Used Heald Machine Co Machines We Buy

Who Made Heald Machines

Heald machines were built by the Heald Machine Co. of Worcester, Massachusetts. The American Precision Museum's Manufacturing Ledger, which lists James N. Heald (1846-1931) in its Machine Tool Hall of Fame, says his family ran a blacksmith shop, foundry and machine shop for 60 years in Heald Village near Barre. In 1903 he bought the firm from his father and moved it to Worcester.

By then, the ledger notes, he had already developed a lathe attachment for both internal and external grinding and a drill point grinder, the start of the grinding work the Heald name is known for.

Heald's Planetary and Internal Grinders

Engine cylinders were Heald's breakthrough. Boring, reaming and lapping were the usual ways to finish them, and grinding was ruled out because an engine block could not easily be rotated around the cylinder centerline. In 1905 Heald devised a grinding machine with planetary action, and the Manufacturing Ledger says it quickly became the standard production method for both auto and aircraft engines.

Heald later added automatic size control and developed hydraulic table feed and centerless internal grinders. Those features still separate one used Heald from another.

Heald and Cincinnati Milling

Reference for Business's history of Milacron records that in 1932 the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company agreed with Heald to share engineering, research and patents. Both built grinding machines, but for different applications, so the lines complemented each other. A little over 20 years later Cincinnati bought Heald outright.

Cincinnati Milling took the name Cincinnati Milacron in 1970, and in 1998 it divested its machine tool business and became Milacron, Inc. No company today tells Heald's story on its own site, so this page relies on the museum's ledger, that company history and the lathes.co.uk archive.

What Decides the Offer on a Used Heald

Heald built more than grinders. The lathes.co.uk machine-tool archive describes a range of high-class boring machines, internal grinders, rotary surface grinders, boring and wheel heads and cutting tools, and it mentions the Company's Bore-Matic machines, which Heald even made a dedicated tool sharpener for.

Which of those you own decides who will want it next, so we start with the machine type and the model on the plate. From there the offer turns on whether the size control or gauging is fitted and working, the state of the hydraulics and the grinding spindle, and which chucks, wheels and tooling stay with the machine.

The Heald Models We See Most

The Heald listings on this page lean heavily toward internal grinders: the 273A, the 72A, the 1CF-90 and 1CF-91, the 2EF and 3EF, and Size-Matic machines. Rotary surface grinders and Bore-Matics appear less often. That mix fits the ledger's account of a company built on internal grinding and automatic size control, and the archive's list of what Heald made.