page_title: Pantograph
section_title: Milling machines
hierarchical_section_title: Pantograph / Uses / Milling machines
caption_attribution_description: A view of the table of a pantograph milling machine. The roller stylus directs the toolpath of the milling cutter as the stylus rides a template or model. This model was built by Deckel, which was a German company that is now a part of the multinational Deckel-Maho-Guildemeister (DMG), which today is in strategic partnership with Mori Seiki, yielding the DMG-Mori Seiki organization.
context_page_description: A pantograph is a mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a second pen. If a line drawing is traced by the first point, an identical, enlarged, or miniaturized copy will be drawn by a pen fixed to the other. Using the same principle, different kinds of pantographs are used for other forms of duplication in areas such as sculpture, minting, engraving, and milling.
  Because of the shape of the original device, a pantograph also refers to a kind of structure that can compress or extend like an accordion, forming a characteristic rhomboidal pattern. This can be found in extension arms for wall-mounted mirrors, temporary fences, scissor lifts, and other scissor mechanisms such as the pantograph used on electric locomotives and trams.
context_section_description: Before the advent of control technologies such as numerical control (NC and CNC) and programmable logic control (PLC), duplicate parts being milled on a milling machine could not have their contours mapped out by moving the milling cutter in a "connect-the-dots" ("by-the-numbers") fashion. The only ways to control the movement of the cutting tool were to dial the positions by hand using dexterous skill (with natural limits on a human's accuracy and precision) or to trace a cam, template, or model in some way, and have the cutter mimic the movement of the tracing stylus. If the milling head was mounted on a pantograph, a duplicate part could be cut (and at various scales of magnification besides 1:1) simply by tracing a template. (The template itself was usually made by a tool and die maker using toolroom methods, including milling via dialing followed by hand sculpting with files and/or die grinder points.) This was essentially the same concept as reproducing documents with a pen-equipped pantograph, but applied to the machining of hard materials such as metal, wood, or plastic. Pantograph routing, which is conceptually identical to pantograph milling, also exists (as does CNC routing). The Blanchard lathe, a copying lathe developed by Thomas Blanchard, used the same essential concept.
  The development and dissemination throughout industry of NC, CNC, PLC, and other control technologies provided a new way to control the movement of the milling cutter: via feeding information from a program to actuators (servos, selsyns, leadscrews, machine slides, spindles, and so on) that would move the cutter as the information directed. Today most commercial machining is done via such programmable, computerized methods. Home machinists are likely to work via manual control, but computerized control has reached the home-shop level as well (it's just not yet as pervasive as its commercial counterparts). Thus pantograph milling machines are largely a thing of the past. They are still in commercial use, but at a greatly reduced and ever-dwindling level. They are no longer built new by machine tool builders, but a small market for used machines still exists. As for the magnification-and-reduction feature of a pantograph (with the scale determined by the adjustable arm lengths), it is achieved in CNC via mathematic calculations that the computer applies to the program information practically instantaneously. Scaling functions (as well as mirroring functions) are built into languages such as G-code.
caption: Detail of the table of a larger pantograph milling machine.
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