Cutting mill
Cutter mills are mills commonly used in laboratories for the preliminary size reduction of soft, medium-hard, fibrous and tough materials. A rotor inside the mill revolves at high speed. The rotor is equipped with special cutting plates which comminute the sample material.
Different rotor geometries make mills adaptable to different material properties. Such mills are suitable for reducing rubber, leather, plastics, grains, dried meat, bones, vegetation and other substances. In elemental analysis, cutting mills should be used with care, since they can contaminate finely-reduced samples with metals from the blades and screens.
History
Cutting mills were invented between the years of 1814 and 1818 and were needed mainly because hand filing the materials took too long. The first two places to use a cutting mill in the industrial world was Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories. These factories found out that the finished product could be produced much faster using these machines than the traditional way of hand filing them. On the private sector, Eli Whitney is said to be one of the more famous inventors that contributed to the birth of the cutting mill.The cutting mills rise to fame happened around 1954 when it became the world's first machine tool to be controlled numerically. This was a big step because traditionally the machines were completely controlled manually. By the 1980s, there was starting to be small shops that had desktop computers and Computer Numerical Controlled cutting mills. This allowed users to rely solely on the computer and the programming of the software to run the machine.