Metal Cutting Principles, third edition (MIT Press Classics)

Toward developing a rational basis for the metal cutting process.

From the introduction: The economic importance of the cutting process may be appreciated by the single observation that nearly every device in use in our complex society has one or more machined surfaces or holes. There are several reasons for developing a rational approach to the cutting problem: 1. To improve cutting techniques--even minor improvements are of major importance in high volume production. 2. To produce products of greater precision and of greater useful life. 3. To increase the rate of production and produce a greater number and variety of products with the tools available. In this treatment of the subject we will consider the cutting process in fundamental terms. The objective is to explain a number of commonly observed results rather than to present a large mass of empirical constants and a large number of empirical relationships of limited applicability.

Milton C. Shaw is Professor Emeritus of Engineering at Arizona State University. Throughout his career he has worked as a consultant to more than one hundred industrial companies and universities in the U.S. and abroad. During WWII, he was in charge of the Materials Division of NASA in Cleveland. Following the war, he served as Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and later as Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Carnagie Mellon University. In 1978, he joined Arizona State University. Professor Shaw has a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Cincinnati and Honorary Doctorates from Drexel University in Philadelphia and Louvain University in Belgium. He is a member of a number of engineering societies around the world, including the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Science.