In the shop

From a recent post on the BBC: 

Right: A factory worker is taught how to handle a horizontal drilling machine in order to produce breech block components, 1943.   From the Imperial War Museum archive.

Comment: it is pointed out in the comments to this posting that this is a milling machine, specifically a vertical milling machine. Another:  The bed isn’t big enough to be a mill, nor is the head. Another comment:  The cutter and the swarf gives that game up.  Note: no safety goggles and the fag in the instructor mouth. A rather dangerous choice when using lubricating fluids on your work.  One  such was Zurnoil often used in the U.S.

The use of the word “Swarf” is correct.  However, throughout the telling of most of my stories of working for my Uncle Jim, I called these metal fragments “spallings”, and probably learned that from him, but that is not correct.  Swarf refers to the material that’s been removed during machining—resulting in chips, filings, or shavings from the metal piece. Spalling refers to a process or type of damage, where material flakes, chips, or breaks off a surface (often due to stress, corrosion, or fatigue), especially in concrete, stone, or metal, although the material which has broken off might be called a “spalling”.  But swarf refers to the byproduct of the machining process – whether milling, drilling, boring or on a lathe.  

When I was a kid in high school it was expected that I “earn my keep” by obtaining some sort of menial job in the summers.  One that was offered to me was from my Uncle Jim, who was a dealer in used industrial machinery.  His business was initially called “Fitzpatrick and Walsh” – he being the Walsh - and later “Colonial Machinery”.  During the latter period, he had an office/warehouse on Mermaid Lane in Glenside, which is a near suburb of Philadelphia, not too far from my own house.  Since by this time I could drive, I could borrow the family car and proceed to the “shop”.

My uncle would buy used industrial machinery such as gigantic presses, saws, bending machines, lathes, milling machines, boring devices and the infamous “automatic screw machines” then clean-them-up and then resell them.  The “clean-them-up” was my job.  These devices were typically the left-overs from the Second World War or the Korean War, the latter only having ended 10 years previously.  The industrial economy no longer needed large quantities of automatic rifles and other accoutrements of war, so the owners were anxious to get sell off these machines.  

The fact of the matter remains that the machines that I was supposed to clean-up were often littered with this swarf, often in a sticky-oily goo of machining fluid residuum. These chips, turnings of filings which were the swarf were typically made of steel or iron and were very sharp along their edges.  It often resulted in small nicks or abrasions to one’s hands and in addition, the machining fluids were difficult to remove from your hands as well, often requiring a lighter solvent, no doubt to be noted as hepatotoxic by OSHA in modern days.  A final hand-wash with Lava soap, containing pumice, was needed but irritating to one’s already damaged fingers.  Another fact of the matter was that the warehouse was not airconditioned, so in July and August one yearned for the return of the school year in September.