High-quality black-and-white photographs of large old machines and tools

[Toolmaker51]

A Cincinnati mill, with a Bridgeport high speed spindle [M head] with a shop-made mount. One hydraulic stylus for blade profile, another for blade foil, operating the indexer. It's tied to gear motor by another a shop-made bracket. The "Y" axis, mounts with the now ubiquitous shop-made bracket.
Unclear if the indexer is manually advanced for each blade, because the dividing plate and sector seem engaged. A tapered [maybe 2 or 3 degree] helical ball-end cutter is milling [or some] contours.
Wish the labels on the boxes were legible. Quite some time before CNC, hydraulic tracers did accurate work. Achieving precision like turbine vanes, patterns sized 10:1, reduction is mechanical. Part of the trick in reducing step over mark is juggling stylus and endmill tip radius, and pattern surface.

I've liked many of these B&W photos, I must print this one!

And best thing of all?
I bet this is the same tool room pictured a few weeks back, with the Rotary Head Mill in the lower left. Another bet, a guy there built shop-made brackets!

[tonyfoale]

..... Quite some time before CNC, hydraulic tracers did accurate work.....

In the early 1970s I started a business making cast motorcycle wheels. I got a bank loan to buy an hydraulic tracer for copying the rim profiles. An incredible device which sure beat the manual machining and form tools that I had used until I saw the light. I had different templates for different width rims. The tracer could follow the templates to half a thou. One of the best business investments that I ever made.
I have no pix of the tracer but here is one of the wheels showing the rim profile.