alt Hacker NewsIn a past life I worked on a rocket engine turbopump that spun at 160,000 RPM. It’s crazy to visualize how fast that is. The stresses in the metal are so high that we needed speciality alloys made exclusively for us. The parts are literally ripping themselves apart.
High speed turbo machinery is certainly an odd area -- like you said, its on the verge of ripping itself apart. The Leybold turbo molecular vacuum pump on my bench at home is rated to spin at 60,000 RPM. In the old days of metal fabrication you'd have two specialty precision machines to locate, drill and bore holes -- the jig bore and jig grinder. Once you bored a hole, if the part was heat treated there was almost certainly a need to touch up the bore from slight deformation so a jig grinder, a jig bore base with a 100,000+ RPM pneumatic grinder, is used to perform the final precision machining.