mystery attachment - is it for schaublin type 53 mill?

Sblack

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There is a schaublin type 53 universal mill for sale locally. In a cabinet beside the machine I found parts for the machine and this attachment. The paint is very similar. I think it is some sort of rotary attachment to cut helical gears, but I am guessing. There is a universal shaft with a keyed extension as if to allow this attachment to be mounted on a moving table where the power source driving the shaft is fixed. There is a gearbox that turns a spindle with a triangular hole - it is a rounded triangle like a wankle piston - I know there is a name for that shape but I don't recall. The other part is some sort of center support, like the center opposite a dividing head. The mounting surface has a dowel pin and a slot for a key to align with slots on a table and it is scraped. Does anybody know if this is for that mill, or for that matter what it is? If I could find a picture of it in operation I could tell if other parts in that cabinet went with it. Any help appreciated.

mill parts.jpg
 
I watched that mill sell on bidspotter and now it's on ebay for 15K :rolleyes:. I would love to have bid on it but Canada was too far of a drive, and I really don't know how customs would have worked out. Are these mills really selling for 15 thousand dollars?
 
I found this at the Schaublin 53N page on lathes.co.uk (such a great site). It is a geared unit with universal shaft that connects the leadscrew to a rotary table. Apparently it can be used for copy milling. Awesome!

It looks like the one you posted is missing a cam folower and rod. Maybe it was somewhere in the cabinet.
img31.jpg
 
I went down and inspected it. It had a lot of tool marks in the table but was otherwise in really nice shape. I think it has one shot or automatic lube, so there was oil on all the ways. The overarm support was in a cabinet that was being sold separately along with that powered rotary table. I convinced the auctioneers to pull it out and put it with the mill. They had no idea what went with what. The machine was powered but the power breaker lever was padlocked shut, so the buyers put it on ebay a couple of hours after the auction closed without even seeing if it ran!

I chickened out after $1000 and I think it went for $2500 or so. Will it sell for $15k? Who knows. North America is going through de-industrialization so shops are closing left and right. If a shop wanted a machine and had $15k to spend would they buy a 20-30 yr old manual machine which is no longer made or would they buy a cnc machine, of which there are many available on the used market? I don't know. I guess we'll see.

It's only worth what somebody will pay. If I had bought it, with their ridiculous loading fees, 18% premium, canadian taxes (15%), exchange rate which is pretty bad right now and the cost of moving a 5000 lb machine I would have been over $5k CDN, then I would have to figure out 550v 3 phase. Probably still worth it, but I don't have that money right now. Sure was nice to dream...
 
I found this at the Schaublin 53N page on lathes.co.uk (such a great site). It is a geared unit with universal shaft that connects the leadscrew to a rotary table. Apparently it can be used for copy milling. Awesome!

It looks like the one you posted is missing a cam folower and rod. Maybe it was somewhere in the cabinet.
img31.jpg

That's pretty cool. Didn't they make similar attachments for Bridgeports?
 
The attachment is really neat, but very limited and totally obsolete in the cnc age. Just like dividing plate and sector arms. But I enjoyed fondling it and admiring the craftsmanship. It's like my atlas saper. It makes no sense in this modern age but I could watch it all day :)
 
Many of the old horizontal mills had setups like that , we've been cutting helix and spirals for over a hundred years.
 
Oh I'm sure it works fine, and in its day it was indispensible, but it must be very limited compared to what can be done with a couple of stepper motors and a laptop.
 
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