Machinery Made of Muslin.

Progress, Volume VI, Issue 5, 1 March 1911, Page 579

Machinery Made of Muslin.

TL •:':'; -::1'3 know that for years paper has bfc.n used in the manufacture of carwheels will not be surprised at this heading. Any material of this sort, used for such a purpose, must of course be cemented, layer by layer, into a mass and consolidated by pressure. in a paper read before the National Machine Tool Builders' Association in New York recently, and printed in The h-o; . „'j (New York, November 10), Mr. Jolin Riddell tells of some noteworthy results that have been obtained with muslin gears and pinions which are not only very strong, but almost noiseless. This latter feature is of no small importance. The machine-shops of to-day are much noisier than those of ten or twenty years ago, owing to the fact that

the machines for cutting and planing iron are run from three to six times as fast as formerly.■ ' ■ These gear noises are very unfortunate, but we hope by improved machinery and the use of various" other materials which have recently been introduced, that this trouble will gradually disappear. "We have at the Schenectady works introduced gears and pinions marie of t. high grade of muslin which have been applied to a great variety of uses. We have used one of them on a boiler-maker's punch and shear which previously gave considerable trouble, not only on account of noise, but in the actual breaking of the gears; due to excessive back lash and fly-wheel action on the machine. We had such wonderful success with that particular pinion, which has been running now for some two years, that we gradually extended the use until now we are using them on two 10-foot planingmachines, which are operated by electric motors and compressed-air clutches, as intermediate pinions for the reverse motion. Heretofore we have tried various substitutes, including bronze, which would go to pieces in two or three weeks: steel would

last longer, but made an intolerable noise; rawhide would seem to shrink and burn out quickly, and we very seldom could find anything that would stand the work longer than three or four weeks at the most." Mr. Riddell goes on to describe an exhaustive test made with these cloth pinions in which so severe a shock was applied as to break nearly half the teeth in a gun-iron pinion, while the muslin pinions were uninjured. He concludes: — "I point this out to show the actual strength of pinions made of this material. So we have reason to believe that with time the noises in machine-shops will gradually disappear as they came, without, however, a corresponding reduction in output."