CNC Brand Profile

Warner & Swasey and the Half of America's Turret Lathes

If you have spent time in an older shop you have seen the nameplate. It is on a gray machine in the corner that nobody wants to move, and the guy who runs it has run it for twenty years and does not want a new one. That machine was built by a company that no longer exists, in a city that no longer builds machine tools, for a country that at the time made more of them than anyone else on earth.

Most dead brands die because the product stopped being good. This one did not. What follows is how a builder gets big enough to supply half a nation's turret lathes, what actually killed it, and what any of that means if there is one sitting in front of you with a price on it.

Two Apprentices and a Decision About Chicago

Worcester Reed Warner and Ambrose Swasey met in 1866 as apprentices at the Exeter Machine Works. Both later worked at Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, where Swasey developed an epicycloidal milling machine. In 1880 they left and started their own partnership.

They started it in Chicago. Within about a year they moved the whole operation to Cleveland, and the reason they gave is the most useful thing in the entire founding story: Chicago was too far west, and there were not enough skilled machinists there. They did not pick a city for its tax treatment or its rail access. They picked it for the labor pool.

That instinct shows up again a hundred and forty five years later, every time a shop owner decides whether to expand in place or move somewhere cheaper and try to hire from scratch. Warner and Swasey answered it in 1881 and never revisited the answer. The company stayed in greater Cleveland for the next 110 years.

The telescope work came almost immediately, and it made the reputation. In 1888 the 36 inch refractor at Lick Observatory in California went into service on a mounting and framework built by Warner & Swasey. It was the largest refracting telescope in the world at the time. The partnership incorporated as The Warner & Swasey Company in 1900. In 1919 the founders donated an observatory in East Cleveland to the Case School of Applied Science, which is why the name still appears on an astronomy building and not just on a lathe.

They Did Not Invent the Turret Lathe. They Industrialized It.

This is the part that gets misreported, and it is worth being precise about because the real story is better. The turret lathe was not a Warner & Swasey idea. The first American one is generally credited to Stephen Fitch around 1845, and a British capstan lathe carrying turret style tooling came before that. Christopher Spencer built the first fully automatic version in 1873. We covered that lineage in the jump from one tool to many, and Warner & Swasey is not in it.

What Warner & Swasey did was turn the turret lathe from a clever machine into a product line. They sized it, numbered it, tooled it, wrote the books for it, and sold it to every industry in America that needed round parts in quantity. The No. 1 through No. 5 machines, the 1A through 4A universal ram types, the AC chucking automatics: a shop could buy a capacity class the way you buy a chuck size today, and the tooling catalog was thick enough to be its own reference work.

By 1928 they were the largest turret lathe builder on the planet. The competition was not weak. Jones & Lamson in Springfield, Vermont, Gisholt in Madison, Wisconsin, and Alfred Herbert in Coventry were all serious builders. Warner & Swasey out-produced them by owning the middle of the market rather than the edges of it.

Half of Every Turret Lathe America Built

The United States produced roughly 800,000 machine tools over the course of the Second World War. In 1942 alone, annual shipments hit about 300,000 machines. That is the scale of the mobilization, and it is the reason the phrase "arsenal of democracy" was about machine tools before it was about tanks. You cannot build the tank until somebody builds the machine that makes the tank's parts.

Inside that effort, Warner & Swasey ran about 7,000 people at its Cleveland works and produced half of all the turret lathes made in the United States. Not half of the ones made in Ohio. Half of the national output, from one company, in one city, largely out of a five story brick plant at East 55th and Carnegie that had been finished in 1910 and ran 220,000 square feet.

The same company was also making optical gunsights and rangefinders, which is what happens when the firm that mounts telescopes and the firm that builds production lathes are the same firm. Precision at the scale of an observatory and precision at the scale of a shell casing turned out to be the same skill applied twice.

A company that builds half of a nation's turret lathes during a war has a very specific problem when the war ends. It has already built half of a nation's turret lathes, and they all still work.

What Happens to a Builder That Wins a War

Warner & Swasey spent the next twenty five years trying to be less dependent on turret lathes, and the acquisition list reads like a company that knew exactly what its problem was.

In 1946 it bought the patent rights to the Gradall telescoping boom excavator from Ray and Koop Ferwerda of Beachwood, Ohio. The Duplex Truck Company followed in 1955, Badger Machine in 1957, Sargent Engineering in 1967. Textile machinery went into the mix. By 1965, employment in Cleveland was down to about 2,000 and operations were shifting out to a newer plant in Solon. The corporate headquarters moved to University Circle in 1968.

The machine tool side did not sit still either. In 1964 Warner & Swasey bought the Wiedemann Machine Company of Philadelphia, founded 1916, the outfit that had introduced the first turret punch press without a center post in 1934. That same year Warner & Swasey showed the first NC turret punch press, the Wiedematic S2550, at IMTS in Chicago. In 1970 Murata Machinery became a partner in the Wiedemann division and the joint operation became Murata Warner Swasey.

