Toolroom

A toolroom is a room where tools are stored or, in a factory, a space where tools are made and repaired for use throughout the rest of the factory. In engineering and manufacturing, toolroom activity is everything related to tool-and-die facilities in contrast to production line activity.

Originally a toolroom was literally in one room, but like emergency room, the term has been figuratively extended in both substantive and adjectival senses to all such places and the methods used there, regardless of the physical space. The name was originally styled tool room or tool-room, but toolroom is now the norm in engineering and machining.

The simplest sense of the word toolroom refers to the storage of tools. A broader use of the term includes reference to a space where tools are made, repaired, inventoried, and/or distributed for use within the factory. This extension of the latter sense reflects the development of greater systemization in manufacturing. During the 19th century, there gradually developed a division of labor whereby the people who made, repaired, kept records of, stored, and retrieved tools were not necessarily the same people who used the tools to do the manufacturing work itself. Examples of such division of labor had existed in prior centuries, but most manufacturing had been done on a craft basis, where there had been no need for the idea of a toolroom separate from the rest of the workshop.

The simplest sense above can also be conveyed by the word toolcrib (sometimes styled tool-crib or tool crib).

In engineering and manufacturing, a toolroom is everything related to tool-and-die facilities and methods, in contrast to the factory floor and production line activity. For people not familiar with these fields, in order to understand the specialist usage, some explanation is needed:

Within the general field of machining there is a rough but recurring division between (a) toolroom practice and (b) production practice (the making of large numbers of duplicate parts). It is the difference between manufacturing itself and the tool-and-die work that is done in support of the manufacturing. Anecdotal examples of similar distinctions can probably be found here and there throughout human history, but as a widespread part of the "fabric" of material culture, this distinction (and the terminology with which to talk about it) has evolved since the Industrial Revolution, and most especially since the advent of armory practice and later mass production.

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