First Shaper, many questions

[cjtoombs]

That's a nice shaper. I have an older model 16" G&E wit the standard table.

 

[benmychree]

Here are the smaller shank tool bits. They are ~.375"
View attachment 257001View attachment 257002

And the big tool holders:View attachment 257003

I've heard and read the old aphorism that you can do anything with a shaper except make money. I'm curious why they have that reputation, and how you used yours in a profitable way. Care to share?[/QUOTE
If you do not have a holder for the 7/16" shank cutters, I'd be interested to buy them from you, they fit a holder for my P&W vertical shaper that I have no cutters for.

 

[cjtoombs]

I've heard that too. The shaper at one time was a manufacturing machine. If you look at manufacturing now metal removal is done on machining centers with 20-50 hp spindle motors using inserted, coated carbide tools with coolant. These tools can run at speeds in the 400 FPM range in steel, plus they cut nearly continuously. They use rapids that are 100's of inches per minute and pallets for setup to reduce spindle downtime. There is absolutely no way a shaper, which maxes out at maybe 130 FPM cutting speed and only cuts part of the stroke by design can keep up with that. They also never developed any insert carbide tooling for them, as they were on thier way out by the time that came around. I think that's probably where that saying comes from. That being said, I think there are still people making money with them on repair work and very low volume jobs. They are also still quite popular in 3rd world countries, for the same reason they are popular with hobbyists (time is worth less than the tooling). They are still made new in India and China, so someone is makeing money with them.

 

[tertiaryjim]

Another reason for the shapers use is that "back then" metal stock came in far fewer sizes and sometimes a lot of material had to be removed.
The shaper was the much faster machine for that.
This is still true in much of the world which is partly why shapers are still being made in India.

 

[Tony Wells]

The money I made with mine, and it was some of the best hourly rate I drew, came from internal spline work. In the oilfield, there are parts that are required to slide axially in relation to each other, yet lock in rotation. Jars and safety joints come to mind. Some are a bit more than simply multiple keyways. The shape is more complex. Some of them required as many as 8 different tools per spline, and some of the tolerances were in the +0.002/-0.000 range. The ones that I didn't make so much money on (there's always lumps in the gravy) were involute and the form tooling had to be custom ground or 3 axis wire cut then honed. That's getting harder to find for shaper tools. And these were not parts small enough to load/unload by hand. So some of them got kind of expensive, and some were T&M. Risk was high on a few of them, as they would come to me complete except for the spline work, and were priced accordingly.

A lot of that work I lost to sinker EDM of all things. I know a shop that has several that run lights out and cut these same features. Sounds more expensive, but if you have 10 machines working around the clock with no one watching, it isn't. A couple of guys working days to make the electrodes and setting up cuts to run overnight is the way to do it.