That branch is the one that lived. Murata took the Wiedemann punch press business fully into its own fold in 1989, and its descendant still trades today as Muratec. If you run a Murata turret punch, you are running equipment with a Cleveland ancestor.

The Numbers That Ended the American Machine Tool Industry

It is tempting to tell the Warner & Swasey story as a management failure. The industry numbers do not support that reading. What happened to Warner & Swasey happened to almost everyone.

Japanese machine tool production rose by a factor of fifteen between 1955 and 1960. Japanese exports to the United States climbed more than 1,200 percent from 1964 to 1967. In 1973 imports were about 10 percent of the American market. By the end of the 1970s they were 22 percent. By 1986, 75 percent of NC machines sold in the United States were imported, and Japan alone held half the American NC market.

Then the floor gave out. American machine tool sales fell from roughly $5 billion to $2 billion between 1981 and 1983. Industry employment dropped by a third over those same two years and was at half its 1981 level by 1991. Between 1982 and 1987, half of all United States machine tool firms closed.

Warner & Swasey was a heavy iron builder with a large installed base and long product cycles, going up against a competitor selling NC turning centers at volume. That is not a fight you win with better management. It is a fight about which country decided to subsidize and scale a sector, and the United States had stopped.

Four Owners in Twelve Years

The ending is fast, and almost none of it is about machine tools.

In October 1979 Dominion Bridge launched a hostile bid, opening at $57 a share and pushing to $75 by December. Warner & Swasey did what a cornered company does and went looking for a friendlier buyer. Bendix Corporation obliged. In 1980 Bendix took the company for close to $300 million and Dominion Bridge withdrew. From the outside it looked like a rescue.

Two years later, Bendix chairman William Agee launched a hostile takeover of Martin Marietta. Martin Marietta responded by bidding for Bendix, the maneuver that got named the Pac-Man defense and is still taught in business schools. United Technologies joined in on Martin Marietta's side. By late September 1982 Bendix owned about 70 percent of Martin Marietta and Martin Marietta owned slightly more than half of Bendix, and the whole thing had become a mutual hostage situation. Allied Corporation stepped in as a white knight and acquired Bendix in 1983.

None of that had anything to do with turret lathes. Warner & Swasey was simply an asset on a balance sheet that changed hands three times in three years, and by 1984 Allied was selling it. Cross & Trecker bought it, at a price reported at about $74 million. Four years after a $300 million purchase.

Cross & Trecker was not a safe harbor. Roughly 40 percent of its sales went to the automobile industry, which was itself in the middle of a restructuring. In 1985 Warner & Swasey closed the Carnegie Avenue factory and offices. The remaining offices consolidated into Solon by June 1989. On October 31, 1991, Giddings & Lewis completed its acquisition of Cross & Trecker, exchanging stock for 94 percent of the shares. In January 1992 it shut the Solon plant and 250 people lost their jobs.

There is a footnote here that ties two of our articles together. Cross & Trecker's Milwaukee machine tool unit was Kearney & Trecker, the company whose engineers filed the patent behind the automatic tool changer that created the machining center. The builder that invented the modern machining center and the builder that made half of America's turret lathes ended up in the same corporate box.

Who Owns the Name Now

Nobody builds a new Warner & Swasey machine. The lathe business ended at Solon in January 1992. Giddings & Lewis, the company that closed it, was itself bought by Thyssen in 1997 and trades today as Fives Giddings & Lewis. The punch press branch is the piece that survived intact, inside Murata, and Muratec still sells descendants of the Wiedemann line.

The Carnegie Avenue plant sat empty for roughly forty years. It was acquired in September 2025 for conversion into mixed income housing. That is the whole American machine tool story in one building: 220,000 square feet that once turned out half a nation's turret lathes, becoming apartments.

The Lineup in Shop Language

The building became apartments. The machines did not. Here is what the nameplate means when you are standing in front of one.

Two real machines make the point better than a spec range does.

A 1969 No. 5, model M4670, runs a 20 inch swing over the bed, a 15 inch three jaw chuck, a 4.75 inch spindle bore on an A2-8 mount, 25 to 1000 RPM, a 20 horsepower motor and a six face turret, at 9,500 pounds. That is a manual machine from the Nixon administration with a bore most toolroom lathes cannot match.

A 1990 SC-25, model M-4500, is a different animal. Twenty eight inches of swing over the ways, a 24 inch chuck, a 6.25 inch hole through the spindle, a 60 horsepower DC spindle motor, a side turret and an end turret with roughly 47 inches of longitudinal travel each, and a Fanuc 11TTA control, at about 27,000 pounds. A 6.25 inch hole through the spindle is big bore capacity by any era's standard, and on the used market it is available at a small fraction of what that capability costs new.

