The Bost Machine Tool Company of Spain makes specialized equipment to service the needs of heavy industry. In this video, you’ll see a crankshaft so large that it gets moved into and out of the machine with a crane get finished ground and polished in a Bost unit. Beginning as a rough forging or casting, this machine uses a multitude of different things like huge grinding wheels, small polishers, and everything in between to take the mongo arm down to a product capable of being lowered into the bottom of a ship of other gigundo internal combustion engine.
As best we can tell from the Bost company website, this machine can handle cranks that weigh up to 77,000lbs, are up to 50ft long, and measure more than 7-feet in diameter. That is jaw dropping stuff. Even more wild is the fact that something even that massive has to be finished to the same degree of precision as a four cylinder or eight cylinder car engine crank. Just because it is huge doesn’t mean clearances or tolerances can be sacrificed. We’re reasonably certain that a crank failure in a ship or some other prime mover would be slightly more than an annoyance. It could result in millions in lost business, cargo, and perhaps even lost lives if it went down in the wrong part of the world.
Stuff like both the huge chunks of metal placed into the crank machine and the operation of the machine itself always leaves us spellbound. It is comical when the machinist puts a cartoonish sized caliper on one of the crank journals to check the measurement. We love stuff like this! Machine porn rules!
Thanks to Scott Brown for the tip!
PRESS PLAY BELOW TO SEE A MASSIVE CRANKSHAFT GET FINISHED IN A BOST CRANK GRINDING MACHINE –
Lots of flying liquid, I guess that counts as porn.
Love this stuff. Would like to see how something this big gets cast as one giant piece and cools to the right size and shape. I am surprised at how much of the work gets done dry. Got to be hard on the tools.
You would think until you see that the size of the cutter is about one story. Even without coolant seeing as there are so many cutting teeth it probably never gets very hot. Besides when you need a crane to change tooling you know you have graduated to the Big Leagues!
The tooling must costs more than the machines I run!
The chips off the contouring operation were as big as SBC main bearings!
How many days does that take! Way cool video.