CNC Brand Profile

Toshiba, Shibaura, and the Boring Mill That Outlasted the Name

Almost every question we get about this brand is really the same question asked three ways. Is Toshiba the electronics company. Is Shibaura a different builder. And if the nameplate says Toshiba and the company says Shibaura, is anybody going to answer the phone when the machine goes down.

The answers are no, no, and yes. What follows is the company behind the nameplate, the one genuinely notorious episode in its history, and the thing that actually decides whether a used one is a good buy, which is not the badge on the sheet metal but the control in the cabinet.

1938, and the Name That Came Back

The company started in 1938 as Shibaura Machine Tool Co. It completed its first mass produced tool at the Tsurumi plant in 1939, built its first injection molding machine in 1956, and in 1961 a merger produced Toshiba Machine Co., Ltd. The Sagami plant for hydraulic machinery followed in 1964.

Here is the part most people get backwards. When Toshiba Machine became Shibaura Machine in 2020, it did not walk away from the Toshiba name. It took back the older half of it.

Toshiba is a contraction. In 1939 two Japanese companies merged: Shibaura Seisakusho, founded in 1875 by Tanaka Hisashige, and Tokyo Denki, founded in 1890. The combined company was Tokyo Shibaura Denki, Tokyo Shibaura Electric. Tokyo plus Shibaura gives you Toshiba, and the parent did not formally adopt that shortened name until 1978. Shibaura itself is a district in Tokyo, which is where the 1875 company got the name in the first place. So Shibaura is not a rebrand invented by a marketing department in 2019. It is the older half of Toshiba, and it is the name the machine tool company was founded under in 1938, twenty three years before it became Toshiba Machine.

A buyer looking at a Toshiba nameplate and a Shibaura brochure is not looking at a company that changed hands, or at a brand that got sold off. He is looking at one builder that went back to the name it started with.

What the Company Actually Builds

Shibaura Machine is three businesses under one roof: machine tools, injection molding machines, and die casting machines. The plastics and die casting sides are large, which is why the name turns up in trade press that has nothing to do with metal cutting.

On the machine tool side, the company describes its range as consisting mainly of horizontal boring machines, vertical turning lathes, bridge mills and horizontal machining centers. In the used market that hierarchy is even steeper than the catalog suggests. When a dealer says Toshiba, the machine is usually a horizontal boring mill.

That is the reputation worth understanding. This is not a builder that competes for the job shop VMC dollar. It builds large, heavy, table type and floor type boring machines for work that is measured in feet rather than inches, and the engineering effort goes into spindle rigidity, thermal behavior over long cuts, and holding position across travels where a small error at the column becomes a large one at the tool.

1987: The Export Scandal That Rewrote the Rules

There is one episode in this company's history that a machinist over fifty will bring up the moment you say the name, and leaving it out would be dishonest.

Between December 1982 and 1984, Toshiba Machine supplied eight machine tools along with NC devices and software to the Soviet Union's Technical Machinery Import Corporation, routed through Wako Trading, a shell company connected to Itochu. One of the machines was capable of simultaneous 9-axis control. The export paperwork described it as a large vertical lathe. The sale violated COCOM, the Western bloc's multilateral export control agreement, and Norway's Kongsberg was implicated alongside it, which is why the affair is remembered as the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal.

The Pentagon concluded that the equipment had contributed to a rapid improvement in the quietness of Soviet nuclear attack submarine propellers. That conclusion drove the political response more than any finding in a courtroom did, and it is worth flagging as a Pentagon assessment rather than a settled technical fact. Congress responded by banning imports of Toshiba Group products, which swept in the parent company that had not made the sale. On March 22, 1988, two executives received suspended prison sentences, of ten months and one year respectively, each suspended for three years. Toshiba Machine was fined two million yen. Company leadership resigned. Toshiba lobbied Congress for two years to get the sanctions eased.

The lasting effect was on export control law rather than on the machines. Nothing about a BTD boring mill sitting in an American shop today is touched by it. It matters here for one practical reason: it is the single most common thing people half remember about this builder, and knowing the actual shape of it is better than knowing the rumor.

