Lathes are machine tools designed primarily to do turning, facing and boring, Very little turning is done on other types of machine tools, and none can do it with equal facility. Because lathes also can do drilling and reaming, their versatility permits several operations to be done with a single setup of the work piece. Consequently, more lathes of various types are used in manufacturing than any other machine tool.

The essential components of a lathe are the bed, headstock assembly, tailstock assembly, and the leads crew and feed rod.The bed is the backbone of a lathe. It usually is made of well normalized or aged gray or nodular cast iron and provides s heavy, rigid frame on which all the other basic components are mounted. Two sets of parallel, longitudinal ways, inner and outer, are contained on the bed, usually on the upper side. Some makers use an inverted V-shape for all four ways, whereas others utilize one invertedV and one flat way in one or both sets, They are precision-machined to assure accuracy of alignment.On most modern lathes the way are surface-hardened to resist wear and abrasion, but precaution should be taken in operating a lathe to assure that the ways are not damaged. Any inaccuracy in them usually means that the accuracy of the entire lathe is destroyed.

The headstock is mounted in a foxed position on the inner ways, usually at the left end of the bed. It provides a powered means of rotating the word at various speeds. Essentially, it consists of a hollow spindle, mounted in accurate bearings, and a set of transmission gears-similar to a truck transmission—through which the spindle can be rotated at a number of speeds. Most lathes provide from 8 to 12 speeds, usually in a geometric ratio, and on modern lathes all the speeds can be obtained merely by moving from 2 to 4 levers. An increasing trend is to provide a continuously variable speed range through electrical or mechanical drives.

Because the accuracy of a lathe is greatly dependent on the spindle, it is of heavy construction and mounted in heavy bearings, usually preloaded tapered roller or ball types. The spindle has a hole extending through its length, through which long bar stock can be fed. The size of maximum size of bar stock that can be machined when the material must be fed through spindle.

 The tailsticd assembly consists, essentially, of three parts. A lower casting fits on the inner ways of the bed and can slide longitudinally thereon, with a means for clamping the entire assembly in any desired location, An upper casting fits on the lower one and can be moved transversely upon it, on some type of keyed ways, to permit aligning the 28 assembly is the tailstock quill. This is a hollow steel cylinder, usually about 51 to 76 mm( 2 to 3 inches) in diameter, that can be moved several inches longitudinally in and out of the upper casting by means of a hand wheel and screw.

The size of a lathe is designated by two dimensions. The first is known as the swing. This is the maximum diameter of work that can be rotated on a lathe. It is approximately twice the distance between the line connecting the lathe centers and the nearest point on the ways, The second size dimension is the maximum distance between centers. The swing thus indicates the maximum work piece diameter that can be turned in the lathe, while the distance between centers indicates the maximum length of work piece that can be mounted between centers.

Engine lathes are the type most frequently used in manufacturing. They are heavy-duty machine tools with all the components described previously and have power drive for all tool movements except on the compound rest. They commonly range in size from 305 to 610 mm(12 to 24 inches)swing and from 610 to 1219 mm(24 to 48 inches) center distances, but swings up to 1270 mm(50 inches) and center distances up to 3658mm(12 feet) are not uncommon. Most have chip pans and a built-in coolant circulating system. Smaller engine lathes-with swings usually not over 330 mm (13 inches ) –also are available in bench type, designed for the bed to be mounted on a bench on a bench or cabinet.

Although engine lathes are versatile and very useful, because of the time required for changing and setting tools and for making measurements on the work piece, thy are not suitable for quantity production. Often the actual chip-production tine is less than 30% of the total cycle time. In addition, a skilled machinist is required for all the operations, and such persons are costly and often in short supply. However, much of the operator's time is consumed by simple, repetitious adjustments and in watching chips being made. Consequently, to reduce or eliminate the amount of skilled labor that is required, turret lathes,screw machines, and other types of semiautomatic and automatic lathes have been highly developed and are widely used in manufacturing.

