently pejorative (profiteer; racketeer).Compare -ary, -er2, -ier2.

Just like Master Masons and Masons there are also Railway Engineers, the people who design and build railways. The Train Engineer can operate his machine on the railway but has no idea how to build it. The Railway Engineer can design and build the railway but has no idea how to drive a train.

Lang