Buying Back Its Own Stock, Then Its Own Name

In March 2017, while Toshiba Corporation was in the middle of its own financial crisis, Toshiba Machine bought back the stock its parent held and separated from the group. That is the transaction that made the company independent, three years before the name changed.

Then January 2020 brought a hostile approach. A fund associated with the activist investor Yoshiaki Murakami made a surprise bid for up to 43.8 percent of the company. Management fought it, and on March 27, 2020, shareholders approved anti-takeover measures at an extraordinary general meeting, blocking the bid.

Five days later, on April 1, 2020, the company became Shibaura Machine Co., Ltd. It is a small detail with a large implication for a used buyer: this is a builder that fought to stay independent and then immediately reasserted its own oldest name. It is not a brand in wind down. It ships new machines today, and the current BTD-130S.R22 runs 118 inches of X travel and a 71 by 87 inch table rated to 26,400 pounds, or 44,000 pounds with the air lift option.

The Lineup in Shop Language

The suffix after the model number is doing work too. On a BTD-110H.R13 or a BTD-130S.R22, the letters and numbers after the dot encode configuration and generation, so two machines with the same leading number are not necessarily the same machine. Read the full designation off the plate, not the first half of it.

The Control Ladder, TOSNUC to FANUC

This is the section that should decide your offer, and it is the one most listings skip.

Toshiba built its own CNC control, TOSNUC, for decades. The difference between that and Okuma, which still builds both the machine and the control it runs on, is that Shibaura stopped. Current machines ship on FANUC. That makes TOSNUC a legacy control rather than a supported flagship, and it is the crux of the whole used decision. An in house control is an engineering advantage while the builder is actively behind it. It becomes an exposure once the builder has moved on.

Three generations show up, and you can date a machine by them almost as reliably as by the serial plate.

A TOSNUC machine is not a bad machine. The iron under a TOSNUC 3 is the same class of iron, and the reason a retrofit is even worth considering on a thirty five year old boring mill is that the mechanical side is worth saving. The point is that two Toshiba boring mills with similar travels can be very different purchases depending on which cabinet is bolted to the column, and the price should reflect that.

One thing that does not change across all three generations is the programming. A boring program written for a TOSNUC in 1990 is recognizably the same language a FANUC reads now, which is the argument we made in why G-code will still be running machines in 2050. The control is the risk. The code is not.

The Machines on Our Floor

We happen to have both ends of the control ladder in stock at the same time, which makes the point better than any table can.

The bottom rung is a 1988 Toshiba BTD-11B on a TOSNUC 3. A 4.33 inch spindle bore, CAT 50 taper, 1,600 RPM, 20 horsepower. Travels of 78 inches in X, 59 in Y, 51 in Z and 25 inches of W. A 55 by 63 inch T-slot rotary table with a full continuous fourth axis, rated to 13,890 pounds. No automatic tool changer. Seventy eight inches of X travel and a thirteen thousand pound table on a 1988 machine is real capacity a shop can still make money with. The absence of an ATC means it suits long boring and milling operations with few tool changes, not part families with twenty tools. And the TOSNUC 3 is the case described above: fine while it runs, a specialist call when it does not.

The top rung is a pair of 2012 Toshiba MPC-3180B 5-face double column bridgemills on FANUC 30i-B. These are a different order of machine: 354 inches of X travel, 153 inches of Y, a 63 inch crossrail, two pallets at 315 by 106 inches with a full changer, a BT50 spindle at 3,000 RPM and 40 horsepower, a 180 tool chain magazine, and a 122 inch column span. They come with the 5-face cutter head, a right angle indexing head with 72 positions at 5 degree increments, a snout 190 head and a small angle head.

Put those two side by side and the whole argument of this article is visible on one floor. Same builder, twenty four years apart. The 1988 machine is a capable piece of iron with a control question attached to it. The 2012 machines have no control question at all, because by then the company was buying FANUC, and a shop can get support for a 30i-B from anyone.

That is the honest read on specific machines, and it is the same read our appraisers give on the phone.

U.S. Presence and Support

Shibaura Machine Company America operates from 755 Greenleaf Avenue in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, covering service, parts, training and warranty across the machine tool, injection molding and die casting lines. On our side, machines wearing either badge are listed together on our Toshiba and Shibaura Machine page, because a buyer searching one name should not miss a machine wearing the other.

