Discussion on "Practical research in production engineering" at the Manchester Section of the Institution

MR. F. W. SHAW : In dealing with the question of cutting speeds and feeds in relation to output, our speaker seemed, in my opinion, to have concluded that the output depended solely on speed and feed, whereas in practice there are far more important factors. There is, for instance, the machine equipment factor. If you merely increase the speed and feed, you decrease the cutting time and nothing else. But the cutting time is often by far the lesser portion of the total time. So that the labour expended on the illustrated charts intended to enable an operator to select the proper cutting speeds and feeds for different tool angles might possibly have been more profitably devoted to providing means for improving what might be termed " idle " factors.