March 10th, 2018: Ruby Loftus
 

Ruby Loftus became Britain’s Rosie the Riveter, on posters throughout the war.
It started with this Laura Knight painting, commissioned by The War Artists' Advisory Committee to recruit more women to ordnance factories.
http://cellar.org/2017/Ruby_Loftus.jpg

The painting is titled, “Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech Ring” and I have a problem with that.
She’s obviously boring the ring, maybe she’ll cut an internal thread later but not in the painting.
Maybe they called it that to convince women if they work in ordnance they’ll get a little.
Or maybe like everything in Britain during the war, the terms were meant to obfuscate reality for spys.
The other things are no glasses and she should have one hand on the carriage feed lever at this point.

But Ruby was really screwing Lance Corporal John Green whom she married that year.
She became an oxymoron… Ruby Green. :blush:

link

Ah, the good old days before safety goggles. But all of the women DO have hairnets, so at least a hair won't fall onto a piece of machinery and damage it.

Ruby Green? Did she emigrate to Canada and give birth to a son named Red?

Yes, they moved to British Columbia but don't know if they had kids.

I haven't seen that in forever.

A modern version of that painting would have a German or Japanese lathe at its centre.

How times change.

Now we have American Nazis agitating in France, strange times.

Putin's puppets are everywhere. :mad:

With a custom tool she may be cutting threads. Brits are weird, perhaps they called this operation "screwing" back in the day.

Goggles? Real machinists need no bloody goggles.

Yes, both hands are in the wrong place.

Oh, the hairnet is for keeping your scalp in place.

Beautiful painting, yeah?

I wasn't paying attention to that, but now it bugs me. Poser. Like GWB in a flight suit.

I think that you mean enigmatic or engagingly eccentric. ;)

Could be a 'poser', like when a scientist is told to look more sciencey by a photographer, and holds a test tube even though they're an astrophysicist.

I figured they might call tread cutting screwing, but in the painting she is not cutting threads.
I think the thread cutting bit may be shown sitting behind the turret toward the tailstock.

Machinist here. Clicking through to the source image shows a much higher resolution and clearly shows to me a very coarse thread or grooving inside the bore, likely what would have been a buttress or trapezoidal thread (very common on large guns because of strength characteristics). The swarf (chips/cuttings) in the bore and on the machine are very similar to what actually results with single-point threading, with large width that's along the axis of the cut and high stiffness that keeps the chip relatively straight. The thread cutting tool tip itself is hidden from view, it would be on the left side of the tool holder in the turret. The controls for feed for threading would be out of view below her right hand, and it is possible that after engaging the cut, she is leaning forward to get a better look at the tool position while it is far away from the end and she doesn't need to disengage the feed for some time still. My verdict is that the description is plausible and accurate. (for reference, I have attached a photo showing how a threading operation chip looks like)

Still don’t think she’s “screwing”, just boring, maybe in advance of “screwing” a buttress (breech-lock) thread, but the trapezoidal is metric.
Ah…
I highly doubt Ruby had carbide inserts. ;)