That mass is doing real work, and it is the same reason old American iron still holds a finish. We went through the physics of it in why your next machine will still be iron. Twenty seven thousand pounds of cast structure does not care what year it was poured.

Parts and Support Today

This is the first question anybody sensible asks about an orphaned brand, and the honest answer has two halves.

The mechanical half is fine. Gahr Machine Company in Cleveland, in business since 1947, stocks repair and replacement parts across the SC series from SC 10 through SC 45, the WSC series, the QCM 6 and Titan machines, and manufactures new and custom parts where stock has run out. They are an independent aftermarket supplier, not a successor company holding original rights, and that distinction is worth being clear about. But they have been doing it in the same city the machines were built in for longer than most of the machines have existed.

The control half is where you spend money. An SC series machine on a 1980s or early 1990s control is an orphaned control on an orphaned machine, and when the drive or the CRT goes, you are into either a specialist repair or a retrofit. Retrofits on these are routine work for control integrators, and an SC 28 retrofitted with a modern CNC is a documented job, not a science project. Budget for it as a possibility rather than discovering it as a surprise.

The underlying reason a retrofit works at all is that the machine's language did not change. A turning program written for that Fanuc in 1990 is recognizably the same thing a new control reads today, which is the argument we made in why G-code will still be running machines in 2050.

Why a Used Warner & Swasey Holds Value

What holds value here is capacity and mass, not the badge. A 24 inch chuck with a 6.25 inch hole through the spindle on 27,000 pounds of iron is a specification that costs real money to buy new in any decade, and the number of machines on the used market carrying it is small. Big bore turning is the last corner of the used market where an orphaned American machine still competes on the thing the buyer actually needs.

The manual turret lathes hold for a different reason. A No. 3 or No. 5 with its tooling package intact is a complete production cell for short runs, and the tooling is the scarce half. Machines come up more often than full tooling packages do, which is why a bare machine and a tooled machine are not the same purchase at all.

Now the other side, because we sell used machines and that is the reason to say plainly when one of these is the wrong buy. If you need a machine a service tech can support under a manufacturer contract, do not buy one. There is no manufacturer. If you are a two person shop with no maintenance capability and no relationship with a control integrator, an orphaned CNC will hurt you the first time it faults. If you need live tooling, a Y axis, a sub spindle and a bar feeder working together on a machine with current documentation, buy a modern turning center and do not talk yourself into a 1990 machine because the bore number is impressive.

The case for a Warner & Swasey is narrower and real: you need large capacity turning, you have or can hire mechanical competence, and you would rather put the savings into tooling and a retrofit than into a payment.

What to Check When Buying a Used Warner & Swasey

The checks that matter are not the same on a manual turret lathe and on an SC series CNC, so separate them.

On a manual turret lathe: check the turret indexing for repeatability at every station, not just one. Check the bed ways for wear at the spot where short parts were run for years, which is usually within the first eighteen inches of the chuck. Check the spindle bearings by feel and by sound at speed. Check whether the tooling came with it, because Warner & Swasey tooling is specific and buying a bare machine means assembling a tooling package piece by piece at auction.

On an SC series or Titan CNC: power it up and cycle every axis through full travel before anything else. Confirm the control boots, holds parameters overnight, and that the memory backup battery has been changed in living memory. Get the axis drives run under load, not just jogged. Ask specifically whether the machine has been retrofitted, because a retrofit is not a defect and is often an upgrade, but it changes the parts picture completely. On a twin turret machine, check both turrets independently.

On either: ask for the machine's service history, and ask what it ran. A turret lathe that spent thirty years on aluminum is a different machine from one that spent thirty years on 4140.

Who Runs These Machines

The buyer for a Warner & Swasey is defined by the work, not by nostalgia. Large diameter turning is the common thread: flanges, valve bodies, hubs, gear blanks, rolls, couplings, and anything where the part is heavier than the operator wants to lift twice. A 24 inch chuck and a 6.25 inch through hole put a shop into work that a 10 inch chuck machine has to turn down.

In practice that means energy and oilfield service work, heavy equipment rebuild, and captive maintenance shops inside mills and plants where the machine exists to keep the plant running rather than to hit a cycle time. Those shops tend to have millwrights and electricians on staff already, which is exactly the capability an orphaned machine asks for.

The manual turret lathes have a second audience: short run and repair shops that need a tooled machine they can set up once and hand to an operator, on jobs where a CNC's programming time costs more than the cycle saves.

Resell CNC Take

An orphaned brand scares buyers for the wrong reason. The risk on a Warner & Swasey is not the castings, the ways or the spindle, all of which were built to a standard nobody is trying to hit at that price today. The risk is the control and the tooling package, and both of those are quotable numbers you can get before you bid rather than discover after. Call a control integrator with the model and the control generation, price the tooling you are missing, and add both to your number. Do that and a Warner & Swasey stops being a gamble and starts being arithmetic.