Big Cincy's as early as WW1 were sporting box ways, while rival K&T, with far better engineering, liked dovetails. My 15 year old MSC CNC knee mill has box ways with turcite on slides - the turcite is failing, but there is no slop that I can discern, and the ball screws scoot them along like there is zero resistance. Big W&S turret lathes always had at least one vee, but smaller stuff like Midland TLs went to box ways. My '47 Monarch 16" CW has two flats and two vees. ATW always swore by four vees and made some exceptionally fine machines. L&S went from all vee to one flat and three vees as early as the mid teens. Americans, the so far all time champs at machine tool building, mostly liked vee ways, or notably a combination of vee and flat. Gents on the east side of the big pond mostly liked flat ways. Not a whole lot of minds were changed on either side, at least not in a period in excess of seventy years. This discussion started over 100 years ago in the Lindsay reprint of "English and American Lathes". It is a process where rotary cutters remove material, which makes it the. One of these automated fabrication methods is CNC milling. Computer numerical control systems offer less need for manpower and higher levels of automation. Lots of turret lathes, multi-spindle screw machines, Myford and Atlas, etc, used flat (box) ways. CNC machining is a highly utilised subtractive manufacturing technology. But that isn't inherent in the type, just in that one design. The ONE problem is if the sides are very thin, as on Atlas. The sides restrain against that.Īll surfaces are really easy to generate, and alinement involves ONE case of being parallel.
Top restrains for all movements but sliding and rotation around a perpendicular axis to the plane. Two (sides) are duplicate for some movements, but the top is simply one plane. Perfect non-duplicated restraint would be a round way and a flat, with one having only point contact, while the other has two-point contact.įlat ways are simply 3 planes.
The carriage if turned around the V is restrained by the flat, but the V also holds it due to its flats. Dovetail are able to marry together the traditional skills of our craftsmen with state-of-the-art CAD drawing and CNC and other wood machining equipment to. The V does have some rotational restraint around its axis that is duplicated by the flat way. BOTH V-ways must touch the carriage at every point.Ī single V and a flat are almost kinematically correct. The DOUBLE v-way is the worst for re-scraping, and has duplicate restraints.which is why its hard to re-scrape.