upon solid masonry, and leveled perfectly when set, no question could
be raised against the usual arrangement, unless it be this: Ought they
not to be set nearly one-fourth the way from the end of the bed? or to
put it in another form: Will not the bed of an iron planing machine
twelve feet in length be equally as well supported by four legs if
each pair is set three feet from the ends--that is, six feet apart--as
by six legs, two pairs at the ends and one in the center, and the
pairs six feet apart? there being six feet of unsupported bed in
either case, with this advantage in favor of the four over the six,
settling of the foundation would not bend the bed.

It is not likely that one-half of the four-legged machine tools used
in this country are resting upon stable foundations, nor that they
ever will be; and while this is a fact, it must also remain a fact
that they should be built so as to do their best on an unstable one.
Any one of the thousand iron planing machines of the country, if put
in good condition and set upon the ordinary wood floors, may be made
to plane work winding in either direction by shifting a moving load of
a few hundred pounds on the floor from one corner of the machine to
the other, and the ways of the ordinary turning lathe may be more
easily distorted still. Machine tool builders do not believe this,
simply because they have not tried it. That is, I suppose this must be
so, for the proof is so positive, and the remedy so simple, that it
does not seem possible they can know the fact and overlook it. The
remedy in the case of the planer is to rest the structure on the two
housings at the rear end and on a pair of legs about one-fourth of the
way back from the front, pivoted to the bed on a single bolt as near
the top as possible.

[Illustration: a, b, c, Fig. 1, illustrate the models shown by