The museum preserves the heritage of the mechanical arts, celebrates the ingenuity of our mechanical forebears, and explores the effects of their work on our everyday lives. Housed in the 1846 Robbins & Lawrence Armory, the museum holds the largest collection of historically significant machine tools in the nation. Our exhibits are open to the public from Memorial Day weekend through October 31 on a daily basis 10:00am to 5:00pm.
Exhibits Closed for the Season
The exhibits at the museum are presently closed for the season and will reopen Memorial Day weekend, Saturday, May 26, 2012.
We invite you to view an 8 1/2 minute film introduction to the museum.
John Aschauer was a true artist and a technician of rare skill. The museum’s collection of his work includes two working machine shops, a steam power plant, which he began at the age of 14 during his apprenticeship in Germany, and a selection of other models. For each one, he made every tiny screw, bolt and nut, machined every gear and every hydraulic pipe and fitting. Scaled to 1/16 size, his models were made completely from his memory of all the machines he had worked on during his long career in the machine tool industry.
Interpretive drawings from the study by the Historic American Engineering Record explain how the museum's building evolved from 1846 to the present. Detailed renderings of the 1846 period show how the waterpower system worked. To view the report on the Library of Congress website, click here.