My 40 Year Project: Part 1: History, Acquisition and Theory - The Mill and My Acquisition of It

摘要

In the early 1970s, when I was an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, I developed a fascination with the whole idea of numerically controlled machines. The head of the faculty at that time was doing research in this area and in about 1964 he had acquired a very early version of a NC mill. (By the way, the list price for the basic mill in 1964 was $1,829 USD without NC controls or any accessories.) The mill was made by the South Bend Lathe Co., with a controller built by the Superior Electric Company of Bristol, Connecticut and marketed under the name "Slo-Syn." They, I suspect, did the conversion and sold it to the university. I was inspired by the possibilities of automatic machining and spent many instructive hours working and learning on this machine.