Different sources declare that machine tools industry covers a wide range of machinery used for machining metal or other rigid materials, usually by cutting, boring, grinding, removing or forming metal to produce components which are subsequently assembled into engineering products.

Simply, machine tools are “machines that produce machines”. Critical sectors of the engineering industry include the manufacture of aerospaceproducts, motor vehicles and general industrial equipment. These sectors, together with the subcontractors that supply them, make up the customer base for supplies of machine tools. Thus, it is generally viewed as a strategic sector for a country.

Given below is a list of various types of machine tools commonly used in the industry;

Grinding Machine: It is mainly used for grinding, a method wherein abrasive wheels are used as the cutting tools.
Milling Machine: It is used for machining (i.e. cutting & drilling) solid materials.
Planer: Planer is a metalworking machine-tool that has a reciprocating work table and a stationary cutting tool.
Broaching Machine: It is a machine tool whose cutting element is a broach.
Lathe: It is a machine tool that rotates the work piece on its axis to perform different operations such as cutting, sanding, knurling, drilling, or deformation, facing, turning, with tools that are functional to the work piece to build an object with symmetry about an axis of rotation.
Shaper: A type of machine tool that uses linear relative motion between the workpiece and a single-point cutting tool to machine a linear toolpath.