The fitting or finishing department of engineering establishments is generally regarded as the main one.

Fitting processes, being the final ones in constructing machinery, are more nearly in connection with its use and application; they consist in the organisation or bringing together the results of other processes carried on in the draughting room, pattern shop, foundry, and smith shop.

To the unskilled, or to those who do not take a comprehensive view of an engineering business as a whole, the finishing and fitting department seems to constitute the whole of machine manufacture—an impression which a learner should guard against, because nothing but a true understanding of the importance and relations of the different divisions of an establishment can enable them to be thoroughly or easily learned.

Finishing, therefore, it must be borne in mind, is but one among several processes, and that the fitting department is but one out of four or more among which attention is to be divided.

Finishing as a process is a secondary and not always an essential one; many parts of machinery are ready for use when forged or cast and do not require fitting; yet a finishing shop must in many respects be considered the leading department of an engineering establishment. Plans, drawings and estimates are always based on finished work, and when the parts have accurate dimensions; hence designs, drawings and estimates may be said to pass through the fitting shop and follow back to the foundry and smith shop, so that finishing, although the last process in the order of the work, is the first one after the drawings in every other sense; even the dimensions in pattern-making which seems farthest removed from finishing, are based upon fitting dimensions, and to a great extent must be modified [119]by the conditions of finishing.

In casting and forging operations the material is treated while in a heated and expanded condition; the nature of these operations is such that accurate dimensions cannot be attained, so that both forgings and castings require to be made enough larger than their finished dimensions to allow for shrinkage and irregularities. Finishing as a process consists in cutting away this surplus material, and giving accurate dimensions to the parts of machinery when the material is at its natural temperature. Finishing operations being performed as said upon material at its normal temperature permits handling, gauging and fitting together of the parts of machinery, and as nearly all other processes involve heating, finishing may be called the cold processes of metal work. The operations of a fitting shop consist almost entirely of cutting, and grinding or abrading; a proposition that may seem novel, yet these operations comprehend nearly all that is performed in what is called fitting.

Cutting processes may be divided into two classes: cylindrical cutting, as in turning, boring, and drilling, to produce circular forms; and plane cutting, as in planing, shaping, slotting and shearing, to produce plane or rectangular forms. Abrading or grinding processes may be applied to forms of any kind.

To classify further—cutting machines may be divided into those wherein the tools move and the material is fixed, and those wherein the material is moved and the tools fixed, and machines which involve a compound movement of both the tools and the material acted upon.

There is also a distinction between machine and hand cutting that may be noted. In machine cutting it is performed in true geometrical lines, th............