Machine tool builder: Difference between revisions

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A '''machine tool builder''' in the broadest [[word sense|sense]] is a [[corporation]] or person that builds [[machine tool]]s. In the most common (and economically significant) sense of the term, a machine tool builder is a corporation whose business is building machine tools for sale to [[manufacturing|manufacturers]], who use them to manufacture products. The machine tools often make [[interchangeable parts]], which are assembled into subassemblies or finished assemblies, ending up sold to [[consumer]]s, either directly or [[business-to-business|through other businesses]] at intermediate links of a [[value added|value-adding chain]]. Alternatively, the machine tools may help make [[molding (process)|molds]] or [[die (manufacturing)|dies]], which then make the parts for the assemblies.

Since many decades ago, the concept ofterm "machine tool builder" implies a company that builds machine tools for sale to other companies, who then use them to manufacture subsequent products. Macroeconomically, machine tools are only means to ends (with the ends being the manufactured products); they are not the ends themselves. Thus it is in the nature of machine tools that there is a spectrum of relationships between their builders, their users, and the end users of the products that they make. There is always natural potential for the machine tool users to be the same people as the builders, or to be different people who occupy a "middle man" position. Markets often have some proclivity for circumventing such a position, although the proclivity is often not absolute. Every variant on the spectrum of relationships has found some instances of empirical embodiment; and over the centuries, trends can be seen for which variants predominated in each era.

Machine tool building is a specialty within the [[tool and die maker|tool and die making]] field, in a way analogous to [[specialty (medicine)|specialties within medicine or surgery]]. The machine tool industry began gradually in the early nineteenth century with individual toolmakers, such as [[Henry Maudslay]], [[Joseph Whitworth]], [[Elisha K. Root]], Frederick W. Howe, [[Amos Whitney]], [[Francis A. Pratt]], and countless others less famous or now unknown, who innovated in machine tool design and building. It then grew into the earliest corporate builders such as [[Brown & Sharpe]], the [[Warner & Swasey Company]], and the [[Pratt & Whitney Measurement Systems|original Pratt & Whitney company]]. In all of these cases, there were product manufacturers who started building machine tools to suit their own inhouse needs, and eventually found that machine tools had become product lines in their own right. (In cases such as B&S and P&W, they became the main or sole product lines.) [[Colt's Manufacturing Company|Colt]] and [[Ford Motor Company|Ford]] are good examples of product manufacturers that made significant advances in machine tool building while serving their own inhouse needs, but never became "machine tool builders" in the sense of having machine tools become the products that they sold. National-Acme was an example of a manufacturer and a machine tool builder merging into one company and selling both the machines and the products that they made ([[automatic lathe|screw machines]] and fasteners).<ref name="Rose1990pp564-565">{{Harvnb|Rose|1990}}, [http://books.google.com/books?id=IT1NVT1vEwUC&lpg=PA564&ots=ZjyLeSiwXo&dq=Reinhold%20Hakewessel&pg=PA564#v=onepage&q&f=false pp. 564–565].</ref><ref name="Ro|lt1965pp169-170">{{Harvnb|Rolt|1965|pp=169-170169–170}}.</ref> [[Hyundai]] and [[Mitsubishi]] are [[chaebol]] and [[keiretsu]] conglomerates (respectively), and their interests cover from ore mine to end user (in actuality if not always nominally).

Today, machine tool builders tend not to be in the business of using the machine tools to manufacture the subsequent products (although exceptions, including chaebol and keiretsu, do exist); and product manufacturers tend not to be in the business of building machine tools. In fact, many machine tool builders are not even in the business of building the control system (typically [[numerical control|CNC]]) that animates the machine; and makers of controls tend not to be in the machine building business (or to inhabit only specialized niches within it). For example, [[FANUC]] and [[Siemens]] make controls that are sold to many machine tool builders. Each segment tends to find that crossing into other segments involves becoming a conglomerate of dissimilar businesses, which is an execution headache that they don't need as long as focusing on a narrower field is often more profitable in net effect anyway. This trend can be compared to the trend in which companies choose not to compete against their own distributors. Thus a software company may have an online store, but that store does not undercut the distributors' stores on price.

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* {{Holland1989}} ''A history most specifically of Burgmaster, which specialized in turret drills; but in telling Burgmaster's story, and that of its acquirer Houdaille, Holland provides a history of the machine tool industry in general between World War II and the 1980s that ranks with Noble's coverage of the same era (Noble 1984) as a seminal history. Later republished under the title ''From Industry to Alchemy: Burgmaster, a Machine Tool Company''. ''

* {{Rolt1965}}

* {{Citation | last = Rose | first = William | year = 1990 | title = Cleveland: the making of a city | publisher = Kent State University Press | isbn = 978-0-87338-428-5 | url=http://books.google.com/books?id=IT1NVT1vEwUC&lpg=PA564&ots=ZjyLeSiwXo&dq=Reinhold%20Hakewessel&pg=PA564#v=onepage&q&f=false }}

===Further reading===