This is the practical difference between Shibaura and a genuinely orphaned brand. When we wrote about Warner & Swasey, the parts answer was an independent aftermarket supplier, because there is no manufacturer left. Here there is a manufacturer, it has a US operation, and it is still shipping new machines. Availability on parts for a 1988 control is a separate question from whether the company exists, and the honest expectation is that mechanical parts and documentation are obtainable while early control electronics are the hard part.

Call the parts counter with the model and the serial before you agree on a number. That single call is worth more than any general statement about a brand, including this one.

Why a Used Toshiba or Shibaura Holds Value

Horizontal boring mills hold value for a reason that has nothing to do with fashion: there is no cheap substitute. If a part needs a 4.33 inch spindle reaching through 78 inches of travel with a thirteen thousand pound table under it, a VMC does not do the job at any price. The machines that can do it are large, heavy, expensive new, and not built in high volume, so the used pool stays thin.

The mass is not incidental either. These machines are heavy because the cut demands it, and the same physics we covered in why your next machine will still be iron is what lets a 1988 machine still hold a bore. On long travels, position feedback is doing the other half of the work, which is the subject of how a big machine learns to measure itself. On a boring mill, confirm whether the machine has linear scales, because it changes what the machine can hold across the full envelope.

Now the other side, because we sell used machines and that is the reason to say when one of these is the wrong buy. A horizontal boring mill is a commitment before it is an asset. It needs floor, it needs foundation, it needs rigging that costs real money, and it needs an operator who has run one. A shop that buys a large HBM to take on occasional big work usually discovers the machine is idle most of the month and the floor space was the expensive part. If your big-part work is occasional, subcontracting it is often the better math, and we will say so.

And if you need a twenty tool ATC and fast part-to-part times, an older boring mill without a tool changer is the wrong machine no matter how good the price is.

What to Check When Buying a Used Toshiba or Shibaura Boring Mill

Identify the control first. TOSNUC 3, TOSNUC 999 or FANUC. Everything else about the purchase follows from that answer, and it should be the first line of the listing rather than something you dig for.

Confirm the parameter backup exists and the battery has been changed. On a proprietary control, losing parameters is the difference between a machine and a large paperweight. Get the backup in hand before the machine ships.

Check the quill at full extension. The W axis is where a boring mill shows its wear. Run it out fully, indicate it, and check for droop. A machine that is fine at half extension and off at full extension will not hold a long bore.

Check the rotary table. Index it through a full revolution, check repeatability at several positions, and confirm whether the fourth axis is continuous or positioning only. Those are different machines and listings conflate them.

Ask about linear scales. Scales on all axes versus none is a meaningful difference in what the machine will hold, and it is a spec that is often omitted.

Plan the rigging before you bid. Get the weight, the floor loading and the disassembly requirement quoted first. On this class of machine the rigging and foundation can approach a serious fraction of the purchase price, and finding that out afterward is how a good buy turns into a bad one.

Who Runs These Machines

The buyer is defined by part size. Horizontal boring mills live in shops doing large weldments and fabrications, pump and compressor housings, gearboxes and gear cases, press and mill components, valve bodies, and heavy equipment rebuild where a worn bore has to be brought back true.

In practice that means energy and power generation work, mining and heavy equipment service, paper and steel mill maintenance, marine, and the large captive maintenance shops inside plants where the machine exists to keep production running rather than to hit a cycle time. Those shops already have riggers, millwrights and electricians, which is the capability an older proprietary control quietly assumes you have.

The double column and bridge mills draw a different crowd: mold and die work, machine tool builders themselves, and aerospace structure shops. The ultra precision line barely appears in the used market at all.

Resell CNC Take

People call about this brand worried about the wrong thing. They ask whether the company still exists, and it does, independent since 2017 and supported out of Elk Grove Village. The question they should be asking is which control is in the cabinet and what the rigging will cost. A BTD with a FANUC on it is a straightforward used purchase. A BTD with a TOSNUC 3 on it is a good machine with a known liability, and it should be priced like one, not like a mystery. Get the model and serial, call the parts counter, and get a rigging quote before you bid. Do that and this brand stops being a question mark.