What did you make on your shaper?

I don't have such nice projects, but I did manage to make a very useful tool for the kind of projects I do. I'm always needing to shorten 1/4" cap screws an smaller. So holding them is not only a pain but kinda dangerous. On another forum I saw a tool Marv Klotz came up with he called a lantern vise. So I modified the design to lay flat and put the v to hold the bolts and screws along with a screw through the v to hold small stuff. I did most of the machining on the shaper except I chickened out and did the V with the mill. I want to get good at cutting v and dovetails with the shaper too. Unfortunately I took the pix after I'd used it several times so there's some scars to the finish.

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C-Bag said:
As a shaper noob, I'm intreagued by how you ground your cutter to cut the rack gears properly. I've not run into that yet.
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Its pretty easy when your cutting a rack, the pressure angle is the tooth angle on a rack. In this case 14 1/2 degree so its basically the same cutter you'd cut an acme thread on the lathe with.

Greg
 
Guys, The workmanship you folks are turning out is exemplary, How the modern world classes these machines as out of date beats me, What seems to mitigate against them is the modern production engineers seem to have an aversion to "The time wasted " on the return stroke, This I feel is also compounded with the fact folks want to use throw away tip tools , Which do not work, They will not / Can not? sharpen tooling, I can achieve a superior tool finish on my work pieces using my shapers, planer, and slotting machine , over that produced by my milling machine.

I have the following machines, A 10" stroke Royal, shaper, a 6" stroke Denham slotting machine, a 6" stroke Adept travelling head shaper, and a 20" stroke Tom Senior double column planing machine (hand powered), I am not on production work, only home shop machining. I recently heard the shaping machine referred to as "A Nodding Donkey" sadly by a very good engineer, who had been schooled in modern ways , Sadly he missed the invaluable benefits of the shaper in a maintenance engineering field or small batches & one offs , A sad sour note about shaping machines I heard a few months back, was "They are designed as "Hack Machines for Rough Work" I will rest my case, Tomorrow strange to say, And by co-incidence, I have two flats to cut on the sides of a long ish shaft, An ideal task for my little Adept travelling head shaper , Where the shaft is held stationary & the head with the tool travels over the workpice, Long Live The Shaping Machine, -- (From a backward out of date craftsman)
 
Back toward the end of the job shop era, when every shop had at least one shaper, the standard line became "you can make anything on a shaper except money." I do not know why they would say that if it was not true for them, and apparently it was, because most of those shapers were sold off or pushed into a corner to collect dust, grime, and rust. For a hobbyist, where making money is not the name of the game, they are still great and versatile machines. Maybe we need to make a high speed CNC shaper and show those new fangled kids? :eek 2:
 
I am led to believe that in Germany a CNC shaper has already been built apparently it is a very large machine weighing about 13 tons, it is a travelling head shaper capable of complex profiling tasks, as well as efficient at hogging off the metal as well
 
C-Bag said:
As a shaper noob, I'm intreagued by how you ground your cutter to cut the rack gears properly. I've not run into that yet.
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Just to add a little to what Greg wrote about grinding your tool bit. I too am planning on using my shaper to cut teeth on a rack. Here is where your Machinery's Handbook is your friend. There are charts with tooth size along with the spacing between teeth. One problem that I had was the spacing of each tooth. Turns out the spacing is the same as the Circular Pitch Line (divide 3.1416 by the diametral pitch). Before I found the charts in Machinery's Handbook, I drew it out using DeltaCad; now I have something to match the cutter to.

Mike
 
Bob Korves said:
Back toward the end of the job shop era, when every shop had at least one shaper, the standard line became "you can make anything on a shaper except money." I do not know why they would say that if it was not true for them, and apparently it was, because most of those shapers were sold off or pushed into a corner to collect dust, grime, and rust. For a hobbyist, where making money is not the name of the game, they are still great and versatile machines. Maybe we need to make a high speed CNC shaper and show those new fangled kids? :eek 2:
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I would interested to know who said it and when. I never worked in a machine shop, but as a mechanic. I saw shop owners being no different from anybody else, always wanting to make more $$ and sure labor was robbing them of that. Once again I have no imperical evidence but I see CNC as nothing but automation meant to replace a skilled human. In the shop that has a contract to make 1,000's of some part, I can see the advantage. But you still have the huge initial cost to overcome, and more than once I've seen a company go under because they decided (with the help of some salesman) to "modernize" and get buried in debt they could never overcome. Progress isn't alway logical or beneficial. Just a thought....
 
Found a new use for my shaper, that may be of interest here.

I was given a dividing head by a friend, I had no real use for it as it was too big to fit on my shaper table. After a while it dawned on me that I could drill a locating hole in the base of it and mount it directly on the knee support stud.

Pic shows it in place shaping a drain plug, the castellations of the home made tool holder being used were also made using it.

Seasons greetings folks

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