One of the most fundamental concepts in the area of advanced manufacturing technologies is numerical control (NC). Prior to the advent of NC, all machine tools ere manually operated and controlled. Among the many limitations associated with manual control machine tools, perhaps none is more prominent than the limitation of operator skills. With manual control, the quality of the product is directly related to and limited to the skills of the operator. Numerical control represents the first major step away from human control of machine tools.

Numerical control means the control of machine tools and other manufacturing systems through the use of prerecorded, written symbolic instructions. Rather than operating a machine tool, an NC technician writes a program that issues operational instructions to the machine tool. For a machine tool to be numerically controlled, it must be interfaced with a device for accepting and decoding the programmed instructions, known as a reader.

Numerical control was developed to overcome the limitation of human operators, and it has done so. Numerical control machines are more accurate than manually operated machines, they can produce parts more uniformly, they are faster, and the long-run tooling costs are lower. The development of NC led to the development of several other innovations in manufacturing technology: Electrical discharge machining,Laser cutting, Electron beam welding.

Numerical control has also made machine tools more versatile than their manually operated predecessors. An NC machine tool can automatically produce a wide of parts, each involving an assortment of widely varied and complex machining processes. Numerical control has allowed manufacturers to undertake the production of products that would not have been feasible from an economic perspective using manually controlled machine tolls and processes.

Like so many advanced technologies, NC was born in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The concept of NC was developed in the early 1950s with funding provided by the U.S. Air Force. In its earliest stages, NC machines were able to made straight cuts efficiently and effectively.

However, curved paths were a problem because the machine tool had to be programmed to undertake a series of horizontal and vertical steps to produce a curve. The shorter the straight lines making up the steps, the smoother is the curve, Each line segment in the steps had to be calculated.

This problem led to the development in 1959 of the Automatically Programmed Tools (APT) language. This is a special programming language for NC that uses statements similar to English language to define the part geometry, describe the cutting tool configuration, and specify the necessary motions.

The development of the APT language was a major step forward in the fur ther development from those used today. The machines had hardwired logic circuits. The instructional programs were written on punched paper, which was later to be replaced by magnetic plastic tape. A tape reader was used to interpret the instructions written on the tape for the machine. Together, all of this represented a giant step forward in the control of machine tools. However, there were a number of problems with NC at this point in its development.

A major problem was the fragility of the punched paper tape medium.It was common for the paper tape containing the programmed instructions to break or tear during a machining process. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that each successive time a part was produced on a machine tool, the paper tape carrying the programmed instructions had to be rerun through the reader. If it was necessary to produce 100 copies of a given part, it was also necessary to run the paper tape through the reader 100 separate tines. Fragile paper tapes simply could not withstand the rigors of a shop floor environment and this kind of repeated use.

This led to the development of a special magnetic plastic tape. Whereas the paper carried the programmed instructions as a series of holes punched in the tape, the plastic tape carried the instructions as a series of magnetic dots. The plastic tape was much stronger than the paper tape, which solved the problem of frequent tearing and breakage. However, it still left two other problems.

The most important of these was that it was difficult or impossible to change the instructions entered on the tape. To made even the most minor adjustments in a program of instructions, it was necessary to interrupt machining operations and make a new tape. It was also still necessary to run the tape through the reader as many times as there were parts to be produced.Fortunately, computer technology became a reality and soon solved the problems of NC associated with punched paper and plastic tape.

The development of a concept known as direct numerical control (DNC) solved the paper and plastic tape problems associated with numerical control by simply eliminating tape as the medium for carrying the programmed instructions. In direct numerical control, machine tools are tied, via a data transmission link, to a host computer. Programs for operating the machine tools are stored in the host computer and fed to the machine tool an needed via the data transmission linkage. Direct numerical control represented a major step forward over punched tape and plastic tape. However, it is subject to the same limitations as all technologies that depend on a host computer. When the host computer goes down, the machine tools also experience downtime. This problem led to the development of computer numerical control.